About Turkmeneli TV

Turkmeneli TV

Turkmeneli TV is a television station based in Kirkuk, Iraq, which broadcasts for the interests of the Iraqi Turkmen community. Broadcasting in Turkish and Arabic, it is the television voice of Turkmeneli, the land of the Iraqi Turkmen, the Turkic-speaking community concentrated in Kirkuk, Tal Afar, Mosul, Erbil, Diyala and Salah al-Din. The channel produces news, documentaries on Iraqi Turkmen history, language and politics, and music programmes, and it operates as a 24-hour channel with studios in Kirkuk and Baghdad and, as of 2012, a studio in Ankara, Turkey. In a country whose satellite television is dominated by Arabic and Kurdish services, Turkmeneli TV is the principal television platform created specifically for Iraq's Turkmen population.

Launch in Kirkuk in 2004

Turkmeneli TV started its test broadcast in April 2004 and its actual broadcast in July 2004, from Kirkuk. The timing placed it among the first generation of Iraqi satellite channels created after the fall of Saddam Hussein's regime in 2003, when the collapse of the state broadcasting monopoly allowed Iraq's communities to build media of their own. For the Turkmen, the need was longstanding. The first Turkmen radio broadcasts in Iraq dated back to a half-hour programme on Baghdad Radio in 1959, and a Turkmen section had existed on the state-run Kirkuk Television, but the community had never had a satellite television channel of its own. Turkmeneli TV filled that gap, and it also operates Turkmen FM radio broadcasting in Turkish with the aim of preserving Turkmen national culture.

Programmes and editorial focus

The channel produces a variety of programmes, such as news, documentaries on Iraqi Turkmen history, particularly Ottoman history, language, politics and music. A study of the Turkish presence in Iraq records that, operating as a 24-hour broadcasting channel, Turkmeneli TV produces nearly twenty programmes in Turkish and Arabic covering health, music, religion and politics, as well as four hours of daily news. One named music programme is Turkmen Havasi, directed by Aslan Sehit. The channel works with a nationalist vision and the slogan the bright face of Iraq, producing programmes for a Turkmen audience about Iraq, with reporters in every province of Iraq.

That editorial mix reflects the channel's purpose. News and political programmes assert the Turkmen claim to a place in Iraqi public life, especially in disputed Kirkuk; documentaries on Ottoman history and Turkmen language sustain a historical identity that connects Iraqi Turkmen to the wider Turkic world; and music and cultural programmes serve the everyday audience in Turkish, the language the community's institutions have promoted in education since community leaders decided in 2005 that Turkish would replace traditional Turkmeni in Iraqi schools.

Studios, transmitters and reach

From its Kirkuk base the channel expanded steadily. By 2010 Turkmeneli TV had opened another studio in Baghdad, and as of 2012 it had studios in Kirkuk and Baghdad in Iraq and in the Cankaya neighbourhood of Ankara in Turkey. The Ankara presence underlines the channel's orientation towards Turkey as the Turkmen community's cultural and political reference point. The same study records transmitters in Kirkuk, Baghdad, Tal Afar, Mosul, Diyala and Saladin, the governorates where Iraqi Turkmen actually live, and a local affiliate operating in Tal Afar. The channel is available on two satellites, Turksat and Nilesat, broadcasting in the Turkish and Arabic languages across the Middle East, and it broadcasts in high definition.

Partnerships with Turkish broadcasters

Turkmeneli TV's programme supply is reinforced by formal agreements in Turkey. In 2008 the channel signed a protocol with the Turkish Radio and Television Corporation, TRT, allowing the station to broadcast sequences and music programmes from TRT. It has also signed agreements with other Turkish channels, including TGRT and ATV, and with the Northern Cyprus broadcaster Bayrak Radio Television Corporation, BRT, to share documentaries. These agreements give a small community channel access to the production libraries of much larger Turkish broadcasters, filling its 24-hour schedule with drama sequences, music and documentaries that it could not produce alone in Kirkuk, while keeping its own news and cultural production focused on Iraqi Turkmen life.

