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CNN Live At Daybreak
Turkey Enforces Turkish Language Use in Schools
Aired March 18, 2002 - 06:31 ET
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
CAROL COSTELLO, CNN ANCHOR: Turkey is walking a fine line. The country is trying to maintain its national identity, while at the same time be sympathetic to ethnic Kurds and their push for rights.
CNN's Jerrold Kessel reports.
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)
JERROLD KESSEL, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): In the Neldhal Barhaks (ph) grade 4-A classroom, the lesson today is biology, taught under the watchful eye of Kemal Ataturk, the legendary founder of modern Turkey.
The issue not what these children are learning, but in what language they are learning, schoolchildren on the cutting edge of a double-barreled test. Turkey's capacity to contain Kurdish collective ethnic aspirations on one hand; on the other, how language in school can buttress Turkey's national collective identity. Lessons in the Kurdish language are outlawed in Turkish schools.
These Kurdish political activists show us some of the small newspapers and magazines put out in Kurdish. This new one called "Dema Nu," the new era, is not permitted to be sold here in southeastern Turkey, an area still under emergency military rule. Its headline: "Education in the Mother Tongue is a Natural Right."
It's not an issue of wanting a separate Kurdish state or independence, they say, simply a question of basic rights within Turkey.
Gokhan Aydiner savors the victory. He is the powerful governor of the region, the man charged with enforcing the emergency rules on southeastern Turkey, the Kurdish heartland. But he still doesn't believe the Kurds have really suppressed their dream of a separate state.
GOKHAN AYDINER, EMERGENCY RULE GOVERNOR (through translator): What they are trying to do is to diminish the richness of Turkey subcultures, and they are trying to create one dominant ethnic nationalist backbone. If you allow this, you will create nationalism, which will only lead to a head-on clash.
KESSEL (on camera): If the military struggle is now to all intents and purposes over, that doesn't mean to say that there is not another battleground, a different sort of battleground here on the streets Diyarbakir.
(voice-over): Not here in this music store, where cassettes of Kurdish songs and melodies are freely available, where their lilting sounds are easily interchanged with those of the latest Turkish pop music. Rather a new battleground, where Turkish authorities fear the nationalist lyrics of some Kurdish songs might still keep on stirring that collective Kurdish identity.
Unless they are perfectly innocuous, what they won't hear on the radio are Kurdish language songs, no Kurdish deejays and any talk promoting Kurdish aspirations is banned on the radio.
In the school playground, there may be chit chat between friends in Kurdish, but the Kurdish struggle is to change the current dominant view in Turkey that individual rights are one thing, collective ethnic aspirations another.
And this Kurdish drive for greater recognition of their distinctive cultural rights within Turkey is clashing head on with Turkey's commitment to a Unitarian national identity, and with a push for regional stability, the current regional watch word.
This now a backdrop for the border battle that harbors in the region, as the United States seeks to ease Turkish fears that any military operation in neighboring Iraq might disrupt that stability. Feeding on the sidelines, persistent Kurdish demands for the language that is theirs alone.
"My principle," the children chant, "is to love my country and my nation more than my soul. I am a Turk."
Jerrold Kessel, CNN, Diyarbakir, southeastern Turkey.
(END VIDEOTAPE)
COSTELLO: And later today, CNN takes you inside Turkeys' Incirlik Air Base. It's a major strategic facility for the United States, a place that could become even more important as the global war on terror expands. In a series of exclusive reports, CNN's Jerrold Kessel is the first correspondent to report from inside that base since September 11. Inside Incirlik Air Base throughout the day only on CNN.
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