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Opinion |
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London Letter: Turkey's Need
for PR in Britain
She announced that she was ready to die in her struggle and that many of her friends had already done so. The BBC journalist making the programme purred with approval and asked not one difficult question or raised one doubt about whether there might not be another side to the story. The tone was, as many BBC programmes are these days, naively left-wing. After all, those 'hunger strikers' belong to an organisation which has terrorised everyone else on the left who does not belong to it and which actually murdered the British Managing Director in Istanbul of a British life assurance company some years back. It had of course plenty of other victims. That is the kind of point which seems to elude BBC reporters dealing with Turkish human rights. I digress. Hearing this bleak picture of Turkey as a hateful murderous place, full of violence against women by police and soldiers, my mind raced back to twelve hours earlier, to Istiklal Caddesi, Macka, Aksaray, Macka and Taksim. Was the programme really talking about a country on the same planet, or somewhere in a parallel universe? To rub home that any mainstream Turkish opinion is unacceptable to the politically acceptable folk at the BBC, the programme cited alleged comments by the Hurriyet columnist Fatih Altayli (they pronounced his name as "Fattie") which they said, called for a spot of sexual violence against the woman they were talking about. This came from Radyo D and they gave a voice-over. Those of their listeners who could understand Turkish, will have realised that they did not actually broadcast the alleged offending bit. British radio and TV are full of such things nowadays. They are the work not of normal foreign correspondents resident in Turkey, but of home reporters who have made links with radical organisations, especially pro-PKK ones, in Turkey. The cumulative effect of these items is horrific and whatever their intentions, they seem to me to create the impression among many British listeners that Turkey is a totally evil and repressive country, where little except cruelty ever happens. Since there must be over 300,000 mainland Turks and Turkish Cypriots, in the UK, at least one in ten of them may have heard the programme, one wonders why the BBC switchboard is not drowned in protests. If it were, this sort of journalism would quickly stop. I wonder if there was even one protest. The leftist condemnation of Turkey in Britain has become so strong that in some London schools, Turkish immigrants are denied the right, given automatically to others, to sing their own national anthem. Until everyone speaks up, the campaign against Turkey by the politically correct will carry on, poisoning perceptions of a European country of 65 million people. Equally it is surely about time that some Turkish officials realised that their behaviour plays into the hands of the anti-Turkish lobby. Two years ago for example, Helen Bamber, the widely respected head of the British Foundation against Medical Torture, visited Istanbul to show solidarity with a group of pro-Kurdish women who organised a conference on sexual violence against women. Ms. Bamber is regarded with enormous reverence in the UK. It was thus unfortunate to say the least that she apparently saw the conference being broken up by police who threatened its organisers before her eyes. The eventual result of that was a charity appeal, describing the event in eyewitness terms, which went out to millions of homes. I know because lots of my friends sent me copies, asking how I could explain it. An equally avoidable disaster came when the Anglican Bishop of Rochester, an academic and leading member of the House of Lords, found the police shutting down a press conference he gave in Istanbul and telling him that only religions recognized by the Treaty of Lausanne were allowed in Turkey. He then organised a debate on Turkey in the House of Lords. Try and value that in PR terms. Of course there are two sides to all these stories. But in each case one side did not get heard and the outcome was appallingly expensive in image terms. In Cappadocia, on the tourist road between Avanos and Goreme, there is a place where the gendarmes regularly stop and search passing cars in the shadow of the famous rock cones and have done so for several years. Local people say they do it just for the Hell of it. The gendarmes themselves told me last week, when they stopped and searched my car, that it was to catch terrorists. Even if this were true, which I doubt, that's not the smartest message to give to visiting tourists these days. Leaving Turkey yesterday, the policemen who stamped my passport smiled cheerfully and asked, "Think we are ever going to get in to the European Union?" "Yes," I said "But only if you start a proper campaign for it." And why not? After all, the other side already has. Barchard is a London-based foreign-affairs columnist and an expert in Turkish affairs. |