Closed Kurdish kids' channel in Turkey relaunches

The channel was one of the targets of a wide-ranging government crackdown in September on the opposition and Kurdish media outlets in a Turkey recovering from an attempted military coup in mid-July.

ERBIL, Kurdistan Region (Kurdistan24) - A children's television station broadcasting cartoons and songs solely in Kurdish relaunched on Friday nearly two and a half months after its closure by Turkish authorities.

Zarok TV's owner Behcet Sevim confirmed the restart of broadcast in a telephone call with Kurdistan24 from the city of Diyarbakir where his media company is based.

The channel was one of the targets of a wide-ranging government crackdown in September on the opposition and Kurdish media outlets in a Turkey recovering from an attempted military coup in mid-July.

Sevim said Zarok TV would continue airing solely in the Kurdish dialects of Zazaki, Sorani, and Kurmanji, despite a legal requirement of 40 percent of broadcast in Turkish.

He also said he did not receive any official order in that regard, and if the issue came up in the future, he would ask the government to pay for translation and dubbing in Turkish, as Zarok TV was a commercial, private enterprise.

Turkey's first kids' channel in Kurdish was supposed to be allowed to air again a month ago, but a bureaucratic process delayed the development.

Back in September, the opposition pro-Kurdish Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP) harshly criticized the government, calling the taking down of the kids’ channel assimilationist, racist, and a blow to democracy.

Stating that Zazaki Kurdish was under threat of extinction according to UNESCO, HDP’s now-imprisoned chair of the parliamentary group Idris Baluken questioned whether “the Kurdish kids watching Zarok TV [staged] the July 15 coup.”

In an interview with Kurdistan24 last month, Sevim noted a wave of criticism by members of the European Parliament affected Turkey’s decision to broadcast Zarok TV again.

“Seriously concerned” about the September closure of Zarok TV and 14 other Kurdish TV stations, 59 lawmakers at the EP called on Turkey to reopen the channels in mid-October.

The EP condemned Turkish authorities who “were misusing” law to appoint trustees to private media organizations in the aftermath of the failed coup.

“The Turkish Government has started considering even children as a threat to national security in its so-called war on terrorism; even Mickey Mouse has been silenced in Turkey,” said EP lawmaker Mark Demesmaeker.

“Kurdish kids will now grow up thinking watching cartoons in their mother tongue is a crime,” Demesmaeker had added.

 

Editing by Ava Homa