7 Communicative Ethnocide and Transversal Citizenship

Three Alevi television stations, Cem TV, TV10 and Yol TV, were on air before the attempted coup of July 2016. But following it, TV10 was closed down in September 2016 by decree, under the government’s state of emergency, and Yol TV’s broadcasting was suspended in December 2016 by the Radio and Television Supreme Council on the grounds of insulting the president, praising terrorist organisations and broadcasting without a Turkish licence. Cem TV remained in operation and is based in Turkey. However, given that each TV channel represents different political orientations within the Alevi community and that the Turkish government approaches each one differently, we cannot examine authoritarian approaches towards media simply by resorting to the use of umbrella terms such as the silencing or freedom of media. Although such terms are useful in addressing the broader structures of state oppression, they overshadow the governmentality, the nuanced approach that the state adopts in silencing the spectrum of alternative voices.

For this reason, the closure of Alevi television stations in Turkey needs to be situated within the history of the Alevi community and the Turkish state’s policies towards Alevis in order to see the nuances of silencing and oppression. While these policies have been part of a broader blow to media freedom in Turkey, I argue that the closure of Alevi channels is an attempt at the communicative ethnocide of the transnational Alevi community by silencing the multiple voices within that community, weakening its transnational connections, and damaging the multi-spatiality between the local, national, and transnational, and therefore the transversal imaginary that was fundamentally supported by Alevi television. By looking at Alevi television and comparing it with Kurdish media, my aim is to demonstrate that ethnocide as a form of cultural annihilation also has serious consequences in terms of media communications and transversal citizenship. In this chapter, I start by providing a theoretical framework for ethnocide by drawing on Appadurai (2006), Clastres (2010) and Yalçınkaya (2014). I then introduce the concept of communicative ethnocide and discuss its relevance for understanding challenges towards transversal citizenship.¹

‘Genocide’ is a legal term which refers to the destruction of a community by the persecution of its members. Although the term is primarily used in reference to the persecution of the Jewish community by the Nazis during the Second World War, this was not the first act of genocide and many communities were intentionally destroyed before this time, including the Armenians in Turkey during the First World War (Akcam 2013). Lemkin (cited in Clavero 2008), who coined the term genocide, has suggested that the term ethnocide can also be used as a synonym; in legal studies, ethnocide often refers to cultural genocide and the cultural destruction of indigenous cultures (Clavero 2008). In the 1970s, it was particularly used in relation to indigenous cultures in the Americas (Barabas and Bartholeme 1973; Lizot 1976; Escobar 1989; Venkateswar 2004), although later the concept was used to explain the cultural destruction of different communities living in different countries (Lamarchand 1994; Clarke 2001; Williams 2002; Casula 2015). A report by the UN on the genocide of indigenous populations refers to ethnocide as follows:

In cases where such [state] measures can be described as acts committed for the deliberate purpose of eliminating the culture of a group by systematically destructive and obstructive action, they could be deemed to constitute clear cases of ethnocide or cultural genocide.

(Cited in Clavero 2008: 99)

Ethnocide can be regarded as a cultural weapon that aims to destroy the culture of a community with or without killing its members. While genocide, according to Clastres (2010), aims to annihilate the body as the marker of race, ethnocide annihilates the mind; it is, he argues, ‘the systematic destruction of ways of living and thinking of people from those who lead this venture of destruction’ (103). Although Clastres makes a comparison between genocide and ethnocide, he does not equate one with the other and acknowledges that the destruction of bodies is worse than the destruction of a culture, but only on the grounds that ‘less barbarity is better than more barbarity’ (103). Williams’s definition of the ‘culture as ordinary’ (2002) allows us to reflect on the everyday dimensions of ethnocide, where we can see how it interrupts, transforms and distorts the everyday practices of an ethnic community, including its symbols and rituals, which provide it with its particular characteristics. Ethnocide can take different forms, such as suggesting the adoption of alternative rituals to those specific to the community, or forcibly replacing them with different practices, or the destruction of culturally significant spaces where everyday practices and encounters take place, and so on. Hence ethnocide can be thought of as a programme which attacks the culture of communities on a day-to-day basis.

