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The twilight world of Turkey's
Kurds
By Pratap Chatterjee
DIYARBAKIR, Turkey - Every night at the Rengin
cafe a line of young men and women link hands and sway
to the solemn strains of traditional Kurdish music that
was completely banned until a couple of years ago. As
the music picks up in pace, the dancing gets faster and
more people join until the whole room is full of people
dancing, singing and clapping.
This cafe, tucked
away in the basement of a downtown building of this
eastern Turkish city, was the first live venue for
Kurdish music to be established just two years ago,
gingerly testing the tolerance of the Turkish
authorities who have stepped back from a complete ban on
all Kurdish language and culture under pressure from the
European Union (EU) as Turkey seeks to join that body.
"When we were children, the only way we could
listen to Kurdish music was on cassettes that were
passed secretly from family to family. Today we can
listen to live music any night of the week at the
Rengin, Sanat, Sin or the Veya cafe," says Yilmaz
Akinci, a 26-year-old primary school teacher, who often
spends his evenings in one of the cafes.
The
Kurdish people are said to be the largest ethnic group
without a country of their own. Some 25 million live in
their traditional homelands, which straddle the border
of Iran, Iraq, Syria and Turkey. Ever since the
establishment of modern Turkey some 80 years ago, the
Kurds have endured cultural repression and a deadly
civil war that has claimed over 30,000 lives in a clash
between guerrillas demanding Kurdish autonomy and the
Turkish military.
Officially, Turkey lifted a
ban on speaking Kurdish in 1991 - a law that also freed
up Kurdish-language music on the radio - but it was not
until August 2002 that the government granted people the
right to study their own language.
The new rules
were enacted in order to match EU laws that guarantee
citizens the right to learn their own mother tongues.
The relaxation of the laws was undertaken in the hope
that the EU might accept Turkey as a member country.
Across the street from the Rengin cafe, on the
second floor of the new Galeria shopping mall in the
center of town, the phone rings every couple of minutes
for Melike Irmak, the only female Kurdish disc jockey in
the country who spins popular Kurdish music all day long
on the independent Gun Radio at 89 FM.
At noon,
Irmak takes a break to read the news headlines on the
air - in Turkish. Despite the fact that she is allowed
to play Kurdish music, she risks arrest if she speaks on
the radio in her native language. Only the government
radio and television stations can broadcast in Kurdish
and even they are limited to about 15 minutes a day.
This schizophrenic relaxation of the ban on
Kurdish pervades the new cultural freedoms. Selahattin
Demirtas, the chairman of the local branch of the Human
Rights Association, explains, "For example, look at this
invitation for the Nawroz, our New Year festival, that
is held every March. For the last three years, the
government has granted us permission to hold the
festival, but last year they threatened to send seven of
us to jail for two years for spelling the name of the
festival with a W instead of a V."
The reason is
that the letter W, which exists in the Kurdish alphabet,
does not appear in the Turkish alphabet. And Demirtas
says that the government still forbids parents from
giving their children Kurdish names. "Just last week a
Kurdish couple was told that they could not name their
daughter Rosarine because it is not a Turkish name."
The memory of the 30 year civil war between the
PKK, the Kurdish guerilla group, and the military is
also a sensitive matter. Irmak says that she must be
careful about what Kurdish music she plays on the radio.
"For example, when we get new CDs at the radio station,
I check to see if any of the lyrics include the words
Kurdistan or Abdullah [the name of the imprisoned PKK
leader Abdullah Ocalan]. If so, I definitely can't play
that particular song."
In fact, a total of 3,000
songs are banned right now and the government often
forbids songs retroactively. Gun Radio is currently
facing fines of US$18,000, which is roughly six months
operating expenses, for playing songs that the
government did not approve of.
Still, the
changes are a vast improvement on the past, according to
local human rights activists. Last year, Avni Dal was
expelled from Istanbul University for demanding optional
Kurdish-language courses, while thousands of other
students have been detained over the past year for
submitting petitions demanding that government schools
teach Kurdish. Eight of Dal's classmates were jailed for
leading the petition campaign.
Eighteen months
ago, Abdullah Yagan, a minibus driver in the Karliova
district of Bingol, was arrested for playing Kurdish
music in his vehicle. And a year prior to Yagan's
arrest, Aydin Acar, a local singer from the town of
Hakkari, was arrested for singing "Kine Em" ("Who are
we?") written by the legendary Kurdish poet Cigerxwin,
at a wedding.
Immediately following the incident
all the local singers and musical groups in the town
were rounded up and taken to police custody by order of
provincial governor Orhan Isin on the grounds of
"inciting the public".
Today the outlook remains
somewhat uncertain. Some are hopeful, such as Veysi
Bolcal, the executive director of Gun Radio, "Cafes like
Rengin were unheard of a couple of years ago. Change is
coming."
Yet five months after the laws were
relaxed to allow the Kurdish language to be taught, the
only school that started shut down because people were
too afraid to attend classes.
(Inter Press
Service)
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