4 Transversal Acts of Citizenship

As a mediated act, transversal citizenship emerges in and through media. The use of traditional and digital media by Alevis in claiming their cultural rights and equal citizenship constitutes different but related appearances of transversal citizenship. While they demand the impartiality of public media institutions in representing Alevis and other religious groups, Alevis also aspire to be free from discourses of hate and explicit and implicit forms of otherisation in media. These claims and demands originate from, and primarily target, Turkey; however, some of them take place in a transversal space and include claims beyond specific national contexts. Furthermore, Alevis do not only regard media as an area of contest over representations and public constructions of Alevism, but also utilise community media in citizenship acts for learning about Alevis and other cultural and political communities and for campaigning, including street demonstrations. The fact that Alevi media is strongly embedded in Alevi organisations enables television to emerge as a means and a sphere of political action. In other words, transversal citizenship in the case of Alevis is pre-determined by a strong transnational network of organisations and even the outlets that are the subject of this book can be regarded as another form of such organisations. In addition, the lack of a voice in the mainstream media underlines Alevi media as the main space for enacting transversal citizenship and as a relatively free one. If Alevi media emerges as a means and a sphere of transversal citizenship acts, this is due to the exclusion of Alevis from mainstream media (both as individual media professionals and in terms of the cultural representations of community) and the organic relationship (in the Gramscian sense) of Alevi media outlets with the transnational Alevi organisations. Therefore, this chapter examines Alevi transversal citizenship acts, first, by focusing on three significant events which crystallise Alevis’ rights claims in media. In the following sections, it looks at Alevi television and investigates how citizenship acts emerge in and through media.

Interestingly, Turkish nationalists’ claims of Alevis as the original Turks (discussed in Chapter 3) have not infiltrated much into the media realm and to date remain marginal. Therefore, Alevi demands that fair representation is developed as a response to the historic conception of Alevism as incompatible with Sunni Islam and of Alevis as heretics. As mentioned earlier, Alevi rights claims consist of demands for fair representation and for freedom from the discourses of hate in the media. Claims relating to the media initially focused on public broadcasting (partly paid for by Alevis as taxpayers), which regularly produces programmes on Islam, particularly during the period of Ramadan. As historical prejudices began to appear more frequently in newspapers and private broadcasting, demands for fair representation became focused on content and on the ways that Alevis and Alevism were represented. Being visible in the media, on the other hand, is not as widely problematised by the community as their rights claims. In order to understand the dynamics of Alevi cultural rights claims in relation to media, we need to examine how Alevis see the Turkish media landscape. Examining Alevi representations in Turkish media enables us to situate Alevi rights claims in terms of the media, hate speech and ‘fair representation’. Here I would like to discuss three key events where Alevi cultural rights claims in relation to Turkish media crystallised. These incidents were often recalled by my interviewees and emerged as a reference point in justifying the need for Alevi media. Therefore, focusing on particular incidents enables us to better understand citizenship acts in and through Alevi television.

Mum söndü is a derogatory reference to the Alevi/Kızılbaş community and their religious practices. It is deeply embedded in the cultural repertoire on Alevis and has historical roots dating back to the 16th century (Çakmak 2021). While examining the genealogy of mum söndü would be very useful in unpacking cultural forms of Aleviphobia, this would go beyond the scope of this study. Here I shall briefly address two significant media events that emerged as a result of the use of the expression on Turkish and German television in order to contextualise Alevi rights claims about cultural representation. Mum söndü implies that Alevis blow out the candles that they light during their cem ceremony and engage in incestuous relationships (Karolewski 2008). It is noteworthy that such a labelling strategy has not only been used specifically about Alevis but has been used about different communities, including Christian, Jews and others, in different national contexts (Adorján 2004), and as a deeply rooted cultural reference has appeared in different realms of cultural production. To give some examples: mum söndü and its variations were used by writers of the late Ottoman period and early Republic such as Ömer Seyfettin (1884–1920), Hüseyin Rahmi Gürpınar (1864–1944), Yakup Kadri Karaosmanoğlu (1889–1974), Reşat Nuri Güntekin (1889–1956) and Peyami Safa (1899–1961) (see Erseven 2005; Çakmak 2019, 2021), and until recently the expression could be found in some dictionaries. A theatrical play titled Mum Söndü (1930) by Musahipzade Celal (1868–1959) has been staged in public theatres since the 1930s while Erseven (2005: 185) notes that a film, Boğaziçinin Esrarı (Dir. Muhsin Ertuğrul 1922), based on Yakup Kadri Karaosmanoğlu’s novel on Bektaşis,¹  Nur Baba, led to protests and that its filming was disrupted and delayed as a result of attacks by Bektaşis, who objected to the references to mum söndü in the film. Reference to incest within the Alevi community was also made in a Turkish television series called Aşkı Memnu (‘Forbidden Love’) in 1975, despite the fact that there were no references either to incestuous relationships or to Alevis in the novel by Halit Ziya Uşaklıgil (1866–1945) on which the series was based. The renowned director Halit Refiğ added new lines to the series, thus insulting Alevis (Ata 2007: 266). The leader of the Alevi Peace Party, Mustafa Timisi, protested about this reference in the series, raising a parliamentary question and bringing a lawsuit against the public broadcasting company, Turkish Radio Television (TRT) (Ata 2007).

