Music is key to Grey Wolves' activities

Searchlight - February 2007

Music plays a key role at political-cultural events organized by the fascist Grey Wolves because they see it as a means to galvanise and strengthen the ultra-nationalist Turkish movement. The Grey Wolves claim that their music is just for enjoyment, but it is clear beyond doubt that it carries a poisonous political message and, like hate music the world over, is used to recruit supporters.

Last June, the Dutch Turkish rap-group Arka Sokak performed at a festival officially sponsored by the Utrecht City Council. Arka Sokak's repertoire includes a song, titled Turks, Kurds, that sets out exactly where the band stands on the position of the Kurdish minority in Turkey: "Do you know how it ends with a ravishing dog, they will be taken one by one and will get a bullet in their head. Our soldiers will exterminate you anyway, the Turkish people hate you to the marrow."

Arka Sokak's views are no great surprise as they move around in Turkish nationalist extremist circles. They also performed in Oldenzaal last year at a cultural event organised by two member organizations of the Netherlands Turkish Federation, the Dutch Grey Wolves' front organisation.

The Grey Wolves are using music as part of a process of familiarising young Turks with what they consider to be Turkish culture and to proclaim the alleged superiority of this culture.

Crowd at the Memon Centre-gathering

The musicians who project this chauvinistic outlook scarcely hide the ideas that motivate them. During performances, for instance, they make the Grey Wolves symbol (see picture above) and wear the insignia of a howling wolf and three crescents, the same symbols that appear on their cassettes and CDs.

On some cassettes and CDs, musicians promote the ideal of 'Turanism' or Pan-Turkism which refers to "the unification of all people of Turkish descent that live in an area reaching from the Eastern Mediterranean to Sinkiang in China and from the Volga to Southern Anatolia".

Ozan Arif has even produced a cassette with the title "Homesick for Turan" with a map on it depicting Turkey, the former Soviet Republics and Armenia as one entity.

Every central aspect of the Grey Wolves' ideology, including nationalism, pan-Turkism, xenophobia, racism, opposition to democracy and the desire for a powerful centralised state, comes through in the music, together with all the objects of the Grey Wolves' paranoia, the most popular of which are communists, Kurdish "separatists", Armenians, Russians, America, the European Union and the Iraqi Kurds. In effect, the lyrics of many of the most popular songs amount to a call for war.

This kind of rubbish is performed at gatherings of the Grey Wolves and their various front organisations all over the Netherlands, and also Germany. However, politicians, mayors and local councillors appear to lack the understanding that these concerts and events are not just taking place for fun and dance, but play a vital part in the Grey Wolves' recruitment and brainwashing of mainly young people.

It is an irony that not a single event organised by this notoriously violent fascist outfit has been banned in The Netherlands while official bans continue to make it difficult for the more usual nazi suspects to perform openly.

By Ernst Haffmans, in Utrecht, for the Research Group on the Turkish extreme right