Kurd beer brews storm in Turkey
By Karl Vick
THE WASHINGTON POST
Saturday, December 31, 2005
ISTANBUL, Turkey — Even before the bloody head of a sheep turned up on the brewery doorstep, the makers of Roj beer had reason to suspect that their light, malty lager might not be to everyone's taste.
There was the hate mail, a virulent torrent of insults invoking mothers, sisters, dogs, blood and "dreamers like you."
There was the knock on the door of the brewer's Istanbul representative, who was taken from his house one evening in late September by Turkish security officers and interrogated till dawn.
And there was the remarkably long time Turkish officials were taking to consider the request to allow Roj into their country.
Brewed in Vienna, Roj is proudly identified on its cans as "Kurdish beer." And Turkey, which fought a bloody civil war against Kurdish separatists, is a country where such an expression of ethnic identity until recently might have resulted in arrest and apparently still carries a certain risk.
"My life is in danger, I think," said the company's managing director, N. Keske, so spooked by threats that he asked that his full name not be published. "This is your last warning," read the note under the sheep's head.
Bringing Roj to Turkey makes sound business sense. No one knows for certain how many Kurds live in Turkey — the question is too sensitive to include on a census — but with estimates running from 10 million to 15 million, it's easily more than in any other country.
Yet what the import effort has tapped so far is the reservoir of mistrust accumulated over decades of conflict between the Turkish state and its largest minority.
The mistrust erupted into civil war in the 1990s, when Kurdish guerrillas battled to separate the country's eastern reaches from a central government that denied the right to give babies Kurdish names, much less "a sip of freedom," the slogan on a bottle of Roj.
Today, the fighting is sharply reduced, and Turkey's elected government has taken official steps to accommodate a Kurdish identity, largely because of pressure from the European Union, which Turkey is attempting to join.
But that doesn't mean Roj will be sold in Turkey.
"I wouldn't advise it," Filiz Telli said as he shared a Turkish brew with a co-worker in an Istanbul bar. "And I think a lot of people think like me."
For the brewers of Roj, the problem is compounded by the name. In Kurdish, Roj means sun, but the name is also used by a Kurdish-language satellite TV station that broadcasts from Denmark.
Roj TV is accused of supporting the separatist Kurdistan Workers' Party, or PKK, labeled a terrorist organization by the U.S. State Department. In November, Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan refused to attend a news conference in Copenhagen because a Roj TV reporter was present.
Keske insisted that his beer, a light lager that finishes clean, has no political ingredients.
"Others are trying to politicize us," he said. "We just want to sell beer." And because anyone might buy it, he added, "it could be a unifying factor."
Yet Roj also reflects Kurdish aspirations. The "sip of freedom" slogan suggests the Kurdish autonomy in Iraq, which many Kurds see as a first step to gaining the nationhood they were briefly promised after World War I. A drawing on the brewer's Web site, rojbeer.com, shows a man chained by his wrists to a wall in one frame and in the next enjoying a cold Roj, the chains broken.
"Well, actually, that was a present from a friend of ours who's a Serbian," said Keske, whose wife is a Serb. "He knew the sufferings of the Kurdish people."
Turkish trade officials declined to explain why Roj's import application is pending after 18 months, three times the normal processing time. But a November EU report singled out "the alcohol beverages sector" for limiting access to the Turkish market. One company, Efes, has 70 percent of Turkey's beer sales.
"It's not a unique problem with this beer," EU spokeswoman Krisztina Nagy said of Roj.
There are, however, some people in Turkey quite open to a Kurdish beer.
"Especially if it's a little bit cheaper," said Cesur Polat, 20, sipping a tall Efes on a curb in Istanbul's Aksaray neighborhood. He gestured to the empties under a parked car and laughed. "If there was Kurdish beer, we would drink even more!"
http://statesman.com/news/content/news/stories/world/01/1TurkeyBeer.html
I suggets those who live in EU , buy some Kurdish beer, to make turks boil..
the good thing about this Roj Beer is their site is so well designed and it has all kurdish dailects...
I hardly have seen a kurdish site in all dailects...without COMNG SOON Pages.
CheersRoj Beer http://rojbeer.com