Almost 20 years after the Aşkı Memnu incident and few months after the Madımak massacre, a popular television presenter, Güner Ümit, caused a storm of protest from Alevis after he had spoken disparagingly about Alevis in a quiz show broadcast on the private channel Star TV on 9 January 1994. In the programme Ümit referred to the Kızılbaş community as incestuous. Before I had even asked about it, one of my interviewees described the event as one of his childhood traumas in relation to Alevism, along with the Madımak massacre. Mum söndü, even if the term was not used explicitly by Güner Ümit, has been a widespread cultural indicator defining Alevis as ‘other’. Following the Güner Ümit incident, more than 10,000 Alevis gathered at Star TV headquarters in Istanbul (Ertan 2017: 102) and protests lasted for two weeks. Later Güner Ümit apologised and eventually the show was cancelled. The incident also ended Ümit’s television career. Ertan (2017: 102) argues that the protests demonstrated the Alevis’ ability to organise and make themselves visible at very short notice. For Yalçınkaya (1996: 212), the Güner Ümit incident indicates how Alevis are critical of the ‘discourses of brotherhood’ which are circulated by the government in order to calm the community backlash. According to Yalçınkaya, Alevis are well aware of their ‘difference’ from others and continue to consider non-Alevis as different. In this way, such incidents, where there is the use of symbolic violence in media, reinforce the boundaries between Alevis and non-Alevis. Arguably, as well as shaping public discourses, such incidents filter into the collective memory of Alevism and underline the distrust against media in terms of how Alevism is represented. A similar incident to that of Güner Ümit happened in 2010. A popular television personality, Mehmet Ali Erbil, used the term mum söndü while talking to a family on the phone in a competition show. While the protests were not as intense as in the Ümit case, nevertheless he was later fined by a local Turkish court (Zırh 2013).

Remarkably, the incest stereotype has also infiltrated German television through a long-standing popular crime series Tatort (Kosnick 2011). In an episode called ‘To Whom Honour Is Due’, an Alevi father is found to have sexually assaulted both of his daughters, killing one of them, despite the ‘prime suspect’ having been the Sunni Muslim husband of the victim. While the episode attempted to challenge the Turkish Muslim stereotype around the themes of honour killing, veiling and forced marriage, it resurrected the Alevi stereotype about incest (Kosnick 2011). The series also suggested that Sunni Islam offered protection from the threat of Alevi incest as one of the incest victims preferred to marry a Sunni Muslim, while the other chose to wear a veil as a ‘piece of protection’ (104). The episode resulted in public unease among Alevis, and led eventually to 30,000 gathering in Cologne to protest at the misrepresentation and stereotyping in Tatort, and to the writing of a letter to the German Minister for Domestic Affairs describing the programme as ‘a direct attack upon all integration efforts to which Alevi immigrants were contributing’ in Germany (106). In my interview, Onur from Yol TV emphasised the role of the channel in campaigning against the discriminatory Alevi representation in Tatort:

If I remember it right, it was back in 2007, Tatort on NDR [Norddeutscher Rundfunk] had brought up incest in Alevis. Through television broadcasting on this, we have been able to gather, in our opinion, 50,000 people in Dom Square [to protest against the series].

Alevis from Turkey, the Netherlands and Belgium also attended the protests, either in person or virtually through videos they had recorded and uploaded to YouTube (Kosnick 2011).

The third protest was against a drama series featuring a rare instance of a reference to Alevism on Turkish television. The reaction began even before the series was broadcast on the public channel, TRT, in 2013. The trailer for Kızıl Elma (‘Red Apple’), in which an Alevi deyiş was played in the background and the Zülfikar (the sword of the Prophet Ali) was used by the protagonist, who is an intelligence officer, led to the public perception that the series would be about Alevis and their relationship with the state. Arguably, this perception was reinforced by the fact that Red Apple was produced by a team led by a Turkish nationalist, Osman Sınav, who also produced and directed the renowned Turkish series Kurtlar Vadisi (‘Valley of the Wolves’), about a paramilitary hero (Emre Cetin 2015). Before discussing Red Apple, it is necessary to give some background on Valley of the Wolves and its depiction of Alevis.