The channel and the Iraqi Turkmen Front

Turkmeneli TV is described in the batch record and community sources as the television channel of the Iraqi Turkmen Front, the main political organisation of the Iraqi Turkmen, and its institutions have shared the Front's fortunes. In April 2005, during a period of acute tension in the north, Kurdish security forces broke into Turkmen institutions in Erbil and occupied buildings including the Turkmeneli Television station, the Turkmeneli radio station and the Turkmeneli printing house, and the publication of the Turkmeneli newspaper was stopped. A presentation to the European Parliament's Subcommittee on Human Rights recorded the same events: in April 2005 Kurdish security agents took over twenty-four buildings, including Turkmeneli Television and Radio. The seizures, in Erbil rather than at the Kirkuk headquarters, show how exposed Turkmen media institutions were in the contested north in the years after 2003.

Language: Turkish, Arabic and Turkmen identity

Language is central to the channel's mission. Turkmeneli TV broadcasts in Turkish and Arabic. The choice of standard Turkish, written in the Latin script, mirrors the community's educational policy and connects Iraqi Turkmen viewers to television culture in Turkey, while Arabic ensures the channel can address the wider Iraqi public and Turkmen viewers more comfortable in Arabic. Scholars of the community note that satellite television exposure may have led to the standardisation of Turkmeni towards Turkish, and that Turkish has become the preferable language for adolescents associating with Turkish culture; Turkmeneli TV, broadcasting Turkish into Turkmen homes every day alongside its own Turkmen-focused production, is one of the instruments of that shift, even as its stated purpose is the preservation of Turkmen national culture.

The community it serves

The Iraqi Turkmen are one of Iraq's principal communities, concentrated in a band of territory from Tal Afar and Mosul through Kirkuk to Diyala, and Kirkuk, the channel's home city, is the centre of Turkmen political claims and the most contested city in Iraq, claimed also by Kurds and Arabs. A channel based in Kirkuk, reporting in Turkish, documenting Turkmen history and carrying Turkmen political arguments, is therefore more than an entertainment service: it is a statement of presence in a disputed city. Its reporters in every province, its Tal Afar affiliate and its transmitters across the Turkmen areas are built to make that presence continuous.

Turkmeneli TV in Iraq's media landscape

Within Iraq's post-2003 television landscape, Turkmeneli TV occupies a specific niche. The state network Al Iraqiya broadcasts some services in Turkmen, and Kurdish and Arabic party channels dominate the satellite neighbourhoods, but Turkmeneli TV is the channel created by and for the Turkmen community itself, listed among Iraq's television stations in international references and in lists of Turkish-language channels. Its director in its early period is recorded as Hanefi Uzuncam. Its combination of community news, Ottoman and Turkmen history, Turkish-language music and health, religion and politics programmes has no equivalent on Iraqi television.

The channel also stands in a longer local broadcasting tradition. Media Landscapes' history of Iraqi media records that Kirkuk TV was inaugurated in 1967 with the first transmissions in Kurdish, in addition to Arabic, Turkmen and Syriac, making Kirkuk one of the first places in Iraq where Turkmen was heard on television at all. That state-run multilingual tradition, however, remained under government control and served government purposes. Turkmeneli TV differs from it in the essential respect: it is the community's own institution, accountable to Turkmen political and cultural life rather than to Baghdad, and free to document Turkmen history and argue Turkmen positions in a way a state channel never was.

Turkmeneli TV today

More than two decades after its July 2004 launch, Turkmeneli TV remains the flagship broadcaster of Iraqi Turkmen media, transmitting from Kirkuk in Turkish and Arabic by satellite and terrestrial transmitters, supported by its Baghdad and Ankara studios and its programme agreements with TRT and other Turkish broadcasters. For Turkmen viewers in Kirkuk, Tal Afar, Mosul and the diaspora, it continues to do what it was founded to do in the first year of the new Iraq: give a community that had known only a half-hour radio slot in 1959 a full television channel of its own.