Skip to: Content
Skip to: Site Navigation
Skip to: Search

  • Advertisements

Denmark, again? Now it's under fire for hosting Kurdish TV station.

Turkey says the satellite network Roj TV is a mouthpiece for Kurdish terrorists.



  • Print
  • E-mail
  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • Yahoo! Buzz
  • Digg
  • Add This
  • Permissions

By Yigal Schleifer, Correspondent of The Christian Science Monitor / April 21, 2006

DIYARBAKIR, TURKEY

From her small apartment in this ancient city, Rabia Celikmilek has access to the entire world. A satellite dish on the roof of her crumbling brick building streams 452 TV channels, with programs from almost every continent.

But Ms. Celikmilek, a Kurd who doesn't speak Turkish, says she only watches Roj TV, a Kurdish channel based in Denmark.

"Roj TV reflects the emotions of the Kurds, our opinions. It's a mirror of the Kurds," says the mother of 10 as she watches the station's 7 p.m. news broadcast.

It's the third time a Kurdish satellite station has tried to beam news into Turkey, whose laws restrict Kurdish programming within the country. The first two were shut down. Now the Turkish government is lobbying Denmark to rein in Roj, accusing the two-year-old station of being nothing more than a mouthpiece for Kurdish terrorists.

"We know for sure that Roj TV is part of the PKK, a terrorist organization," says a Turkish foreign ministry official, referring to the outlawed Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK), which battled Turkish troops during the 1980s and '90s in a bloody separatist fight that took the lives of more than 30,000. "[The PKK] is listed as a terrorist organization by the EU. Denmark is a member of the EU, and we would expect that the broadcasting organization of a terrorist group would not be given a free pass."

Asked for evidence of this link, the foreign ministry official says only that Roj had released the names of slain PKK guerrillas before the Turkish authorities had released their identities, implying the station must have a direct connection with the PKK. Turkey has also accused Roj of helping incite a three-day outbreak of violent protests in the southeast earlier this month, and says it has provided the Danish government with documentation to prove the station's link to the PKK.

Denmark, meanwhile, finds itself wrapped up in yet another sticky freedom-of-the-press debate. Although nothing compared to what took place during the furor over the prophet Muhammad cartoons first printed by a Danish newspaper, Denmark's embassy in Ankara - Turkey's capital city - has been receiving a steady stream of angry letters and e-mails from Turks incensed by the country's hosting of Roj TV.

The issue even sparked a mini crisis in Copenhagen last fall, when Turkey's Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan boycotted a press conference with his Danish counterpart, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, because a reporter from Roj was in the room.

"Surely [the Roj TV affair] is not something that helps to improve relations," admits Anders Christian Hoppe, Denmark's ambassador to Turkey. But Mr. Hoppe declined to comment on whether Denmark was taking any steps to investigate or shut down the station.

"The [Danish] government's position is that, just like in Turkey, this is a matter for the courts. Governments in Western countries, including Turkey, do not interfere with the courts," the ambassador adds.

Page: 1 | 2 Next Page

  • Print
  • E-mail
  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • Yahoo! Buzz
  • Digg
  • Add This
  • Permissions