Valley of the Wolves and its spin-offs were on air for more than a decade and depicted controversial topics around such issues as the ‘Kurdish question’, all from a nationalist-(para)militarist perspective (Emre Cetin 2015). The last of the series led to widespread protests by viewers who logged thousands of telephone complaints with the Turkish regulatory body, the Radio Television Supreme Council, expressing the fear that the nationalist depiction of the ‘Kurdish question’ would contribute to the escalating conflict and violence against Kurds. As a result of this public unease, the channel decided to pull the series and it was not broadcast. A subsequent version of the series, Valley of the Wolves Ambush (2007–16), also depicted Alevism from a nationalist perspective through one of the main characters Zülfikar Ağa. In the series, Zülfikar Ağa works as a close ally of Polat Alemdar (the paramilitary hero and the main protagonist of the series) and tries to keep the Alevi community out of trouble and from causing any ‘provocations’. The series can be seen as the first explicit and longest depiction of Alevis in television fiction and despite the nationalist framing of Alevis and Alevism in Valley of the Wolves Ambush, the community did not publicly denounce the series. There might be several reasons for this. In spite of its nationalist discourse, Valley of the Wolves Ambush depicts Alevis in a ‘positive light’ as allies of the state and of the paramilitary protagonist. The series also portrayed various other ethnic and religious communities through different characters, although often negatively, and hence Alevis were not targeted in the same negative way as Kurds, Zazas, Jews or Christians.

In contrast, Red Apple was considered to be the ‘anti-Alevi’ version of Valley of the Wolves and Alevis attempted to mobilise a similar reaction against the series as had occurred in the case of the depiction of the ‘Kurdish question’. Even though Red Apple did not receive as much public attention as Valley of the Wolves, the chair of the London Alevi Culture Centre and Cemevi at the time, İsrafil Erbil, protested against the series in a press release, logged an official complaint to the Radio Television Supreme Council and also filed a criminal complaint on the basis that the programmes promoted division and hatred (Emre Cetin 2018a: 91). Erbil argued that the series portrayed Alevis as part of the ‘deep state’, defaming Alevi youth, Alevism and its values. The complaint was dismissed by the Radio Television Supreme Council and later the prosecution decided not to prosecute the case, yet the series did not last long. Oddly, Red Apple did not in the end have any explicit references to Alevis or Alevism and it is difficult to know whether the Alevism theme was dropped because of the complaint or not. One might also assume that as a public broadcaster, TRT might have been reluctant to depict Alevism in order to avoid further controversy. It is interesting to note that despite the proliferation of television drama series in the 2000s via the increase in the number of private channels and the subsequent depiction of politically loaded themes, such as the ‘Kurdish question’ and religious piety (Emre Cetin 2014), Alevism has not yet made an entrance as a main theme in this medium, even from a nationalist perspective. Valley of the Wolves Ambush, which ambitiously touched upon various socio-historical issues in Turkey still stands as a notable exception.

Put in a historical perspective, these incidents demonstrate the expansion of Alevi cultural rights claims towards transnationality. Alevi protests about Tatort and Red Apple clearly indicate that rights claims in relation to cultural representations take place on a transnational scale. Transnational Alevi communities in Western Europe have been engaging with Turkish media content via satellite since the 1990s and, more recently, via online streaming. The protests against Red Apple are evidence that Alevi organisations abroad do not confine themselves to political matters, but also intervene in the Turkish cultural realm. This provides them with further public visibility in Turkey and puts them on the agenda as they interfere in popular matters such as television series, which have been the realm of a hegemonic struggle for different groups (Emre Cetin 2014). These citizenship acts also apply in the case of Tatort, where the protests resulted in a further awareness in the German public of the differences among ‘Turkish migrants’ (Kosnick 2011). The Alevi community’s response to Tatort highlights how they imagine themselves as part of German society and feel troubled about transporting prejudices and phobias from the Turkish context into Germany. However, the virtual and physical protests that took place in other European countries and Turkey indicate that the binaries of transnationalism are insufficient in addressing the multi-spatiality of these citizenship acts about media. Despite the fact that the series was broadcast to a national audience, the protests about Tatort took place in different countries and gathered protesters physically in Germany and in a transversal space online. The Tatort protests epitomise transversal citizenship as multi-spatial and as mediated through digital media involving online protests, as well as the use of traditional media in dealing with the colonial gaze towards Alevis (stemming from Turkey and dispersed across different spaces of migration). Transversal citizenship acts have emerged through television and on digital media, while simultaneously taking place on the streets in the form of demonstrations in a number of localities.

