TRT Şeş: Hatta vega tu lu kû buyi?

Following the trend of the day, let me too greet the launch of TRT Şeş with a Kurdish headline. Mine contains a bit of reproach, like the last line of Selahattin Pınar's famous composition "Bir bahar akşamı": "Where were you before?" (Hatta vega tu lu kû buyi?).

The only criticism that can be directed at a step so well aimed toward the solution of a plague of a problem we have been living with for decades, a step so effective that it will at once determine the political, cultural and moral atmosphere, is probably that it has come so late.

Indeed, as we watch TRT Şeş's broadcasts, we seem set to lament what all our fears, which have enveloped us until now, have made us lose. Because the reality that has begun to emerge from its very first broadcasts shows that a Kurdish television broadcast made by the state will bring closer rather than push away, integrate rather than divide, make loved rather than make hated. It also appears that this channel's broadcasting will create an atmosphere of moral and emotional fusion far stronger and more positive than expected.

Another reality that has not escaped the attention of those who have toured and seen the region is that satellite dishes have become extremely abundant. Everyone knows that the biggest reason for the demand for these dishes is generally that people want to receive Kurdish broadcasts via satellite. Those who want to receive Kurdish broadcasts can find a response to this demand through nearly ten channels on satellite. So it is not really possible to say that the people of the region had a need to receive television broadcasts in their own mother tongue. On the contrary, it is the state that has a serious need for Kurdish broadcasts, to explain itself to the people of the region and to keep them within the emotional and moral borders of a country. The longer it delays meeting this need, the more it is Turkey that loses. The more Turkey delays, through senseless stubbornness, taking this and similar steps, the more its emotional and moral communication with the region is weakening and even starting to be severed.

This being so, it is impossible to understand Deniz Baykal's statement that "it is not right for the money of 70 million to be spent only in line with the ethnic demands of one segment of our citizens". Deniz Baykal, who says the state must be "ethnically blind", ignores that the same state is already based on a definition of an ethnicity. If the state which he says should not see the ethnic identity of the other party had truly been structured as a state above ethnicities, what he says could be accepted to some extent. But is not the most important reason for the emergence of the ethnicity problem in Turkey that the definition of the nation was made on the basis of a certain ethnicity, quite literally of race and language, by privileging it over all other ethnicities, even by completely denying the others? Among the 70 million whose money is at issue there are also the Kurds, whose number easily exceeds 10 million, and for years they have been financing a language they neither understand nor use. I am aware that these words of mine come out a bit odd, but when one accepts looking at the matter from this angle, no proper picture can be seen.

It must be said that with the actual existence of TRT Şeş many important problems regarding the Kurdish issue will be solved on their own. That the DTP members of parliament, keeping their distance from the opening of TRT Şeş, announced that simultaneously with it they would heroically wage a struggle for adding to the alphabet the letters Q, W and X that Kurdish phonetics requires is only an act or discourse that will go down in the history of political comedy. TRT Şeş is in any case creating an environment in which bans of this kind will become thoroughly meaningless and inoperative.

This environment will also apply to its contribution to the diagnosis and solution of the Kurdish issue. Mümtazer Türköne is quite right when he says that the Kurdish issue is essentially a Kurdish-language issue. Almost all the cultural rights expressed within the framework of the Kurdish issue have concerned the state's acceptance or prohibition of Kurdish. It is understood that the process that began with TRT Şeş's broadcasts will establish a ground on which even voicing this matter as a problem will become absurd.

As one of the actors expected to be the first to make use of this ground, YÖK did not delay in joining this feast of democracy. I can already foresee how the Kurdish language and literature departments that Prof. Yusuf Ziya Özcan announced will be opened at some universities will reveal Turkey's cultural depth and richness.

For these steps, which of course will not harm Turkey's national unity in the slightest, to be more productive and beneficial, the most important thing to be heeded is that these steps not be squandered in the name of banal "national unity and solidarity" propaganda.

Even if there is no longer a need for Kurdish broadcasts because of the abundance of alternative broadcasts, nobody should doubt that the people of the region will show a sufficiently appreciative attitude for this gesture of the state. Instead of trusting the quality of this appreciation, one must not be greedy for more in a way that would make everything even worse.