The Birmingham age-herald., 1906-10-07
ABSURD TURKISH CENSORSHIP.
Ottoman Newspapers Are Ridiculous
 Travesties.

Constantinople.-Nish Effendi Seferi-
 an, who died suddenly yesterday on the
 way to his summer residence on the Bos-
 phorus. was officially styled Second
 Translator to H. l. M. the Sultan and Di-
 rector of the Foreign Press" This mis-
 leading title gives no adequate idea Of the
 real meaning of this man and his office.
 He was, in reality, the chief censor of
 newspapers and telegrams, and he might
 even be put down as the originator or the
 vile and harassing measures which nave
 destroyed every bit of free movement Tn
 the Turkish press.
 Everything of political, social Gin the
 higher senseaof the word) and historic in-
 terest is carefully excluded from the Otto-
 man newspapers, no matter whether they
 are printed in the Turkish, Greek, Armen-
 ian or French language. Turkish news papers have thus been reduced to rldlcu-
 lous travesties of journalism. They reVel
 in essays on all sorts of indifferent and
 trivial matters, but dare not say single
 word respecting the politics of Turkey,
 and only the most harmless and uninter-
 esting political topics of other countries
 are permitted to be printed in the form Of
 a few short agency dispatches or clip
 pings from European newspapers.
 Foreign books. too, are submitted to
 most rigid and grotesque censorship. No
 
 reference to the Ottoman government or
 the Mohammedan religion is allowed to
 pass the custom houses, and this prohbi-
 tion is carried so far as to exclude from
 Turkish soil not only poets like Dante and
 Shakespeare. who spoke disrespectfully or
 the Prophet, but even all encyclopedias
 and guide books The list of prohibited
 books includes among others such immor-
 tai works as Tassos Jerusalem Deliver ed" Chateaubriand's Martyrs" Victor
 Hugo's Les Orientales," La Fontaines Fables and the works of Voltaire Rabe-
 lais, Zola and several modern French au- thors. Pierre Loti's recent book Les
 Desenchantes." dealing with Turkish ha- rem life. Is also on the Turkish Index FIX purgatorius.
 It Is true the booksellers of Pera are clever enough to smuggle the prohibited books into the country through the me- dium of the foreign postoftices but they
 are careful about selling them to stran- , gers. All this tends naturally toward
 suppressing the progress of culture on Eu ropean lines.
 Even moro rigid than the censorship on
 Turkish newspapers and foreign books is the oppressive system introduced by Ni- shan Effendi as regards the telegraphic service to and from Turkey. Direct tele graphic news service from Turkey to Eu- rope has been practically annihllated by these methods. Every dispatch arriving at or sent from a place in Turkey is be- ing censored both by the police and the Yildiz authorities, and many a dispatch addressed to a party living in Turkey is simply suppressed. without any warning to the addressee. if its meaning is not per fect1y clear to the censorship official. who in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred is man of no education whatever. Even plainly harmless dispatches sent abroad In 6etaiDpd for several hours and even days at the telegraph offices and then returned to the sender as inadmissible.
 It has been the experience of the writer of these lines that no fewer than four dis patches containing favorable information concerning the sultan's health have been withheld recently by the censorship. two of them for fully three oays, and then re- turned to him dordre superieur. When he demanded an explanation of this arbi- trary and illogical proceeding he was told that ..it is our desire that nothing should be sent abroad concerning the Ibrson of his imperial majesty"
 The stupidity of this system Is the more obvious. as 1t does not prevent the send ing of all sorts of telegraphic news to Eu- rope, the newspaper correspondents being compelled to send them over an indirect route. via Bulgaria, where they have an | agent to whom they send their dispatches , by letter, the agent forwarding them by wire The Turkish censors consequently gain nothing whatsoever by their ludi- crous and irritating methods, whereas the i Turkish treasury is thereby robbed of the | telegraph tolls amounting to many thou sands of pounds. which take their way to | the Bulgarian exchequer The vast ma jority of the business people are likewise | In the habit of forwarding their dispatch | es via Bulgaria in order to escape the de- | lay. and. quite frequently, the danger of direct telegraphic communication.
 That the latter way of transmission is not always free of risk to the sender will | be illustrated by the following occurrence which happened a few months ago: An | Armenian commission merchant of this | city received a dispatch from his Liver | pool agent informing him that the price 1 of cotton had dropped several points, | whereupon the Armenian wired him Jus l top gunder'-i. e.. Send hundred bales : ] But in the Turkish language top means | both bale" and cannon" An Armenian | ordering 100 cannon from England. The poor fellow was taken from his bed at midnight to the Yildiz police and submit ted to a crucial examination. In vain he