Having identified issues of misrepresentation of Alevis and Alevism in the Turkish media and the public reaction of Alevis to them, I would now like to focus on the role of Alevi media in providing a mediascape for citizenship acts. We can distinguish between two aspects of citizenship enactment within Alevi media: 1) Alevi television as citizenship enactment (media as acts/citizenship acts in media); and 2) Alevi television as a site through which citizens are invited to act (media as a site for citizenship acts/citizenship acts through media). In the following subsections, drawing on interviews I conducted with Alevi television workers and members of the community, and the content of Alevi TV broadcasts, I examine these specific forms of citizenship acts as they emerge in Alevi television.

As demonstrated in Chapter 2, cultural citizenship is about learning about oneself and others. Alevi television provides substantial knowledge on Alevism and Alevi culture, and enables its viewers to rediscover their own cultural identity. This is particularly important for two reasons: first, the colonial approach towards Alevis has deemed cultural and traditional sources of Alevism, such as gülbang and cem, as unimportant and irrelevant, thus undermining Alevi history and identity; and secondly, Alevi religious practices in particular have been ‘forgotten’ as a result of the immense transformation brought about by modernisation and urbanisation in Turkey. As we have seen, many researchers highlight how Alevis’ political engagement with Kemalism and later the left has meant the de-religionising of Alevism, eliminating its religious elements and institutions from its identity. Urbanisation has also diluted the physical, face-to-face interactions between ordinary Alevis and their faith leaders, such as dedes, thus challenging the lineage-based religious practices of Alevism (Coşan Eke 2021). In this respect, fear has also played a significant role at the generational level, whereby many Alevis have abstained from revealing their Alevi identity in the urban public sphere for fear of discrimination or worse, and as a result failing to pass Alevi knowledge and customs on to the younger generations, in order to protect their children and youth from random and everyday symbolic and physical violence.

Sökefeld (2008b: 272) argues that the Alevi movement has deeply transformed Alevism. Dedes and ocaks have been replaced by Alevi organisations, the genealogical model by the democratic model, and educated Alevi intellectuals have taken over the role of passing down knowledge and traditions through books, journals and magazines, rather than the traditional oral method of transmission. Therefore, ‘Alevism was changed from an oral tradition into a literate discourse’ (272). While this is partially true, we need to be beware of positing a purely linear understanding of the transformation of Alevism. For this reason, I argue that Alevi television has actually been reviving Alevism’s oral tradition by portraying Alevism ‘as a way of life’ on the screen and by opening up new channels for cultural citizenship. In his work on Inuit television production, Santo (2004: 382) demonstrates that ‘Inuit media production has long served as a site of resistance to these hegemonic incorporating tendencies and has offered alternative means of “schooling” that not only teach Inuit about their culture, but how to practice it’. In a similar vein, Ginsburg (1994: 315) says that Aboriginal media in Australia and social relations built out of it help to develop support for indigenous actions of self-determination. Alevi television draws extensively on community events to make up nearly a third of the weekly schedule. Therefore, television production is enmeshed within everyday practices and events that construct Alevi identity. Ginsburg (1994: 306) describes this embedded aesthetics as ‘a system of evaluation that refuses a separation of textual production and circulation from broader arenas of social relations’.

The cultural reproduction and reconstruction of Alevism on television and the reviving of the oral tradition are not only crucial for the ‘cultural future’ (Michaels 1987) of the community, but also for their political survival as cultural citizens claiming equal citizenship and recognition. That is to say, without boundary work,² without defining what is distinctive about the community, Alevis would not be able to substantiate their rights claims for recognition. The media workers themselves regard Alevi television as a cultural/religious source which disseminates traditional knowledge, the oral transmission of which had been disrupted by migration:

Urban migration in Turkey resulted in degeneration, not only of Alevism but of many other things. For instance, people are so much busy with work, their finances. There is a sociological dimension to it too. Under such pressure, would there be any room for identity, for Alevism? […] Therefore, Yol TV is a big source of light. It is a carrier of a culture that is diminishing and that is targeted to be destroyed.

(Naki, Yol TV)

For instance, my mum considered herself very ignorant about Alevism. Now whenever I go to her place, Yol TV is on. She keeps talking about things she learned [on Alevism] and asking me questions. I say, ‘I didn’t know, mum’, I also just learned it. I really did not know much about Alevism and it was a real deficit. You fight for Alevism but you are very ignorant about it. Especially for those who grew up in Germany, it is really difficult. Because there is assimilation. You are already assimilated in Turkey, then it becomes more difficult in Germany. I can say that we found out about ourselves through television.