Essential to both genocide and ethnocide is the concept of the ‘Other’ since in both cases the Other means difference and this difference has to be dealt with. For this reason, in making sense of ethnocide, it is useful to compare it to genocide’s vision of the Other. While the genocidal mind sees Others as evil and wants to eliminate them, the ethnocidal mind wishes to transform them by eliminating the difference and making the Others identical to itself. Whereas the genocidal mind sees a hierarchy of races, with its own superior to Others, the ethnocidal mind presupposes a hierarchy of cultures (Clastres 2010). In this sense, ethnocide involves a cultural war against the Other, with the aim of diminishing the characteristics of what makes the Other different and foreseeing an eventual assimilation of the Other into the mainstream, thus ‘reducing the Other to the same’ by ‘the dissolution of the multiple into one’ (Clastres 2010: 108).

For Clastres (2010) it is a universal fact that all cultures are ethnocentric, but being ethnocentric does not necessarily entail that a culture is ethnocidal. For this to occur particular tools and opportunities are required and these are afforded through the formation of the state. For Clastres, the state is a requirement and precondition for ethnocide:

All state organizations are ethnocidal, ethnocide is the normal mode of existence of the State. There is thus a certain universality to ethnocide, in that it is the characteristic not only of a vague, indeterminate ‘white world,’ but of a whole ensemble of societies which are societies with a State. (111)

Simply put, the systematic cultural elimination of the Other requires the state’s organised and institutionalised power. Violence is seen as inherent in the existence of the state and the need to engage in systematic violence both leads to and requires the organisational capacity of the state. It is important to emphasise this interconnection in order to understand the complexity of ethnocide as a cultural form of violence. While Clastres sees ethnocide as an inherent characteristic of state societies and considers ethnocide as a tool that can be used by every state, he also recognises the potential for resistance by the Other in such societies. For Clastres, ‘the ability of resistance of the oppressed minority’ means that ethnocide is not an inescapable fate for the Other (103). Whether the Other is able to resist ethnocide or not depends on the community’s history and the way that the community is organised. One needs to look at the community’s capacity as well as the state’s approach in a given historical context in order to understand the extent of ethnocide.

According to Yalçınkaya (2014), the Turkish state’s approach towards Alevis must be seen as a form of ethnocide, even though Alevis themselves have tended to view it rather as assimilation. Yalçınkaya (2014: 23) argues that the state’s policies towards Alevis is an attempt at getting them to comply with the state’s definition of the ideal citizen, and for this reason ethnocide is a more accurate concept to understand the state’s approach towards Alevis. Unlike assimilation, which aims at destroying Alevi as an identity, along with Alevi cultural practices so that culturally Alevis become indistinguishable from the Sunni Muslim majority, the Turkish state is concerned with redefining Alevis and their culture to produce a political identity commensurate with that of the ideal Turkish citizen. Yalçınkaya adopts a Foucauldian approach which sees ethnocide as a creative activity that creates an identity, while transforming it according to the desires of the state. The state’s ethnocidal policies does not aim at destroying Alevis per se. Instead, it seeks to destroy the community’s internal order and its power of self-regulation (Yalçınkaya 2014: 32); what lies at the core of this ethnocidal project is the religious practices of Alevis. The state wants to transform Alevi identity through displacing, re-designing and re-conceptualising Alevi rites and rituals (Yalçınkaya 2014). The discussion of whether the cemevi is a place of worship and whether the cem itself is a religious ceremony exemplifies this approach. The state resists recognising the cemevi and the cem as essentially and distinctively religious and instead attempts to redefine them as ‘culturally deviant’ practices. In order to examine the ethnocide of Alevis, Yalçınkaya (2014) focuses particularly on the period in which the JDP government launched various projects involving Alevis, such as the Muharrem Fast Breaking, the Alevi Opening and the Mosque-Cemevi project. At the Muharrem Fast Breaking in 2008, Alevi faith leaders, dedes, were invited to break their Muharrem fasts according to Islamic conventions and at some official meetings such as the Alevi Workshops in 2009 the dedes were treated as though they were tariqa leaders, that is, leaders of an Islamic school of Sufism or sects (Ecevitoğlu and Yalçınkaya 2013; Borovalı and Boyraz 2015; Lord 2017).

