Turkey ups a gear for Kurd television channel

Hurriyet Daily News with wires

Turkey's public broadcaster will Jan. 1 inaugurate a television channel broadcasting in the Kurdish language, marking a fresh milestone in Ankara's fence-mending efforts toward its Kurdish community.

The new station, which will be Channel Six of the state-run Turkish Radio and Television Corporation, or TRT, will broadcast round the clock in Kurdish "without imposing the state ideology while offering comprehensive informational programs," according to TRT director İbrahim Şahin.

The channel will initially begin broadcasing in Kurmanci, a dialect spoken by the majority of Turkey's Kurds.

The ambitious project will face tough competition from Kurdish-language channels based abroad.

Turkish authorities hope the new station will help erode the popularity of the Denmark-based Roj TV, which continues to broadcast despite Ankara's vigorous protests to Copenhagen that the channel is a mouthpiece of the terrorist PKK organization.

Channel Six has set the bar high, hunting, according to the Turkish press, for high-calibre Kurdish stars to host some of its programs such as singers Ciwan Haco and Sivan Perver.

Ankara has been tentative on Kurdish cultural rights, fearing that such freedoms would play into the hands of the PKK.

But eager to boost its bid to join the European Union and under growing criticism that heavy-handed policies serve only to radicalise the Kurds, Ankara has undertaken a series of taboo-breaking moves in the 2000s.

Landmark reforms in 2004 pave the way for broadcasts
Legal reforms paved the way for TRT to launch 30-minute weekly broadcasts in Kurdish in 2004, followed two years later by the green light for private broadcasters to follow suit.

The reforms set a landmark about Kurdish cultural freedoms, but were widely criticised as shallow. The new channel has been denounced by activists as a sop to the Kurds from a government which has no serious intention of resolving the Kurdish issue.

Kurdish origin lawmaker Sirri Sakik dismissed the project as a "cosmetic" gesture ahead of local elections, in which Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan's Islamist-rooted Justice and Development Party, or AKP, hopes to take control of major municipalities in the southeast.

"There is no political debate about this channel. The government wants to use it for propaganda," Sakik, a senior member of the pro- Kurdish Democratic Society Party, told AFP.

The prime minister triggered a wave of criticism in November when he said in comments about Kurdish unrest at the time that Turkey has "one nation, one flag and one state" and pointedly added that "those who do not agree should go."