(Düzgün, Yol TV)

As Naki’s account of his mum and himself demonstrates, learning about Alevism through television is not confined to the younger generations. My interviews with audiences indicate that for first-generation migrants in the UK, Alevi television is a primary source for learning about Alevism. Studies have demonstrated that the break-up of oral tradition and the dissolution of the ocak system in which dedes passed the knowledge of Alevism to the members of the community have been disrupted by modernisation and urban migration (Coşan-Eke 2021). First-generation Alevi migrants in the UK are also the first generation who have restored their relationship with Alevism through Alevi organisations and Alevi television, while being detached from Alevism’s oral tradition. With its ability to enter the domestic sphere, television holds a privileged position as the carrier of culture. Hartley (2001, 2007) examines the use of television for learning and contends that it provides general knowledge and teaches us about the day-to-day conduct of public and private affairs, juxtaposing pre-modern and modern modes of address; according to Hartley (2001), cultural citizenship has been taught by television acting as a mass medium. Therefore, what we learn through television is not only general knowledge and the contemporary socio-political agenda but also some form of civility, a way of joining political life through our cultural identities. Alevi television enables Alevis to learn about their religion and culture, providing them with a point of reference for making sense of their identity. It also defines Alevi identity as a political entity, as well as being cultural and religious. Learning about one’s cultural identity through television paves the way for defining that identity in political terms as well. Using Bhabha’s (1990) distinction between the pedagogical and performative temporality of narratives, Alevi television enables the performativity of culture which is excluded from the pedagogies of the nation-state. Equally, though, by means of this performativity, television engenders its own pedagogical temporality in terms of what Alevism is.

At this point, it is worth mentioning that Yol TV and TV10 take a clear stance on not broadcasting cem ceremonies, unlike Cem TV. At first, one might think that such a decision stems from seeing television as a mundane, profane medium and the need to respect and protect the boundaries of what is sacred for Alevism. However, both workers at Yol TV and TV10 emphasise that televising cem ceremonies comes with the risk of standardisation and homogenisation. They consider that the diversity of Alevism is yet to be unearthed and take up the challenge of depicting it on television by showing the life and events of different Alevi communities on the screen. Such a commitment is expressed more boldly by TV10 as it emphasises Kurdishness through its multilingual programmes (Turkish, Zazaki and Kurdish) and attachment to a Kurdish political agenda:³

When you turn on [Cem TV], you see the cem ceremony broadcast. Then viewers think that ‘oh this is what the cem ought to be’. But this is not the case. When you go Hubyar you see a different cem, if you go to Adıyaman, cem is different or if you go the Aegean [region], you see a different cem [ritual].

(Ali, TV10)

TV10 and its successor Can TV, however, broadcast semah and occasionally some parts of the cem, reframing it as dem or muhabbet cemi, an informal community event or gathering rather than a full cem ceremony. This is despite, as indicated in my follow-up interviews with Can TV workers, increasing local demand from people who conduct and attend the ceremonies for them to be broadcast. This illustrates how the television workers’ attitude towards the cem ceremony as a whole is different from their approach towards particular components of the ceremony and its various rituals, such as candle lighting and semah. In this approach, the pedagogies of Alevism on television exclude the showing of complete sacred ceremonies, focusing rather on particular cultural elements, which arguably contributes towards the secularisation of Alevism through fragmenting and reframing it, prioritising its cultural elements over the religious. However, this leads audiences, particularly of the second generation, whose members probably have not attended many cem ceremonies before, to turn to Cem TV to see what cems are like and to make comparisons:

Thursdays they show cems from Istanbul or elsewhere. I like it when they do stuff like that […] We compare. I have only been to a cem once in London, so I don’t know much. But when I recall them [cem on television], I am like ‘yeah, they did this’. We always watch it [cem] on television. When they perform semah, we go like ‘they do it like this, we do it like that’.

(Ela, 22, undergraduate student)

Most of my interviewees take a different approach to that of the television and do not problematise the broadcasting of cem ceremonies as they are really interested in finding out more about Alevism and how different Alevi communities practise the ceremony. The desire to learn about Alevism through television overcomes the tensions between the sacred and the profane and the definition of Alevism as either culture or religion in the eyes of the viewers. For them, having knowledge about Alevism becomes a prerequisite for taking a position on what Alevism is and how to define it. Elsewhere, I have argued that under-represented communities prefer misrepresentation to no representation (Emre Cetin 2015). In this sense, seeing Alevi rituals on television also seems to have a symbolic value for viewers in terms of a validation of their collective identity and self-expression.