Yalçınkaya (2014: 32–5) describes the particular methods through which ethnocide operates. These are: 1) displacement of the community; 2) destroying its locality and geography (also see Göner 2017a; Orhan 2019); 3) destroying the memory of the community; and 4 the displacement of the community’s performances. Following the massacres² of Koçgiri (1921) and Dersim (1938) and the pogroms of Çorum, Malatya, and Sivas during the 1970s, Alevi communities were forcibly displaced and re-settled or had to leave their villages and neighbourhoods in order to avoid the escalating violence. Yalçınkaya expands the displacement to include housing policies and the gentrification of urban areas, where Alevi neighbourhoods were pushed out towards the margins of cities. The second method targets human-made or natural places that are deemed sacred by the community, such as specific locations of pilgrimage, rivers or hills. Building a dam on the Munzur river in Dersim, which is considered sacred by the local Alevis, exemplifies this method. Destroying localities is also about destroying the collective memory of the community as these places are also spaces of remembering and commemoration and of reproducing the myths that construct the collective identity and sense of belonging. In a similar vein, the management of the Hacı Bektaş Lodge and the festival organisation by the state in the 1990s is another example of this triple function of destroying the locality, collective memory and displacing the performances by scripting, spectacularising and de-sacralising them as staged performances. Replacing sacred fire with a candleholder, opening and closing the cem ceremony with namaz and running a cem ceremony for Ramadan are other ways of displacing cem performance (Yalçınkaya 2014: 35).

I would, however, like to introduce a fifth method of ethnocide: destroying the communicative means of the community, and it is this which I refer to as ‘communicative ethnocide’. As discussed in this section, the Turkish state’s perspective towards Alevis is highly influenced by its genocidal and assimilationist policies against Armenians and Kurds (Ateş 2011; Dressler 2013, 2021). Ateş (2011: 21) argues that Alevi persecutions in the Republican period stemmed from the threat felt by the state as a result of Alevi rights claims. Persecution has been a systematic bio-political method employed by the state and executed either by armed forces, as in Koçgiri and Dersim, or by paramilitary support, as in the massacres of Çorum, Malatya and Sivas (Yalçınkaya 2020). While ethnocide is the cultural counterpart of this approach, communicative ethnocide is the specific method which targets communication among the members of the community and their ability to feel part of it via media and communications. The following section unpacks this concept by focusing on Alevi media and comparing it with Kurdish television, which has also been systematically targeted by the communicative ethnocide policies of the state towards the Kurdish community.

As ‘the suppression of cultural differences as deemed inferior or bad’ (Clastres 2010: 108), ethnocidal violence can target the locality, memory, performances and the communicative capacity of the community. Thus, communicative ethnocide is not an isolated process but is part of the ethnocidal project undertaken on a particular community. Its aim is to destroy the communicative means and capacity of that community in order to interrupt and eventually annihilate its cultural formation. Communicative ethnocide can take place through various means and media, including cultural events, social gatherings, press, television and social media. While each means of communicative ethnocide deserves to be investigated in depth, here I would like to focus on the communicative ethnocide that takes place in the context of television broadcasting, which then has further implications for the uses of digital media (discussed in Chapter 8).

As with ethnocide more broadly, communicative ethnocide requires the power of the state because currently states are the main actors regulating communication policies via, for example, television licences, channel allocations and infrastructural regulations. Furthermore, states are the primary actors which hold particular agendas and policies concerning minorities (Brubaker 1996). Taken together, therefore, communicative ethnocide can be seen as a planned and regulated action of the state. It can take both a passive form, where the state, for example, sets up legal barriers to the operation of ethnic media, and an active form, such as imposing a ban on broadcasting in particular languages, or interrupting and censoring broadcasting. In both cases, the aim is to hinder or eliminate: 1) the interaction between the members of the community; 2) the members’ ability to stimulate and guide their social imaginary as to what constitutes their community; 3) the multivocality within the community; and 4) the cultural self-reproduction of the community through media. Therefore, it has significant implications in terms of identity politics, minority rights and the way collective identities that are under-or misrepresented in the media express themselves and enact their rights claims in and though media.

