To Some in Turkey, a Kurdish Beer Has the Flavor of Aversion

Roj proudly identifies itself as "Kurdish beer." Brewed in Vienna, its Turkish import application has been pending for 18 months, three times the norm. (Rojbeer.com)

ISTANBUL -- Even before the bloody head of a sheep turned up on the brewery doorstep, the makers of Roj beer had reason to suspect 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in danger, I think," said the company's managing director, N. Keske, so spooked by threats he asked that his full name not be published.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 here -- 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 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 Kurds 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. Last month Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan declared that there was room for ethnic identity within the concept of Turkish citizenship, a bold declaration in a country that historically has enforced Turkishness as the only acceptable identity.

But that doesn't mean Roj will be sold in Turkey.

"I wouldn't advise it," said Filiz Telli, who was sharing a Turkish brew with a co-worker in an Istanbul bar. "And I think a lot of people think like me."

Telli testified to the view that the "Kurdish problem" had moved from the military sphere to the social. The fighting that leveled thousands of villages in Turkey's overwhelmingly Kurdish southeast set off a migration to the cities of the west and north, where Kurds are often viewed as outsiders.