WASHINGTON DC – When Ismail Sheikho recalls his days at the Silopi refugee camp in Turkey--for Iraqi Kurds escaping Saddam Hussein’s 1992 crackdown--he remembers waiting all day just to hear the 15-minute Kurdish news broadcast of the Voice of America (VOA).
“I bought a radio back then just to listen to the news,” says Sheikho, remembering that at the time the VOA was just about the only international broadcaster offering a Kurdish service.
“The program was very short, about 15 minutes, mostly news about Kurds and the world,” says Sheikho, who is now part of Toronto’s sizeable Kurdish immigrant community.
He is happy that – unlike the early days when he would have to wait all day just to hear the radio crackle to life in his own language just for 15 minutes – now the radio’s Kurdish broadcasts have been extended to three hours daily, and are available online.
No one knows about those early days of the service better than veteran radio broadcaster and poet Khalaf Zebari. He and renowned Kurdish singer Homer Dizeyee were the two anchors of the show, together comprising a sizeable portion of the Kurdish service’s five-person staff.
“In April 1992, I received a telephone call from VOA officials that the agency was going to start broadcasting in Kurdish. I accepted their offer, and relocated my family from Nashville, Tennessee to Washington, DC,” says Zebari, who was a broadcaster at the Voice of Kurdistan during the 1974-75 Kurdish uprisings. His voice was to become identified with the VOA’s Kurdish Service.
Another early employee, Fakhria Dosky, who is the current service chief, recalls being contacted with a job offer by Salih Najim Hasan, a Lebanese Kurdish journalist and the Kurdish service’s first chief.
“I was excited to be a part of the first Kurdish radio of a major country. But, at the same time, I was nervous because it was a new experience for me,” remembers Dosky, who oversees the Kurdish service’s eight salaried staff, six of them from Iraq and two from Iran. In addition, the service contracts a team of freelancers in Turkey, Syria, Iraq, Iran and elsewhere.
Once a leading news and information source for Kurds, VOA Kurdish now faces an onslaught of challengers, which are stealing listeners from the American broadcaster – especially in a place like Iraq’s autonomous Kurdistan Region, which has always been the primary target of VOA.
These days, more than 100 radio and television stations operate from the Kurdish enclave in northern Iraq, some operating round-the-clock with news and other programs, offering a challenge to the VOA’s short daily broadcasts.
But listeners like Mehmet Sandri, an Istanbul-based Kurdish journalist, still prefers the VOA. “In all four parts of Kurdistan the media have a local perspective, but VOA has a broader view, and it covers all parts of the homeland.”
But the VOA does not only have to worry about local challengers. International contenders for the world’s estimated 30 million Kurdish listeners include SBS radio of Australia, Sweden’s SR International Radio, and Iran’s state-run radio, which broadcasts in both Sorani and Kurmanji.
Voice of Russia and TRT 6 of Turkey even offer programs in Zazaki.
Long-time listener Ahmed Binavi sees a deeper dimension to the VOA’s Kurdish broadcast, believing “it has shown Turkey and other countries that Kurds exist because America, the strongest country in the world, was broadcasting in our language.”
But there is also plentiful criticism of the VOA’s Kurdish programs, especially among Kurds in Turkey and Syria, who feel that the broadcaster concentrates mostly on Iraqi Kurdistan, virtually ignoring independent views on Kurdish-related news in Turkey and the civil war in Syria.
Many Kurdish listeners in Turkey complain that the station never gave them much more than the official version of the news in Turkey – a close ally of the US. Syrian Kurds say that the VOA is not devoting the resources it should to covering the Syrian civil war.
“We did not see many programs about the social and cultural lives of Kurds in Turkey; their struggle and political movement were all passed over,” claimed Sheikmus Sefer, president of the Kurd-Pen and Kurdish Writers Association in Diyarbakir.
“We stopped listening to the VOA because the northern (Turkey's) Kurds could not see their lives reported in the VOA Kurdish service,” said Halil Duzgun, a shop owner and former listener in Diyarbakir. “We started to listen to Turkish broadcasts of BBC because they were more objective.”
Many Syrian Kurds voice a similar complaint.
“The situation in Syria is currently the most important issue in the Middle East. If VOA had stringers in Rojava (Syrian Kurdistan), and provided extensive coverage on Syria, there is no doubt the listeners would be more,” said Meksim Isa, a Syrian Kurdish journalist and a correspondent of Orient TV in Berlin.
“VOA Kurdish should focus on all parts of Kurdistan, not on a single part,” said Sefer, president of Kurd-Pen in Diybarbakir.
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