Communicative ethnocide has a number of consequences for ethnic communities in four main domains: representation, language, space and citizenship acts. For those communities that are under-or misrepresented in the mainstream media, ethnic media provides opportunities to raise their own voice (Bailey et al. 2007; Matsaganis et al. 2011; Karim and Al-Rawi 2018), something which communicative ethnocide seeks to eliminate by silencing such communities by demolishing the potential for a multivocal media ecology. Ethnic media is also crucial for the linguistic survival of many communities as it serves as a means to revive dying languages and to popularise them among community members. Communicative ethnocide diminishes this opportunity as well as interrupting the transfer of native languages to the new generation. It also has serious consequences in terms of the spatiality of community identity in the digital era, where members of the same community in different localities can connect not only through television but also social media. Especially for those minorities that are usually dispersed through different locations, that is, stateless or migrant communities, communicative ethnocide means the interruption of self-imaginaries which are constructed and sustained mainly through media. Finally, ethnic and community media is able to engage and mobilise communities in an active way so that community members can become involved in everyday politics and rights movements as well as community politics (Bailey et al. 2007; Matsaganis et al. 2011; Karim and Al-Rawi 2018). Communicative ethnocide diminishes this potential for citizenship acts by destroying the community’s own public sphere.

The contemporary situation of Alevi television exemplifies these features of communicative ethnocide where Alevi culture is being silenced in the media as part of the broader ethnocide policy of the state. At this point I shall examine the communicative ethnocide of Alevi television through three distinct but related dimensions: infrastructural; audience; and transversal.

Along with eleven channels, most of which were Kurdish channels, TV10 was closed down under the state of emergency in September 2016, which also meant that all its equipment and infrastructure were confiscated to be sold to third parties. An appeal by TV10 to resume broadcasting was later rejected by the State of Emergency Commission. However, TV10 has operated online, albeit with limited resources and a reduced programme schedule, which has resulted in a loss of a wide section of its audience who do not have internet access. Yol TV’s blackout also took place in late 2016 under the state of emergency; however, the way it was silenced was different, but like TV10 it is also available online as well as on IPTV, which has also resulted in a loss of audience, as will be discussed more in detail in Chapter 8.

It is important to understand that communicative ethnocide is not necessarily totalitarian in the sense that the state recognises and responds differently to the differences, even nuances, contained within ethnic identities. The Turkish state’s varied approach to different Alevi television stations can be seen to be a result of this nuanced approach. For instance, TV10, which is regarded as the voice of Kurdish Alevis, has been subject to harsher measures, such as the confiscation of tools and equipment and the arrest of journalists working for the channel, whereas Yol TV was closed down due to the Radio and Television Supreme Council’s decision. Since the first Alevi TV station, TV Avrupa, started broadcasting, Alevi television has explored a variety of ways of representing Alevism and the Alevi identity, from broadcasting video clips of Alevi music to producing programmes on Alevi religion. Until recently, different Alevi television channels could be clearly differentiated in terms of their political orientations as an extension of the differences within the Alevi movement and the effect that these orientations have had on programming content in relation to Alevism itself. Thus, as well as reflecting different political orientations within the Alevi community, Cem TV, TV10 and Yol TV also adopt different definitions of Alevism. Within this variety of representations of Alevism, the state has a particular ‘preferred Alevism’, which clearly situates it within Islam. This preferred Alevism has been voiced by Cem TV. For many of my interviewees, the Cem Foundation and Cem TV are a state project which works to assimilate Alevis into the Turkish–Islam synthesis.³ This accounts for the fact that while TV10 and Yol TV, which do not promulgate this ‘preferred’ definition, have been subject to different forms of communicative ethnocide, Cem TV has remained untouched and is on air. As Clastres (2010) and Yalçınkaya (2014) argue, ethnocide does not aim to annihilate ethnic identity, as is the case with genocide, but aims to make the Other resemble the Same – the more similar it is to the Same (in this case Turkish–Sunni–Muslim), the better. This is the role that Cem TV assumes in its representation of Alevism, one that approximates Aleviness (Other) to Sunni Islam and Turkishness (Same). In many ways, it is similar to the Kurdish TV station TRT Kurdi, which was established by the Turkish state to fulfil the requirements of the European Union, and which can be thought as serving the same mission and representing the ‘preferred Kurdishness’.⁴