As I have discussed in Chapter 3, it is difficult to talk about an Alevi citizenship that advocates only rights for Alevis and, in this respect, Alevi channels are also interested in learning about other communities as well as Alevis. This pedagogical practice can be regarded as a political act where other ‘minority’ cultures are not considered simply as part of a broad spectrum of ‘non-Alevis’ but as oppressed or marginalised cultures and communities. For instance, religious minorities such as the Ezidis who were subject to the brutality of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) and a marginalised community in Turkey have also been producing programmes about their own culture on Yol TV. Other ethno-religious minorities, such as the Assyrian and Greek Orthodox communities in Turkey, were mentioned by my interviewees as groups with whom Yol TV had worked. TV10 (now Can TV) and Yol TV produce programmes that embrace perspectives from a wide spectrum of leftist and Kurdish movements. ‘Anti-fascism’, ‘anti-racism’, ‘being on the side of the oppressed’, ‘social peace’ and ‘equal citizenship’ were often mentioned when television workers described their broadcasting values and policy. In this way, Alevi television is not solely interested in Alevis and their culture but has broader political ambitions in giving voice to ‘others’ in Turkey:

Our Alevi broadcasting will not save Alevis. Our television must hold a position for making democracy work in Turkey in its fullest sense. [Television] must lead Alevis in this. Strengthening the democratic front would not solely work with Alevis. Of course, the struggle for democracy would have its own forces and institutions. And Alevis would be part of them. We cannot have democracy in Turkey without Kurdish, Turkish, Sunnis and Alevis fighting for it together.

(İsmail, Yol TV)

This wider spectrum of interest in learning about others is not confined to simply the culturally or religiously different ‘other’ because in Alevi TV broadcasting terms ‘otherness’ is usually presupposed on the basis of oppression. The fact that the majority of Alevis associate themselves with progressive politics and support for the left leads them to have a considerable engagement with the Turkish political agenda, which is also evidenced by the politics of the TUP and later the PP (Ata 2007; Ertan 2017; Massicard 2017). Political talk shows make up almost half of the Alevi television schedules. The fact that Alevi television producers are situated within networks of the left and the Kurdish movement and the politicians’ eagerness to appear on Alevi television in order to gain the support of Alevi voters, along with the limited media outlets where left-leaning politics are visible, can be mentioned as other key reasons for high number of political talk shows.

In 2012 Alevis were alarmed by the harassment and violence that routinely targeted those who did not fast during Ramadan, including the majority of Alevis. In the small town of Sürgü in Malatya, an Alevi family who reported the disturbance caused by the loud noise of the drum played before the Sahur, the pre-dawn meal taken prior to the daily fast, was subject to an attempted lynching by a group of Muslims. The unease continued for days and Alevi organisations and Yol TV, in particular, launched a campaign to protect the family. The channel reported on the attack live, calling the family members who were stuck in the house and discussing the attack with members of parliament. Yol TV also provided the telephone number of the Malatya Police Department and other local authorities and encouraged the audience to call them in order to show their support for the family and, importantly, to let the authorities know that Alevis are able to mobilise an international public when an Alevi is in danger. Back then, I was also following the attack on Yol TV in London and called the Malatya police station requesting the security forces take action to protect the family. The officer I talked to sounded frustrated and said, ‘Look miss, we do whatever is needed.’ Yol TV’s campaign mobilised their audience, leading them to take action by making phone calls from the comfort of their own homes as the least they could do and brought the attack onto the mainstream media agenda. The family was saved, although they were unable to continue living in Sürgü because of security risks, and they eventually migrated to the UK with the support of the German and British Alevi Federations.

Previously (Emre Cetin 2018a), I argued that the Sürgü attack exemplifies the role of Alevi television in constructing an Alevi public discourse and reveals the extent to which Alevis are a transnationally connected public. This significant case also demonstrates the power of Alevi television in enabling and facilitating Alevi citizenship acts (through media) with the audience calling the local authorities in Malatya to demand that local forces treat the Sürgü family as equal citizens and to protect them. This is a transversal citizenship act enacted through the media involving a complex set of connections and relations across different national borders, namely a channel broadcasting from Germany reporting an attack in Turkey, mobilising an audience living in different countries in Europe and facilitating the settlement of the family in the UK in order to save their lives. This transversal space was generated by transnational media, enabling an audience to take action thanks to simultaneous reporting. Naki from Yol TV describes the event:

