Turkey: Culture Warriors Take Aim at Alcohol

As clips go, it seems pretty inoffensive: scenes of men doing Lords of the Dance impressions in a dark, water-filled basement interspersed with shots of a crowded dinner table studded with bottles of wine.

But when singer Aslizen Yentur sent the promotional video for her first album to Kral TV, Turkey's top music station, she was told the alcohol would have to come out.

"I thought it was a joke", says Yentur, a 30-year old who's been a support vocalist for some of Turkey's best-known groups. "The album is called 'Cheers.' The song is based on a Greek tavern song. Was I supposed to sip yogurt drink?"

Her arguments cut no ice with Kral. When the clip made its broadcast debut earlier in February, all that remained was the Irish dancing, plus a couple of lingering shots of the leading lady reclining on a red divan.

Kral TV officials were unavailable to comment on their decision, which has no basis in Turkish law. But the censorship comes as RTUK, Turkey's broadcasting watchdog, works on new regulations that would make it illegal to broadcast scenes that "encourage consumption of alcohol."

Leaked into the media mid-January, news of the plans sparked outrage, and a defensive justification from the watchdog. The draft, it insisted in a January 23 press release, is merely bringing Turkey, a candidate for European Union membership, in line with EU norms.

In this conservative country, the bill has many supporters. Nearly half the complaints RTUK received last year were from viewers upset at what they considered the excessive visibility of alcohol (and cigarettes) on TV.

Yet critics point out that European restrictions on alcohol are limited to advertising. For them, hardening official attitudes on alcohol are a symbol of the Justice and Development Party (AKP) government's worrying turn towards religious populism.

"Drink was always an issue for conservative opinion, but until now no government paid attention to it", says Mehmet Ali Birand, a prominent commentator. "Now the AKP seems to be saying 'come on, let's give them a hand.'"

Aslizen Yentur, the signer, isn't the only victim of the new puritanical attitudes. In mid-February, 20 bar owners in the southeastern city of Diyarbakir looked set for bankruptcy after the local governor gave them a month to shift their businesses from downtown locations to a designated district on the outskirts of the city.

A government initiative to create "red streets" for bars was thrown out by the country's highest administrative court in 2005, and Diyarbakir's Chamber of Commerce has taken the governor's decision to court. Even so, Diyarbakir is not the only city whose bar owners in the city center are feeling the heat.

Nor are they the only ones operating alcohol-related businesses that are finding it increasingly difficult to keep them running. Small but full of potential, Turkey's millennia-old wine-making industry is also struggling, following a 400 percent hike in wine taxes since the AKP came to power.

Owner of a winery on the Marmara Sea west of Istanbul, Cem Cetintas says he's had to put plans to extend his vineyards on hold. "Making wine these days is like selling snails in a Muslim neighborhood," he adds, using a common Turkish phrase for something that flies in the face of religious and cultural norms.

An Islamic-rooted party whose leaders are teetotalers almost to a man (there is only one woman), the AKP has received international plaudits for its pragmatic reformism since it first came to power in 2002. But its clumsy, on-going efforts to end an unjust ban on head-scarved students in university has polarized this most secular of Muslim countries, causing both sides to resort to increasingly acrimonious rhetoric. [For background see the Eurasia Insight archive].

Facing volleys of criticism from the secular media, Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan has responded in kind. "You are the ones who print pictures of totally naked women on newspapers against this nation's moral values", he said angrily on February 13. "Have we interfered with that?"

He has a point: even 'serious' Turkish newspapers are full of headlines like "Mariah Carey topless." All this talk of moral values worries many Turks, who point to the increasing public use of religious-tinged words like 'caiz' (permissible) and 'gunah' (sin).

"I fear that what we have here is the beginning of a major normative change, a change against secular lifestyles, a gradual profound Islamicization of society", says Hakan Yavuz, author of a book on Turkish political Islam, and no bigoted secularist.

Barring AKP's rapid return to its pro-EU policies of pre-2004, he thinks it's a process that could prove very difficult to stop. "Intentions may be good, but when you use religious feeling, you cannot control the outcome," Yavuz said.

Such pessimism may just be premature, though, at least if Turkish history has any lessons to give.

AKP - and their appointees in nominally autonomous public bodies like RTUK - aren't the first leaders to take a dim view of drinking. Faced with rebellions throughout Anatolia and widespread discontent, the early 17th century Sultan Murat IV responded by closing coffee houses and taverns.

Aimed at crushing potential hotbeds of unrest, the crackdown failed. Murat IV died shortly after, aged 29, from drink.