The fact that Alevi channels with different political orientations have been subject to varying measures is itself indicative of the complexity involved in understanding how communicative ethnocide works and how it needs to be distinguished from cruder forms of censorship. While both these other forms and communicative ethnocide are violations by the state, the latter works by targeting a community and obstructing its communicative means in order to destroy the community’s cultural formation. Hence, I argue that the closure of TV10 and Yol TV cannot simply be seen as attacks on freedom of speech or media but are deeply rooted within the state’s ethnocidal policy against Alevis and must be regarded as a specific part of Alevi ethnocide.

While it is more common to interfere in the content, production and regulation of ethnic television through the means of censorship and control, communicative ethnocide can also encompass the audience. For instance, in the case of Kurdish television, the viewership act itself can be regarded as an ethnic manifestation and communicative ethnocide has set its sights on viewership practices. The satellite dishes on top of the roofs of Kurdish homes were distinguishable with the change of satellites from Eutelsat to Intelsat and, because of this, the Turkish authorities were able to detect who was watching Med TV – the dishes acted as flags of identity. This resulted in

the smashing of satellite dishes, the intimidation of viewers, dish vendors, dish installers, and coffee-houses; a more effective form of repression is cutting off electricity from villages and small towns during prime-time hours when MED-TV is on the air.

(Hassanpour 1998: 61)

This has not happened to viewers of Alevi television as it is not possible to detect who they are by simple surveillance techniques, as was the case with the Kurds. However, the closing of television channels and limiting them mainly to online communication has necessarily had an effect on the audience. My interviews with viewers in the UK reiterate the urge for visibility and the feeling of loss on a collective level following the closures. Nuray, who has been active in the Federation in the last ten years, says that Alevi channels have been a meeting point for the community:

I used to watch Yol TV a lot. I really liked the programmes there. They were really important, TV10 and Yol TV, because they were depicting Alevis. We weren’t mentioned in the news in any other channels, even in the case of important matters, maybe just in a line or two … Our channels made Alevis meet. Their closure is such a loss for our community.

(Nuray, female, 47, housewife)

The interviews conducted with those who work for Alevi television suggest that the closure of the channels has been a challenge, especially for those Alevis who live in remote and rural areas. Rural Alevis find it much more difficult to represent themselves and to get their voices heard in media and politics. In this sense, Alevi television holds a symbolic significance for Alevis who live in remote places, particularly where there is a Sunni Muslim majority. At the same time, one can argue that the closure of oppositional television stations in the aftermath of the attempted coup has also pushed urban Alevis to rely more on Alevi television in order to receive information other than that provided by government-supported media organisations. My informal discussions with Alevis living in Ankara and Istanbul, especially with those who do not or cannot use social media, suggest that they have found it difficult to access reliable news sources after the closure of oppositional television channels, including Alevi media. In this way, communicative ethnocide is more destructive during periods of authoritarianism and increasing censorship where communities require more information about the political agenda in order to protect and defend themselves and sustain their community ties.

The experience of Kurdish broadcasting in Europe, starting with Med TV and followed by Medya TV and Roj TV, illustrates an active form of communicative ethnocide which has strong parallels with the fate of Alevi television broadcasting. Originally dispersed into four states, Iraq, Iran, Syria and Turkey, the Kurds are currently a large community, of which there are an estimated 14 million in Turkey and 850,000 in Western Europe.⁵ While the Kurdish movement dates back to the late Ottoman period, the struggle gained considerable momentum in 1978 with the formation of the PKK and their policy of armed opposition to the Turkish state and call for independence, and later for autonomy and cultural rights. Kurdish television broadcasting in the Turkish context has been very much framed by this armed conflict and political struggle, as well as international crises in the region. It makes an interesting case study of a medium for an ethnic group which does not have a state yet is aiming to build a national identity through television in a transnational context (Hassanpour 1998, 2003; Sinclair and Smets 2014; Keleş 2015; Smets 2016).