I was at home casually hanging about and then received a phone called. They said there is a problem in Turkey about a Ramadan drum. I didn’t quite get the details. Then I talked to the family and learned that they would be lynched as in Maraş or in Sivas. The excuse is they raised their concern over the drum being played in front of their house [despite it being known that they were not fasting]. I quickly came to the studio. Our television does not have formalities … We turned the cameras on, changed the schedule and started the live broadcasting. This is the way we do it, we can go on live now if we want to … We started the live [broadcast] and talked to the family. It [the attack] was suddenly on Turkey’s agenda […] Members of parliament of CHP [Cumhuriyet Halk Partisi] and HDP [Halkların Demokratik Partisi] went to Sürgü after watching us, we gave the family’s contact numbers to them and so on […] All of a sudden, it was on the agenda of all Alevis. What happens next, the parties who get votes from Alevis cannot remain insensible. They have to focus on there, they have to send someone there. So members of parliament went there, it became an issue in the parliament and so on, hence the family was saved. If it wasn’t for television, that family could have been [massacred], like in Maraş, or that house could have been burned down, like in Sivas. Even this indicates media is an indispensable and a powerful element. No one can give up on it.

(Naki, Yol TV)

As a parallel, Richardson (2020) situates ‘bearing witness while black’ within a long history of slavery and colonialism, emphasising that the news production of African American activists through smartphones draws heavily on the history of anti-racism. She says that ‘in terms of atrocity, witnessing is a form of connective tissue among black people that transcends place’ (2020: 12) and this is not specific to the digital era and the affordances of the mobile phone. In this respect, I have discussed the significance of the collective remembering of massacres in the making of Alevi identity (indeed, the rituals and means of commemoration and the collective memory of the community is an interesting topic which deserves the further attention of researchers). Here I would like to argue in relation to the Sürgü attack that Alevi television was utilised as a means of witnessing and was a political act drawing on the collective memory of the Madımak massacre. The Sürgü attack transformed how Alevis use the medium, from a passive form of witnessing (of the Madımak) into an active one, inviting the audience to bear witness and act against the risk of lynching of an Alevi family. They utilised the media to make the Sürgü incident an urgent public issue, drawing on their collective memory of Madımak by inviting non-Alevis such as members of parliament and politicians. It can be argued that without the collective remembering sparked by the images of the massacre in the media, such forms of bearing witness and citizenship acts via the media would not have been possible. That is to say, Alevis have remembered to protect and not to forget (Zelizer 1998) through television. This time, bearing witness through television enabled Alevi citizens to act upon violence and protect community members.

Özkan (2019), who worked at Cem TV for her ethnographic research, tells of a similar incident in Yazgılı (pseudonymised by the author) in which a Kurdish Alevi family was reportedly attacked by the locals during Ramadan. Cem TV covered the attack for four days, bringing it onto the public agenda. However, the narrative about the attack was ‘unsettled’, oscillating between framing it as an act of religious discrimination and a peculiar and singular incident of banal violence. Özkan (2019) argues that the lack of clear positioning of Cem TV stems from the outlet’s ties to the Cem Foundation, which has been actively following a pro-state position for Alevis(m) and also because of the Kurdishness of the family, both of which are difficult to accommodate within the Turkish nationalist perspective of the channel. Yazgılı discussion of Cem TV points to a clear line between citizenship acts through media and mere journalistic reporting of an attack (regardless of whether it is good journalistic practice or not). Rather than highlighting the ethno-religious motivations and calling for protection and political mobilisation in relation to the attack, Cem TV ignored the testimony of the family and their emphasis on their ethnicity, as well as religion, and the family’s situating the attack within the broader history of massacres of Alevis. Silencing victims by describing them as unreliable sources operates as a strategy for reframing the attack rather than giving voice to the victims, deeming their experience of violence irrelevant. Nevertheless, despite its pro-Turkish state positioning, Özkan (2019: 319) rightly situates Cem TV within the category of minority media as the channel openly claims to represent Alevis within the otherwise pro-Sunni political context which characterises mainstream media in Turkey and its limitations. In other words, being a pro-state nationalist media outlet is not sufficient for it to be described as mainstream media. But the opposite is also true: being a minority media does not automatically assign Cem TV citizen media status, something which further delineates identity and citizenship as distinct categories.

