Turkey: Kurdish beer makers have received threats from Turkish nationalists

The Kurdish brewers of a beer brewed and bottled in Vienna, Austria announced on December 28 they have received threats from Turkish nationalists. "I'm sure that extremists, probably Turkish" made the threats, the executive director of the Roj Brewery Company, N. Keske, told Adnkronos International (AKI).

Roj (Sun) called beer is billed as the first Kurdish beer and bears the slogan "a sip of freedom" on the bottle. It is sold in Austria, Italy, Switzerland and in recent months also in the Kurdish regions of northern Iraq. But Keske says he and other company officials, most of whom are Kurdish immigrants, are increasingly concerned with the acts of intimidation aimed against them.

The company receives hate mail and crank telephone calls "almost daily" while recently a severed sheep's head was left in front of the company's headqurters. Attached was a note which read: "This is the last warining."

In September a Roj official was picked up by police in Istanbul and held for several hours for questioning. Still, the company is anxiously waiting for Turkish authorities to respond to a request for the beer to be sold in Turkey, potentially a major market - some 20 percent of the country's population of 67 million is believed to be Kurdish.

No exact figures on the number of Kurds in Turkey exist because the question of ethnicity and Kuridish minority rights has long been taboo. For decades Turkish authorities waged a bloody conflict with the main Turkish separatist movement the PKK.

Depsite the fact that Roj shares its name with a pro-PKK Kurdish television channel based in the Netherlands, Keske denies "any political motive" behind the name choice. "We sell a Kurdish product, a product 'for immigrants' so to speak. It is as if you were to sell a brand of Italian spaghetti abroad," he says.

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