Med TV started its broadcasts from the UK in 1995 with a licence from the Independent Television Commission (ITC) granted for ten years. However, as a result of diplomatic pressure from the Turkish state, less than four years later, in March 1999, its licence was revoked by the ITC (Sinclair and Smets 2014: 324) with accusations that the channel supported ‘terrorism’ and broadcast ‘hate propaganda’ (Hassanpour 1998, 2003). This was followed by raids on the studios of Med TV, arrests of the television staff and the seizure of its computers and hardware from its offices in Belgium, Germany and the UK, after which it began its broadcasts via the French-based Eutelsat, until France Telecom refused to renew its licence (Hassanpour 1998, 2003). Following a similar pattern to the political parties established by the Kurdish movement, which were continuously closed down and re-opened under different names, Med TV was re-established again as Medya TV in France in 1999, from which it broadcast until 2004, when the ‘Conseil Superieur de l’Audiovisuel […] the French licensing authority, found that Medya TV was merely a successor channel to Med TV and revoked its broadcasting licence’ (Sinclair and Smets 2014: 325). Following Medya TV’s closure, Roj TV, which was primarily based in Denmark, replaced the channel. Sinclair and Smets (2014) provide a detailed account of how Roj TV led to another international crisis, this time between Denmark and Turkey, involving various parties, such as Eutelsat and Reporters Without Borders, in a long judicial process. In the event, the Danish court ruled against a ban on Roj TV or on Nuce TV, the latter having been designed as a replacement in the event of Roj TV’s closure. Recently, the Kurdish television landscape has expanded to include various local, national and transnational channels as well as thematic broadcasting such as news and children’s television. However, the state of emergency has given an opportunity for the Turkish government to silence Kurdish media by arresting Kurdish journalists, closing down news agencies and blacking out television channels such as Jiyan, Mezopotamya and Denge.

The presence of Med TV and the studios, offices and production facilities of its successor stations in different European countries, such as the UK, Belgium, Germany, Sweden and Russia, reinforced the identity of Euro-Kurdishness, which as Soğuk (2008: 185) notes is cultivated through such a sense of aterritoriality and borderlessness. Despite its Euro-Kurdish identity, Kurdish broadcasting from Europe has been subjected to a transnational form of communicative ethnocide in which various countries have been involved in the Turkish state’s attempt to silence Kurdish television. In Sinclair and Smets’s (2014: 320) words, ‘[n]ever before in the history of European television broadcasting has there been a case in which the European Union […] countries have aggressively fought to fine, censure and close down television channels broadcasting from within the EU’. This aggression by these EU countries has been stoked by international initiatives arising from the Turkish state. As Hassanpour (1998: 53) comments, ‘[a]mong the Middle Eastern countries, Turkey is the first and the only one to use its full state power to silence MED-TV’, and in order to implement its communicative ethnocide, the state has used different methods. Within Turkey, it has ‘unleashed its coercive forces to prevent the reception of the airwaves within Turkey, whereas in Europe, it used diplomatic power, espionage, jamming, and various forms of intimidation to stop the emission of television signals’ (Hassanpour 1998: 53).

Even though the Turkish state has attempted to intervene in Alevi politics in European countries with, for example, its attempt to change the curriculum for Alevi lessons taught in Germany (as communicated in an interview with a member of the Alevi Federation Germany), there has been no direct interference by the Turkish state in the broadcasting by Alevi television channels in Europe, unlike the situation with Kurdish television. However, the threat of possible action in the future and the measures taken against Alevi television in Turkey means that communicative ethnocide challenges the transversal imaginary of the Alevi community. Naki from Yol TV explains the extent to which Yol TV serves as a means of connectivity for Alevis living in different countries:

Because this television does not belong to individuals, firstly the German Federation of Alevi Unions then other European countries [the members of the Alevi Unions living in European countries] had to watch it. In such a position, it means, say you live in Cologne, then you are able to watch what Alevis in Sweden do. You could watch what Alevis in Denmark do. Before that, Alevis had to meet together once a year or every six months and they would explain the situation in the UK, Sweden, Denmark and so on. But thanks to this system which has started a year ago, those in the UK were able to follow activities in Duisburg.