Mobilising Alevi citizenship through television does not solely involve acts of remembering and bearing witness, as in the Sürgü attack. Television also operates as a way of encouraging Alevi citizens to attend events such as demonstrations and protests. In 2013 the Turkish prime minister, Tayyip Erdoğan, was scheduled to visit Bochum in Germany in order to receive an award for tolerance. The award sparked protest by tens of thousands of people of Turkish origin and, as a result, Erdoğan cancelled his visit. The demonstration was organised by the Alevi Federation Germany. According to some of my interviewees from the Federation who had also been producing programmes for Yol TV, the size of the demonstration was a result of announcements made on Yol TV encouraging people to protest against Erdoğan receiving the prize. My interviewees from Yol TV argued that they had been able to organise the demonstration at very short notice with a high turnout by campaigning on television, which allowed them to explain the importance of this protest to their audience:

For instance, in Germany we used to start organising demonstrations one month prior to the demo. We used to call people via phone, send them fax messages calling them to the demonstration. Now, we don’t need this. We are able to gather 50,000 people in three days through Yol TV. Tayyip [Erdoğan] was going to come here. We learned about it three days before. We said, let’s protest against this. We started [protests] in Sivas as fifty people, then we became a hundred, then 1,000, then 3,000. After Yol TV we became 20,000, 100,000 to 150,000. You are able to have better communication with people [thanks to Yol TV]. You can access them directly.

(Naki, Yol TV)

No doubt the gathering of masses of people to protest against Erdoğan does not simply stem from the power of Alevi television. The unease caused by authoritarianism in Turkey and the critical mood in the aftermath of Gezi⁴ might also have played a significant role in such a mobilisation. This event where Erdoğan cancelled his visit to receive the prize often came up as a theme in my interviews with Yol TV workers when they discussed the significance of Alevi television for the community and their politics. It also demonstrates that the European Alevi Unions Confederation and Alevi Federation Germany were able to use television as an effective tool to influence transnational grassroots Alevi politics and to inform ordinary members, who had not been actively engaged with these organisations, helping them to know more about their activities and support them. In this regard, Alevi television can be seen as a political medium for Alevis in mobilising different citizenship acts, such as protests, so expanding its field of influence to include those not yet active. A similar scenario occurred when the previous head of the European Alevi Unions Confederation, Turgut Öker, was arrested in Turkey in 2019. The Confederation called on the audience to protest against the arrest through Yol TV and initiated a more inclusive collective action, one that included Alevis, with less transnational connectivity. Asker from Yol TV also recalled the Tatort protests and said that the station had been very influential in organising the demonstrations and gathering a huge mass of protesters at the time.

These examples indicate that Yol TV draws on already well-established transnational networks linked to the Confederation, unlike TV10, which has not been able to launch influential campaigns, demonstrations or protests. Although TV10 has a close relationship with the DAF, it does not define itself as DAF’s media nor does it fully adhere to the political position of the organisation on Alevism. Such a distinction between Yol TV and TV10 demonstrates that citizenship acts through media need further political ties and affiliations beyond viewership.

Transversal citizenship acts through media are also strongly tied to other sites of citizenship acts. For instance, in 2016 both Yol TV and TV10 broadcast protests against the establishment of a refugee camp near the Alevi village of Terolar that included local residents, Alevi leaders, intellectuals and transnational organisations. The camp was designed to accommodate over 25,000 refugees, while the population in nearby villages was stated as around 6,000.⁵ The local residents in nearby villages were concerned that the government was settling ex-ISIS militia in the region, leaving Alevis an open target for religious violence, with the eventual aim of displacing them. The protests lasted for more than 90 days and broadcasts from the area were eventually hampered by the security forces, who also attacked protesters. Despite its longevity and the transnational support that it received, the Terolar protests were not able to actively mobilise a large number of community members; later, they faded away after the attempted coup of 2016, which resulted in the closure of Alevi television stations.

Citizenship acts in media can be pursued by media activist themselves, whereas citizenship acts through media require audience engagement beyond media reception. This is not to say that citizenship acts in media do not require a close connection with the audience, nor that they do not have the ability to lead to citizenship acts through media. However, citizenship acts in media indicate the limits of politicisation through media. Alevi television is seeking ways to involve audiences in television production through citizenship journalism; it invites audiences to take part in media activism, as well as facilitating activism through the media, as the aforementioned events indicate. While the prospect of implementing citizenship journalism in Alevi broadcasting might not be very promising for a variety of reasons, including Alevis’ fear of being identified with Alevi institutions in small towns and villages in Turkey, limited resources and the need for instant access in the age of the digital indicate citizenship journalism as the way forward for Alevi broadcasting. Citizenship journalism might be a way of bridging the gap between citizenship acts in and through media, particularly with the Alevi media’s shift to digital.

Alevi citizenship acts in and through media are transversal. They take place across different but connected spaces through media, they simultaneously rely on community organisations and on traditional and digital media, and they raise a voice against historically deep-rooted forms of violence and discrimination which are embedded in the collective memories and imaginaries of the community. The following chapter focuses on these imaginaries to examine how citizenship acts are facilitated by a collective sense of belonging across spatial borders.