Turkey: Free Speech Debate Targets Controversial Television Series

The recent cancellation of the phenomenally popular Turkish television series Kurtlar Vadisi (Valley of the Wolves) has prompted a growing debate in the country about whether limiting free speech to curb violence and resurgent nationalism is censorship or good government.

For the last few years, Valley of the Wolves, a chronicle of life in Turkey's criminal underworld, has been an almost unstoppable ratings star. A spin-off movie, which saw the show's hero doing battle with the United States military in Iraq, ranks as Turkey's highest-grossing movie ever.

Valley of the Wolves, which was canceled in February one episode into a new run on the privately owned Show TV, tells the story of Polat Alemdar, a patriotic undercover intelligence officer who infiltrates the Turkish mafia, but starts operating in the murky zone where the interests of unsavory elements from the government and organized crime meet. The new season was supposed to deal with the problem of Kurdish terrorism, but many feared that the show's take on this extremely volatile topic would only fan sectarian tensions in Turkey.

"It was a dilemma for people who support free speech," said Yusuf Kanli, chief columnist for the English-language newspaper Turkish Daily News. "They were outraged by the show, but yet they couldn't say a word."

Turkish intellectuals have in recent years accused the government of stifling free speech by prosecuting writers under article 301, a vague law in the penal code that makes it a crime to "insult" Turkish identity, even in a work of fiction. The law has been most notably used against Nobel Prize laureate Omar Pahmuk, and, more recently, ethnic Armenian journalist Hrant Dink, who was later murdered for his views. [For details, see the Eurasia Insight archive].

This time, though, many of those same intellectuals were on the other side of the divide, asking the Turkish government to step in and use its influence to cancel Valley of the Wolves. It was an irony that was not lost on some of the show's supporters.

"These so-called intellectual journalists and writers, who were talking so much about the incompatibility of article 301-type legislation in Turkey with the European Union, which was built on the notion of free speech, now all of a sudden have become the supporters of censure when it comes to Valley of the Wolves," wrote Yilmaz Ozdil, a former television executive who is a columnist for the daily Sabah.

A large number of complaints and pressure from the government body that oversees Turkish television led to the show's cancellation, a distinct fall from grace. After the successful first season, the gala premiere of the Valley of the Wolves film was able to attract some of Turkey's leading figures and top celebrities, including Parliamentary Speaker Bulent Arinc and the wife of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

"It is an extraordinary film that will go down in history," Arinc raved to reporters after the screening.

But critics of the show say it had crossed the line from fictionalized entertainment into something that was stoking what has been a rising nationalist wave in Turkey. Cleverly mixing references to real events with dramatized scenarios, Valley of the Wolves -- on television and on the big screen -- consistently touched upon several political and cultural hot button issues, among them a growing anti-Americanism and a fear that Turkey will ultimately get dragged into the war in Iraq.

In the television series' first season, Polat Alemdar, on trial for murdering several heroin smugglers who were part of a larger foreign plot to destabilize Turkey, is let go after the judge decides that he did it for the love of Turkey.

In the film, meanwhile, Alemdar and his crew head down to Iraq to avenge the honor of the Turkish military after American GIs arrest a contingent of Turkish special forces, putting hoods over their heads while in captivity. Based on a real 2003 event that caused outrage in Turkey, the movie then goes on to weave a cartoon-like tale of larger-than-life blood-thirsty Americans wreaking havoc, throwing into the mix a Jewish-American doctor who is harvesting organs from the bodies of dead Iraqi prisoners for patients in the West.

Nilufer Narli, a sociologist at Istanbul's Bahcesehir University, says the show's mix of fiction with reality allows the show to reflect current political trends in Turkey, while at the same time amplifying them.

"People look at the movie and the series as a documentary, not fiction. That is the problem," she Narli said.

"It is not a positive nationalism that the show puts forward, but negative nationalism based on fears and polarization in Turkey," she added. "In this nationalism, there are enemies and these enemies need to be destroyed."

Analysts say, though, that recent events -- most notably the January murder of journalist Dink by an extreme nationalist 17-year-old -- has made many, including the government, realize that the nationalist fervor whipped up by Valley of the Wolves may be pushing Turkey in a dangerous direction. [For details, see the Eurasia Insight archive].

"I think the government was scared, because now the new rising nationalism may hurt them at the upcoming general elections," said political analyst Cuneyt Ulsever. The vote is scheduled for November 2007. "They are now trying to cool this tension down, and that is why they tried to block the showing of Kurtlar Vadisi."

The producers, however, have promised that the series will return in some other format, perhaps via the Internet. For fans like Kerem Aslan, a 24-year-old Istanbul shoe salesman, such a move would no doubt be welcome. The series' characters, he commented, are "good models."

"They do what they do for Turkey, for their homeland. They love their nation."