(Naki, Yol TV)

This is not only the case with Yol TV, which is run by the European Confederation of Alevi Unions. As well as having a studio in Germany, TV10 also serves as a medium for the transnational connectivity of the Alevi community in Turkey and Europe. As emphasised in earlier chapters, both channels have specific programmes which are produced in and about different localities in Turkey and Europe, giving voice to the Alevi communities living in these various local contexts. As most of the channels have been based in Europe and have appealed to Alevis in Turkey as well as Europe, Alevi television has made a significant contribution towards the transnational experience of Alevis. As my interviews with television workers in Germany and Alevi audiences in the UK suggest, Alevi television has reflected and re-constructed the Alevi public sphere as they have culturally bonded Alevis living in different countries and localities, have helped Alevi organisations to expand transnationally and have enabled the Alevi community to gain confidence in being more explicit about their identity. Mustafa emphasised the ability to stay in tune with the community events in the UK even when he was in Turkey:

Reflecting our own essence, sharing our faith and values with public, let them know, coordinating the news between us … There was a disconnection between Europe and Turkey [Alevi communities] and it wasn’t this much when we had Yol TV. They are watching it in Turkey too. For instance, when I was in Turkey during the summer, they used to broadcast our festivals here and other things. I was able to follow it through Yol TV. Also TV10…. I used to watch them both. Unfortunately, now we are prevented.

(Mustafa, male, 67, retired)

As mentioned by Mustafa, Alevi television has been informative about contemporary events and debates within the community by following and screening their events. Loss of such connection re-shapes transversal imaginaries as Alevis have lost the effortless everyday following of geographically dispersed communities through television. Hence the closure of Alevi channels and the challenge of retaining their audience have had significant transnational consequences for the community. This has interrupted the circulation of information in different localities and hindered the involvement of European Alevis in Turkish politics and the interconnectedness of Alevis in Turkey and in Europe. In this regard, it is not the communicative ethnocide of only those Alevis in Turkey but also the transnational Alevi community, which is connected on a day-to-day basis through satellite television.

A keen activist from the Federation, Sakine, shared an anecdote which indicates the broader implications of the closure as television also forms connections with other affinity communities, such as the Ehl-i Hakk,⁶ who are a marginalised ethno-religious community mainly based in Iran:

It was back in 2011 or 2012 … We attended the Çorum memorial [in Çorum] followed by the Sivas [Madımak in Sivas] memorial, which then concludes with a cem ceremony in Hacı Bektaş on the 4th of July … This has been done repeatedly in the last four years. It was the first time that I attended, if I’m not wrong. In Pir Sultan’s village [in Sivas] … We visited there every year and stayed there for a couple of days. While chatting in the village centre … In Topuzlu … There is a local place called Topuzlu where Pir Sultan used to attend cems or maybe hiding from the authorities or seeing people. A place in a woodland which has a cemevi, a soup kitchen and so on … They said, ‘we have visitors from Iran staying in Topuzlu, Ehl-i Hakk from Iran came’. If I remember it right, two buses full of people [Ehl-i Hakk] were there. We went there and introduced ourselves. They said, ‘we know you, we know who you are’. They know all about the festival [Alevi Festival in London] and other things about here. We were really surprised. Then they said ‘Yol TV, Yol TV’ with a little bit of Turkish [that they speak]. This is invaluable. A can [Alevi] from Iran, from your culture, from your belief, knows about what is happening here [in the UK]. How many Alevis live in the UK, what they do, what their achievements are … Or us [know about Alevis in] Canada, Austria, Europe, Turkey …

(Sakine, female, 47, housewife)

Notably, Sakine’s account demonstrates that there are connections beyond Europe stretching to Iran and Canada.⁷ My interviewees in Alevi television also mentioned their attempts to connect to migrant communities in North and South America.

