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Turkey: Kurds still unhappy despite
language broadcasts
23.3.2006
By Gareth Jones
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DIYARBAKIR,
Turkey-Kurdistan, 23 March 2006 - In a fresh
milestone for minority rights in Turkey, private
television channels will begin Kurdish language
broadcasts today, but Kurdish activists say their
community needs many more reforms. Turkey is under
pressure from the European Union, which it hopes to
join, to improve the cultural rights of its ethnic
minorities, especially the 12 million-strong Kurds
who until the 1990s were banned from using their
language at all in public.
“After many bureaucratic setbacks, we have finally
won the right to broadcast in Kurdish,” said Cemal
Dogan, director of Gun TV, one of three broadcasters
now allowed to show Kurdish language programs. The
others are Soz TV and a radio station. “It is a
small step, we still face many restrictions. But it
is very important for Turkey and we are happy,” he
said.
Broadcasts will be limited to 45 minutes a day, or
four hours a week, and must carry Turkish subtitles.
They cannot air educational programs teaching the
Kurdish language or broadcast programs aimed at
children, such as cartoons. Gun will target 1.5
million viewers in Diyarbakir, the biggest city of
Turkey’s mainly Kurdish southeast region, and its
environs with programs about history, culture and
health.
Turkish state television and radio already provide
limited broadcasting in Kurdish and several other
minority languages including Arabic, but Dogan said
nobody watches them as they consist almost entirely
of news items from the previous week. Ankara has
dragged its feet over allowing Kurdish language
broadcasts due to fears this could fan political
separatism. Turkish security forces have battled
Kurdish rebel fighters since 1984 in a conflict
which has cost at least 30,000 lives. “With time,
people will see there is nothing to be afraid of,
that allowing these broadcasts can help to resolve
the Kurdish problem,” said Dogan.
Others are less optimistic. They say Ankara’s slow,
grudging broadcasting reforms are symbolic of its
wider approach to the Kurds and say Turkey only acts
because of heavy EU pressure. “If I were (Turkish
Prime Minister Tayyip) Erdogan, I would allow free,
unlimited broadcasting in Kurdish, except for
politically sensitive material,” said lawyer Sezgin
Tanrikulu, head of the Diyarbakir bar association.
But rising Turkish nationalism, along with looming
elections due by 2007, make it harder for Erdogan to
act, he said. Tanrikulu said this situation benefits
only the Kurdish rebels, who exploit people’s sense
of frustration. Violence in the southeast fell after
the 1999 capture of rebel leader Abdullah Ocalan,
but has flared up again in the past two years.
Many Kurds welcomed Erdogan’s visit to Diyarbakir
last August when he acknowledged for the first time
the existence of a “Kurdish problem,” Tanrikulu
said, but his subsequent failure to back up promises
with action has disappointed local people.
Diyarbakir Mayor Osman Baydemir agrees. “Tensions
are rising. The government does not have a sound,
well-based plan for resolving the Kurdish problem,”
he told Reuters.
Baydemir’s Democratic Society Party (DTP) wants a
general amnesty for the rebels, more cultural rights
and autonomy for the Kurds and a lowering of the 10
percent threshold required to win seats in the
Turkish Parliament. This rule effectively bars the
DTP, which has strong support in the southeast but
which nationally has yet to win more than 10 percent
of the vote.
“If we achieve these things, I do not think the
Kurds will want independence from Turkey,” Baydemir
said.
Reuters
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