Economist, UK
Dec 30 2008

Turkey and the Kurds: Television diplomacy

Dec 30th 2008 | ANKARA AND DIYARBAKIR
The Economist print edition

Hopes that a new channel may herald fresh reforms

ROJIN is a feisty, beautiful Kurdish bard who belts out nationalist
ballads. As a result, private Kurdish television channels that showed
her were long penalised or even taken off the air. But now she will be
a regular on Turkey’s stultified TRT state television, which this week
launched a 24-hour Kurdish channel in the main Kurdish dialect,
Kurmanji.

A contradiction, yes. But it may just suggest that the Justice and
Development (AK) party is regaining the reformist zeal that made it
one of Turkey’s most popular and progressive governments. Kurdish
hardliners scoff that the new channel is a cynical sop to the
country’s 14m-odd Kurds before local elections in March. When Recep
Tayyip Erdogan, the AK prime minister, told an audience of Kurds in
Diyarbakir in 2005 that the state had made mistakes in its treatment
of the Kurds, his party won many a Kurdish heart (and vote). But it
has lost them since he succumbed to the army’s demands to deal with
Kurdish PKK rebels by force, not negotiation.

The army has been relentlessly pounding PKK guerrilla bases in
northern Iraq. The PKK’s civilian arm, the Democratic Society Party,
which has 20 elected parliamentarians, has been consistently snubbed
by the AK government. Court cases bordering on the ludicrous continue
against its members and against Kurdish-run municipalities that name
their streets after eminent Kurds. One child in a Kurdish family from
Germany was refused entry at the Turkish border recently because he
had a Kurdish name.

Even radical Kurds express hope that the new television channel,
however wimpish, may spell a new beginning. Indeed, they hope the AK
will renew the reform promises that helped it to win re-election, with
a bigger share of the vote, in July 2007. Mr Erdogan is expected to
make a statement during the televised launch. Kurdish dissidents are
due to host some of its shows. Whether it can compete with the PKK’s
hugely popular satellite channel, Roj, is another question.

Private Kurdish television channels in Turkey are allowed to broadcast
in their mother tongue for only four hours a week. Every show is
vetted and has to have Turkish subtitles, making live programmes
impossible. But the fact that Shivan Perwer, one of the most renowned
Kurdish nationalist singers, is considering appearing on TRT’s Channel
Six is being widely hailed as a breakthrough.

In another move, some 200 Turkish intellectuals have launched an
internet petition about the massacre of hundreds of thousands of
Armenians during the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, saying that they
are sorry. The text of their apology does not use the term genocide,
favoured by Armenians. But at least 25,000 Turks, from many different
walks of life, have signed the petition, prompting calls of treason by
far-right nationalists. Mr Erdogan himself has called the petition `a
mistake’. The country’s president, Abdullah Gul, who has spearheaded
secret talks to normalise relations with Armenia, has been accused by
an opposition parliamentarian of having Armenian ancestry. He took her
to court, claiming his lineage was Turkish and Muslim to boot.

The petition’s signatories have also been assailed by many Armenians,
who dismiss it as a ploy to get Barack Obama, who has used the G-word
in the past, to drop it. Yet some are less recalcitrant. Khatchig
Mouradian, a writer in the Armenian diaspora, says that `without such
initiatives, traditional diplomacy resolves too little, late, and
risks looking like mere make-up on a deeply scarred face.’