BY HASAN CELAL GUZEL
RADIKAL- While watching TRT 6, I remembered the National Security Council (NSC) General Secretariat's meetings about the southeastern Anatolia region after the 1980 coup. It was a time when the coup administration issued a law banning the use of Kurdish. At that time, PKK terrorism hasn't started yet, but the separatist movements of racist-separatist Kurdish supporters were already present.
The effect of this prohibitive approach, a leftover of Turkey's single-party era and the coup, was felt by the MGK's military circles. There were calls for TRT to broadcast shows to teach Turkish and provide unity of language and culture for the southeast. Eventually this resulted in TRT radio broadcasts and its GAP TV channel. Now, a quarter-century later, TRT started a channel broadcasting in Kurdish. This starkly shows the change of mentality in Turkey.
According to some writers, Kurdish is divided into two dialects: Kurmanci, spoken by Kurds living in Turkey and Iraq's western Azerbaijani region, and Sorani, spoken by the majority of Iraqi Kurds and other Kurds living in certain parts of Iran. On the other hand, certain experts don't consider the Zaza dialect to be a true dialect of Kurdish, but a different language altogether.
Some researchers say that the Kurdish spoken in Turkey is a dialect of Persian with different accents. According to the Russian Kurdologist Vladimir Minorsky, Kurdish vocabulary contains many words with Turkish, Farsi, Arabic, Armenian, Keldani, Circassian, and Georgian origins.
I'm telling all this in order to show how hard it is to broadcast in Kurdish on TV, as we would never denigrate any language spoken in Turkey. But the following facts should be known as well:
1. There's no single language called Kurdish. It's a fact that people who speak different dialects or even different accents of Kurdish have trouble understanding each other.
2. The dialects that we know as Kurdish, which are generally spoken in Turkey, are part of the Persian language group and look at lot like Turkish.
3. Obviously, no dialect of Kurdish was developed in order to spread culture, and this makes broadcasting as well as education and training very difficult. So our state started its Kurdish broadcasts with self-confidence, embraced its citizens with all of their differences, considered these differences a richness, and helped the development of their cultures.
In discussing the Kurdish TV issue, we would like to highlight the following:
1. This isn't a concession to the actions of the PKK/Democratic Society Party (DTP), but the state embracing its citizens and showing the same respect for everybody.
2. Turkey's unitary state status will continue, and the only official language in the new Constitution will remain Turkish.
3. Our citizens in the southeast will be taught Turkish, and this won't be neglected, either.