Both Kurdish and Alevi television broadcasting in the Turkish context demonstrates communicative ethnocide does not necessarily have only a national dimension, despite the fact that it is implemented by the nation-state. Instead, in the era of satellite and digital technologies, communicative ethnocide can and does take place in a transnational context where various national and international actors are involved, as has been the case with Med TV and its successor television stations.

Communicative ethnocide does not take place in a vacuum; instead, it should be seen as part of a broader project of ethnocide. Even though it has been implemented within the specific conditions of the period after the attempted coup of 2016, during which the JDP government has aimed to re-establish its authority over different factions of the opposition, the closure of TV10 and Yol TV must be regarded as part of the pre-existing ethnocide policy of the Turkish state, for whom satellite broadcasting is regarded as a further challenge to its broader national policies and its project of constructing the ‘ideal citizen’. At the same time, satellite broadcasting has proved an opportunity for migrant communities such as Alevis to reaffirm existing identities while constructing an imagined transversal one within a transnational public sphere and to pursue their political ambitions. But satellite technology does not guarantee a realm which is free from state interventions, as Kurdish and Alevi television demonstrate, even though Alevi television, through the use of online broadcasting technology, has managed to circumvent these interventions, although with a more limited size of audience.

Despite mobilising Alevi audiences for different Alevi causes and enabling transversal citizenship acts through media, as discussed in Chapter 5, Alevi television channels have not been able to make their closure a public issue. TV10 has regularly organised demonstrations in Istanbul in order to protest at the closure and to demand the release of the television workers who have been held under arrest between 2017 and 2019. However, the attendance at the demonstrations has been limited to dozens at best. On the other hand, Yol TV has not launched a public campaign and politicised the issue for the community. To put it more clearly, Alevi transversal citizenship acts through television have not been used to fight against communicative ethnocide. There might be several underlying reasons for this. First and foremost, the closure resulted in a disruption in the relationship with the viewers. Hence, the disruption has also meant that it has lost its influence on the community to make the case against television closure a visible issue. Secondly, the government intervention has been part of a set of broader measures in controlling and censoring public debates. Therefore, public campaigns in Turkey have been more difficult to organise and support, particularly for communities such as Alevis and Kurds. Thirdly, the closures did not specifically target Alevis but put them in the same box as many oppositional and controversial parties of Turkish society, such as Gülenists. Limited resources have also been a problem in campaigning against closures, especially given the difficulties Alevis face in simply trying to survive. Lastly, Alevis might not have considered media and their right to express themselves as priorities in an uncertain political context.

Nevertheless, Alevi citizenship acts on television against communicative ethnocide have occurred in the form of media activism and resistance against the closures (Emre Cetin 2020b). The attempt by Yol TV to promote IPTV technology amongst the members of the European Alevi community can be regarded as an example of this resistance. The need to promote new types of digital communication technology for Alevis in Turkey, as well as audiences abroad, presents a challenge for Alevi broadcasting and its resistance against communicative ethnocide. While technological advances do not necessarily guarantee the creation of a freer public sphere for communities such as Alevis, they can provide short-term, and possibly even longer-term, opportunities for survival in the face of a communicative ethnocide directed by the state. The Alevi case demonstrates that the opportunities for resistance against communicative ethnocide are very much bounded by the community’s transnational capabilities, including community organisations, the political mobilisation of its members and the community’s infrastructural media investments.

In Chapter 8, I discuss the resistance strategies of Alevi broadcasting in detail and how the new period of online streaming has changed their relationship with the viewers. Back in 2017–18, when I conducted most of my interviews with television workers and the members of the community, the repercussions of the closure had not been felt as strongly as when writing this book in 2022. My follow‑up interviews and observations on social media indicate that the transversal citizenship has been challenged by the geographical re-focusing of the channels and digital divides among Alevi viewers. In the next chapter, I examine how the closure of Alevi television accelerated the shift to digital media, and social media in particular, and how it distorted the transversal imaginary by dividing it across different audience groups and geographies through a compulsory shift to digital communications.