Share this
A Turkish Youtube programme and its host have drawn fire for the extremely hostile reception audience members extended to a guest on the show, the Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP) deputy and human rights defender Ömer Faruk Gergerlioğlu.
Oğuzhan Uğur’s show “Mevzular Açık Mikrofon,” which roughly translates as “Issues Open Microphone,” has amassed more than 4.7 million views since it was uploaded on 18 August. Uğur, widely known as a nationalist, says the aim of the show is to provide a platform for people with different views to communicate with each other.
However, there did not seem to be much diversity of views among the audience who bombarded Gergerlioğlu with often-hostile lines of questioning throughout the show.
Kurdish rights are an incendiary and divisive issue in Turkey, where the country’s largest ethnic minority are subject to repression of their linguistic, cultural and political rights. While Turkish nationalist parties often take a hard line against expressions of Kurdish identity, the pro-Kurdish HDP has amassed widespread support in the country, winning 67 seats with more than 10 percent of the vote in the 2018 parliamentary elections.
Starting with the pointed silence when Gergerlioğlu arrived on stage, it was clear which side of the issue Uğur’s audience took. Even the host acknowledged this, likening the audience to the Gray Wolves, a Turkish ultranationalist group which has been banned in various European countries over violence, because of their hostile tone.
Upon Gergerlioğlu’s arrival on stage, in a display of protest the audience do not applaud. Audience members go on to ask the deputy what he thinks about Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, the country’s founding father, the killing of Turkish soldiers by the PKK, whether the HDP seeks independence for Kurds, whether he can recite the national anthem, and whether he considers the PKK to be “a terrorist organisation” – all of which are often asked to HDP deputies and those advocating a peace process.
Audience members’ questions implied doubts about Gergerlioğlu’s Turkish identity and insinuated or openly stated that he had turned his back on his country.
A long-running theme throughout the three-hour show was the view that the HDP was linked, directly or implicitly, to the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), a banned group that launched a struggle for Kurdish self-rule in the 1990s.
One audience member asked the HDP deputy to recite Turkey’s national anthem, while another demanded his thoughts on the Turkish Republic founder Mustafa Kemal Atatürk. Audience members asked Gergerlioğlu whether he followed the Turkish government’s line that the PKK was a terrorist organisation, and demanded that he call Turkish soldiers killed in the conflict against PKK militants, “martyrs”.
While facing constant interruptions from audience members, Gergerlioğlu tried to offer a different perspective by explaining the pains suffered by Kurds at the hands of the state and stressing the importance of a peace process.
But the deputy’s words fell on deaf ears, as one audience member asked why Gergerlioğlu did not take up arms against the state “just like the corpses he defends.”
Another audience member, the head of an association of the mothers of slain soldiers, accused the HDP of causing the deaths of thousands, then joined other members of the audience who denied the existence of any legitimate Kurdish issue in Turkey.
Some were vocal in their objection to the right to mother tongue for Kurds, while one commemorated Abdullah Çatlı, a far-right deep state agent who was responsible for countless crimes and murders of leftists in the 1990s, saying “terrorists should be shot in the head, not talked to.”
The programme drew criticism immediately after it was aired, with some social media users accusing Uğur of intentionally choosing ultranationalist audience members to target the deputy.
Uğur denied the accusations, reiterating his claim that the aim was to make people talk and understand each other. He also promised to host his own father Hasan Atilla Uğur, a former soldier and a suspect in the case of enforced disappearances and extrajudicial murders of 22 people between 1992 and 1996 in the mainly Kurdish southeastern province of Mardin (Merdin).
