Opposition leader Baykal criticizes TRT6, saying “the state shall remain blind to ethnic identities”. Professor Cankaya reacts: “Public TV should benefit all citizens.” Reactions from Kurdish activists divided, suggesting lack of legal base shows government’s insincerety.
(Source) Bia news center - İstanbul

Scholars and activists welcome the new Kurdish channel in state television and ask for improved rights to private channels amid reactions from main opposition party and some circles of the Kurdish movement.

Republican People’s Party (CHP) president Deniz Baykal criticized the incentive, saying, “the state shall remain blind to ethnic identities of citizens” and spending public money to that end.

“Public broadcasting should benefit all citizens. Politicians must review their approach to notions like state of law and rights of citizens, plurality and equality,” professors Özden Cankaya of Galatasaray University, told bianet. “This channel could provide an opportunity to bring education services to Kurdish speaking population in Turkey, who are deprived of such for a long time. I would also contribute to efforts of peace.”

Turkish Radio and Television (TRT) begin broadcasting in Kurdish on January 1st, through the newly established TRT 6. Consisting of programs aimed at children and women as well as cultural and news bulletins, the new channel is on air 12 hours a day. Renowned Kurdish artists such as musician Rojin take part in the broadcast.

While the government promotes TRT 6 as a part of its plans to recognize cultural plurality in the country, some criticize the move as insincere and as a political trick to win Kurdish votes before the upcoming local elections in March.

Lack of a sound lawful base for the broadcast provides grounds for this argument. A procedure for TV and radio broadcasts in “languages other than Turkish that are traditionally used by Turkish citizens were established in 2006.

On the other hand, the foreseen broadcasts were limited to 45 minutes a day, subtitles in Turkish were mandatory and programs aimed at children were banned. Local TV stations like Gün TV faced pressures and prosecutions upon claims of violating this code. “Without a new law, introduction of TRT 6 won’t benefit us” said Ahmet Birsen of Gün TV. “Our channel was closed for a year for airing Şivan Perwer’s song Xalo. Now, it was on TRT 6 on its opening day. Implementation of the law remains arbitrary.”

Reiterating the argument, pro-Kurdish Democratic Society Party (DTP) MP Gültan Kışanak insisted that without recognizing the same rights for private channels, TRT 6 would remain a hoax to undermine their struggle for cultural rights.

On the other hand, president of the Women’s Center (KA-MER) in Diyarbakır, Nebahat Akkoç, welcomed the incentive as an important step. “We’ll intervene to influence the content of the broadcast. Women in could benefit from TRT 6 if they could learn their rights in their own language.”(EÜ)

The last article of Hrant Dink, Turkish-Armenian writer, that appeared on his newspaper Agos the day he was assassinated.
by Hrant Dink
Source: Agos Newspaper
January 19, 2007

In the beginning I was not concerned about the investigation initiated by Şişli Public Prosecutor under the pretext “insulting Turkish identity”.
This was not for the first time. I was familiar with a similar case from Urfa. I was being prosecuted since three years because of my statement at a conference in Urfa in 2002 where I said that “I was not Turk but an Armenian and a citizen of Turkey” and there was again the accusation of “insulting Turkish identity”. I was completely unaware of the trials, I was not interested at all. Some of my lawyer friends from Urfa were dealing with the case in my absence.
I was completely indifferent too when I gave my interrogation to Public Prosecutor in Şişli. In the end I was trusting to my article and my good will. If Public Prosecutor evaluated the whole of the series of my articles and not this single sentence which alone did not make any sense at all, then he would easily understand that I had not an intention of “insulting Turkish identity” and this comedy would end, I thought.
I was completely sure that after the interrogation I would be not be sued at all.
I was sure of myself
But to my surprise, the case came up in court.
Still I didn’t lose my optimism. So I even told to lawyer Kerinçsiz who accused me during a live Tv program that “he should not be so eager that I would not be punished due to this case and that in case of punishment I would leave the country.” I was sure of myself, I really did not have the will or intention to “insult the Turkish identity”. Everyone reading the whole of the series of my articles would understand this.
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J.K. Gibson-Graham
April 2006

It seems that the making of a new revolutionary imaginary is underway. Coming into being over the past few decades and into visibility and self-awareness through the Internet, independent media and most recently the World Social Forums, this emergent imaginary confounds the time-worn oppositions between global and local, revolution and reform, opposition and experiment, institutional and individual transformation. It is not that these paired evaluative terms are no longer useful but that they now refer to processes that inevitably overlap and intertwine.
We glimpse the broad outlines of this new imaginary in the performative self-designations of the “movement of movements”—We Are Everywhere, Other Economies are Possible, One No, Many Yeses, Life After Capitalism —and in the statements of movement activists like John Jordan:

Our movements are trying to create a politics that challenges all the certainties of traditional leftist politics, not by replacing them with new ones, but by dissolving any notion that we have answers, plans or strategies that are watertight or universal…We are trying to build a politics…that acts in the moment, not to create something in the future but to build in the present, it’s the politics of the here and now.
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Balca Arda and Murat Guney
Can you give us and our readers, general information about CTheory?

Arthur & Marilouise Kroker:
CTheory(www.ctheory.net) is an electronic journal of theory, technology and culture. It has been described by Le Monde as “one of the three leading intellectual electronic reviews in the world.”

A unique intellectual project, CTheory is made possible by the age of the Internet, on-line 24/7 thanks to the web and streamed globally in a format that celebrates open-systems, open-architecture and open-file sharing. Resisting attempts to close down the utopian possibilities of the Net, CTheory does the opposite. It speaks and writes and publishes in a way that explores the possibilities of electronic culture for forms of thought, forms of publishing, forms of communication that are equal to the best democratic, critical and communal tendencies of digital culture. CTheory is a digital community.

Launched in 1993 as an ascii listserv that immediately attracted an international network of readers and writers, expanding quickly as one of the first publishing web sites due to the programming assistance of Carl Steadmann (the web designer who did the encryption protocols for Wired), CTheory now publishes in a variety of net formats: ascii, web, multimedia as well as a digital archive of books and journals stretching across three decades of collective reflection on key issues in technology, culture, politics and theory.
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