Breaking Kurdish silence on the airwaves

Ozgur Radio was forced off the air by the government

By Jonny Dymond BBC Istanbul Correspondent

Flick through the television channels or cruise the FM dial on a radio and you would not think there was a problem of broadcasting in Turkey.

There are dozens of satellite TV channels proliferate and FM is so busy that stations jostle against each other competing for bandwidth.

But there is one particular sound you will not hear. Kurdish, the language of the 12 million strong Kurdish minority, is banned in Turkey.

Now the country's National Security Council is now considering whether to lift the ban.

But for the moment, the only way for Kurds watch television in their mother-tongue is by tuning to Med TV, a Kurdish satellite station that broadcasts from Paris.

Mecit Kapazan wants his children to learn Kurdish

Med TV is on pretty much all the time in the home of the Kapazan family, in Fatih, an immigrant neighbourhood of Istanbul.

Caktal Kapazan is the youngest - three-years-old. He speaks no Turkish at all.

Other members of the family do speak some Turkish, but not at home.

His father Mecit is adamant: "We are Kurdish," he says. "We are not Turkish, Arabic or Persian. We are Kurdish."

"We want our language. We want television broadcasts and education in that language".

So far there has been no yielding to those demands.

Civil war

For 15 years the Turkish Government fought a bloody civil war with the Kurdish paramilitary group, the PKK, that left between 30,000 and 40,000 people dead.

Only after the capture of the PKK's leader Abdullah Ocalan in 1999 did it cease.

We are Kurdish. We want our language. We want television broadcasts and education in that language.

Mecit Kapazan

But the government still decries any loosening of the tight restriction on the use of Kurdish.

Recently around 100 political activists were arrested as they attempted to fax petitions to parliament requesting Kurdish language education.

And broadcasting is monitored just as carefully.

Fusun Erdogan, the director of Ozgur Radio knows all about it.

Off air

Ozgur Radio can not be found on the busy FM dial anymore. It was ordered off air last summer.

But it wasn't because of broadcasting in Kurdish - her staff had already carefully winnowed the music they played so that Kurdish lyrics could not be heard.

Only the instrumental versions of Kurdish songs were allowed on air.

Fusun Erdogan says there is no media freedom in Turkey

Instead her station was banned because it broadcast what the authorities called a left-wing song.

"There's no freedom to broadcast in Turkey" she says.

"Abolition of censorship is celebrated every summer, and then every summer we are taken off air.

"The prohibitive Ottoman mentality needs to change."

Radio Ozgur is still broadcasting - but only on the internet.

The Turkish Government is split over the issue.

The nationalist party, the MHP, opposes any loosening of the restrictions. It is the second largest party in the three-party governing coalition.

And the powerful military, who meet the government of the day in the National Security Council, are opposed to anything that might inflame Kurdish nationalism.

But Turkey is under pressure from the European Union, which it wants to join, to ease up on its Kurdish minority.

Turkey will need to jump one way or another.