Washington Post - By Molly Moore
04/12/2000

ISTANBUL –– Last year a film produced by a Kurdish cultural center won an award at the Ankara Film Festival, sponsored in part by the Turkish Culture Ministry, which had banned the film from Turkish cinemas.

For the past eight years, Turkish security courts have hired interpreters from a Kurdish linguistics institute in Istanbul, yet its director now faces trial in another court on charges that the institute is an illegal business.

As Turkey campaigns to join the European Union--which has demanded that it grant more rights to its Kurdish minority--public debate over the Kurdish issue is becoming more vitriolic than ever and government policies are increasingly divided.

As the long Kurdish rebellion has diminished since last year, and satellite television and the Internet make Kurdish culture more accessible, many top Turkish officials say the country should lift bans on Kurdish-language television and arts. But hard-line nationalists, fearful that any recognition of Kurdish identity will fragment Turkey and strengthen separatism, are fighting back with political threats, vaguely worded laws and sympathetic security forces.

"We're in chaos," said Hasan Kaya, who faces trial over his role as chairman of the Kurdish Institute, which researches Kurdish culture and language.

For years, international human rights organizations have criticized Turkey for its refusal to grant basic rights to its approximately 12 million Kurdish citizens--almost a fifth of the country's population. But the issue has grown more important as the European Union has taken up the issue.

In addition, modern communications have diminished the effectiveness of prohibitions on Kurdish-language television programs, movies, plays, music--and the teaching of Kurdish language in schools. Last week, Senkal Atasagun, Turkey's civilian intelligence chief, said, "Kurdish people living in the southeast are already watching illegal broadcasts of Medya TV," a Kurdish-language channel broadcast from London via satellite.

The conflict between the government and separatist Kurdish guerrillas in the southeast, which has left an estimated 30,000 people dead and hundreds of thousands displaced, has subsided significantly since last year's arrest of Kurdish Workers' Party (PKK) leader Abdullah Ocalan, adding to pressure for the government to relax restrictions.

The new efforts to make some accommodation for the Kurds have sharply divided Turkey's coalition government and bureaucracy. Prime Minister Bulent Ecevit and many senior ministers are pushing for freedoms for the Kurdish population. But Ecevit's main coalition partner, the Nationalist Action Party, is resisting, as are the military and other security forces, and local government authorities in the southeast.

The conflict became an uproar last week when the intelligence chief, Atasagun, declared that the government should permit Kurdish television broadcasts. Turkish nationalists were even more outraged the following day when Ecevit announced he had authorized the pronouncement and agreed with it.

"To demand Kurdish TV in Turkey is nothing but treason," said Abdulhaluk Cay, a minister from the Nationalist Action Party, which, as its name suggests, is an ultranationalist group.

"Turkey is coming out of long years of trouble and bloodshed, and now it's time to debate," said Ozdem Sanberk, director of the Turkish Economic and Social Studies Foundation, an Istanbul think tank that advocates greater democracy and openness in Turkish government and society.

No segment of Kurdish society has been whipsawed more by shifting attitudes and a divided government than organizations trying to promote Kurdish culture through its music, film, theater, literature or language. "If you speak in Kurdish, sing in Kurdish or promote any arts in Kurdish, you are accused of being separatists," said Hatice Coban, 34, a member of the executive board of the Mesopotamia Culture Center in Istanbul.

In the nine years since the center opened, its branches in the southeast have been shut and its leaders--including Coban--have routinely been arrested. During one arrest, Coban said she was stripped and beaten.

Although the government won't permit the center's films or plays to be performed publicly in Turkey, last year's film about the emotional conflicts of a man whose village had been burned won a first prize at the Milan Film Festival--and a special jury award at the Ankara Film Festival, which is sponsored in part by the Culture Ministry.

This year, the cultural center was invited to enter a Kurdish play in another Ankara festival. But when the center invited theater critics and others to attend a free dress rehearsal, police locked the center's theater and dressing room for "unlicensed theater activities."

"Juries can watch [Kurdish plays or films] and we can win awards in Turkey, but the people shouldn't see our productions," said Coban.

The Kurdish Institute's Kaya also has been the victim of inconsistencies in government policies. He said the institute was formed in 1992 to preserve a "culture about to be forgotten for future generations." The institute has built an archive of Kurdish literature and music and recently published a dictionary.

In March, an Istanbul prosecutor charged Kaya with teaching Kurdish language courses, which is illegal under Turkish law. Prosecutors later amended the charge to operating an illegal business.

Kaya said that eight years ago the institute received a charter from the Trade Ministry to operate. And in what he said is a sign of its acceptance by many parts of the government, "We've provided translators to state security courts."

In its effort to prove that Kaya's institute is teaching illegally, the indictment against him lists as evidence five dictionaries that define "institute" as a school.

Istanbul prosecutors also charged Kaya with inciting hatred through Kurdish music recordings that allegedly praised PKK activities. Kaya said the institute received permission from the Culture Ministry to preserve the music. Although an Istanbul judge dismissed the charges, prosecutors have appealed to a higher court.

And although 10,000 copies of the institute's new Kurdish dictionary have been distributed throughout the country--including to government offices--police confiscated copies of it from a bus garage and from a branch of a teachers union in the southeast.

In contrast to such police actions, Deputy Prime Minister Mesut Yilmaz recently urged an immediate end to emergency rule in the east and southeast, saying that a state that "belittles its citizens, does not like their religion, customs and clothing," and views them as a "danger to its existence, cannot carry Turkey into the 21st century."