From ban on Kurdish to Kurdish TV

It sounds insane, right? Well, it did not sound so to the Turkish Republic since its founding in 1923. It was created from the ashes of the multireligious, multiethnic Ottoman Empire, which had fallen victim to national uprisings. Thus, the Republic’s founders thought, ethnic identities other than those of the dominant Turks had to be suppressed and even erased. "Our job is to Turkify the Kurds," said İsmet İnönü, Atatürk’s second man, "right away, with no delay." Soon, gendarme would appear in the bazaars of Diyarbakır and other predominantly Kurdish cities in order to force the locals to speak Turkish. And almost every eye-catching spot in eastern cities were covered with Atatürk’s famous motto: "How happy is the one who says, I am a Turk."

Assimilation and resistance
Yet most Kurds never felt happy by saying so. If you visit Diyarbakır, you can see a telltale scene of their rejection on the big wall of the big military garrison that rises in the middle of the city. The wall presents that same motto -- "how happy is the one who says, I am a Turk" Ñ but it is covered and protected with a high barbed-wire wall which was apparently built to protect the garrison from stones and bombs. It is an ironic sign of the policy of forced assimilation that Turkey carried out on its Kurdish citizens, only to receive a violent backlash.

But, alas, things have been changing recently -- and changing very fast. As early as 1990s political leaders such as the then prime minister Süleyman Demirel conceded "the Kurdish reality." Thanks to a more liberal prime minister and president, Turgut Özal, the ban on Kurdish music was lifted. In the 2000s, due to the European Union-related reforms, the ongoing democratization and the new elites in power, bans and restrictions started to vanish one by one. Kurdish language courses were allowed in 2005 and restrictions on broadcasting in Kurdish were minimized. Soon, the government promises, institutes of "Kurdology" will be opened in Turkish universities.

The most symbolic and game-changing of these steps, though, was the opening of a 24-hour language channel by the TRT, Turkish’s official TV and radio institution. The new "TRT-6" (TRT-Şeş in Kurdish) was launched on Jan. 1, and since then I have been following the reactions it receives. Most Kurds on the street seem to be happy with this first official approval of their language by the state which suppressed it for decades. A friend of mine, Mehmet Ulaş, 20, who lives in Istanbul but originally a native of a village near Diyarbakır, explained this to me in a letter in which he wrote:

"After the opening of the channel, I called my mother and grandmother in Diyarbakır, who both cannot speak Turkish. ’This has been very good, son,’ they said. Apparently the channel impressed them more than us. I recall that when I was a teenager, I would watch Turkish TV thanks to my education in school. I would laugh or feel sad according to the content. Then my mother and grandmother would ask, ’what is happening son, what is on TV?’ We had to translate the words on television into Kurdish. ’I don’t need your translation son anymore,’ said my mother to me on the phone. ’Now I understand.’ It was really a nice thing to hear."

What is crucial here is that by TRT-6, the Turkish state gives its Kurdish citizens not just a channel of news and entertainment. It also gives them a sense of recognition and respect. These are the very principles that it should have followed since its beginning, but it took eight decades to see that.

Nationalists on both sides
No wonder those who keep on thinking in the old paradigm have opposed TRT-6. Interestingly they come from the nationalists of both sides -- Turkish and Kurdish. On the former side, the two main opposition parties, the People’s Republican Party, or CHP, and the Nationalist Movement Party, or MHP, spoke out against the official Kurdish channel. The leader of CHP, Deniz Baykal, whose illiberal nationalism does not surprise us anymore, announced, "the state should not support any ethnic efforts." He obviously does not realize that the state indeed needs to take affirmative action to show respect to the Kurdish culture, which it thoughtlessly suppressed for decades.

The other nationalists were on the Kurdish side. Spokesmen for the outlawed PKK, or Kurdistan Workers’ Party, went as far as denouncing the channel as "guard TV," a reference to the "village guards," the anti-PKK Kurds who were armed by the Turkish state as a counter-insurgency force. Speakers for the Democratic Society Party, or DTP, which looks like the political wing of the terrorist PKK, were again not supportive toward the channel. The truth is that both Turkish and Kurdish nationalists are not happy with the idea of a multicultural, multiethnic Turkey, which undermines their opposing but actually very similar ideologies. That’s why they didn’t like TRT-6, and that’s why it was a very right step to be taken.