Last September, under pressure from the Turkish government, Netflix agreed to release one of its new series only in Greece and Cyprus. Famagusta depicts the 1974 Turkish invasion of Cyprus. The protagonists of the series—a co-production between Greek and Cypriot companies—are Greek Cypriots, and the show is broadly sympathetic to them. Turkish officials insisted that Famagusta was nothing more than pro-Greek propaganda and began a campaign to prevent global audiences from watching it.
Ebubekir Sahin, the head of Turkey’s Radio and Television Supreme Council, the government agency tasked with media censorship, met personally with representatives from Netflix. Following the meeting, Sahin posted on X, “As the organization that regulates and supervises digital broadcasting services in our country, [we have] held the necessary meetings with the broadcaster Netflix and an understanding has been reached that the production will not be broadcast [outside Greece].” Sahin did not acknowledge Cyprus’ existence at all.
Last September, under pressure from the Turkish government, Netflix agreed to release one of its new series only in Greece and Cyprus. Famagusta depicts the 1974 Turkish invasion of Cyprus. The protagonists of the series—a co-production between Greek and Cypriot companies—are Greek Cypriots, and the show is broadly sympathetic to them. Turkish officials insisted that Famagusta was nothing more than pro-Greek propaganda and began a campaign to prevent global audiences from watching it.
Ebubekir Sahin, the head of Turkey’s Radio and Television Supreme Council, the government agency tasked with media censorship, met personally with representatives from Netflix. Following the meeting, Sahin posted on X, “As the organization that regulates and supervises digital broadcasting services in our country, [we have] held the necessary meetings with the broadcaster Netflix and an understanding has been reached that the production will not be broadcast [outside Greece].” Sahin did not acknowledge Cyprus’ existence at all.
Netflix’s decision was met with little furor outside of the Greek press, and the company did not respond to Foreign Policy’s request for comment about the move. It was part of a long-standing pattern of successful Turkish censorship of content that depicts either Turkish or Ottoman history in a negative light. Turkey not only blocks the release of such content domestically—but has maneuvered to do so abroad, as well.
How the past is depicted has always been a fraught question for Turkish national identity and foreign policy. That’s because Turkey’s relationship to history is a paradox. Although Turkey is a new country—just barely a century old—its birth in the chaotic and violent decades of the early 20th century means that Turkish identity is locked in a continuous struggle with history’s shadow.
The modern Turkish state emerged from the Ottoman Empire. This vast and early modern Islamic empire spanned across large parts of Asia, Africa, and Europe, and it ruled over a multiethnic, religiously pluralistic population. The Ottomans entered World War I on the brink of collapse. As the war went on, tensions within the diverse empire began to boil over.
From around 1913 onward, the Committee of Union and Progress—the revolutionary group-turned-political party that ruled the Ottoman Empire from then until its collapse—undertook systematic campaigns of ethnic cleansing against perceived internal threats. The empire’s Christian populations—including Armenians, Greeks, and Assyrians—were the main targets, which was the result of growing Turkish nationalism.
Although these genocides predate the official establishment of the Turkish state, they form the core of the inconvenient history that the Turkish government attempts to suppress. After the war ended, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, young revolutionary-cum-Ottoman officer who would go on to found Turkey, rallied Turks to the promise of an independent, secular, modern—and homogenous—state. To do this, he believed it was essential to erase the Ottoman Empire’s legacy of pluralism.
Ataturk’s denial of the Armenian, Greek, and Assyrian genocides was not just about avoiding the bad deeds of the Ottoman Empire, but also about refusing the idea that Armenians, Greeks, and Assyrians ever had anything to do with what is now Turkey. In Ankara’s view, Turkey has always been unambiguously—and unquestionably—Turkish. Any other view is seen as implictly challenging the legitmacy of the Turkish state.
Few modern states have been as relentless as Turkey in their efforts to censor discussions of the past. Even fewer have been as successful.
Turkey was only 11 years old when it launched its first campaign against the movie studio MGM. In 1933, the Austrian Bohemian writer Franz Werfel published The Forty Days of Musa Dagh—one of the first major novels about the Armenian genocide. MGM acquired the film rights to the book even before the English translation was released, intending to cast Clark Gable as its protagonist.
However, when reports of the project began to emerge from the Hollywood press, Turkey’s ambassador to the United States was given orders by Ankara to attempt to stop filming. The diplomat appealed to the State Department and threatened a smear campaign against the film and studio.
Initially, MGM resisted Turkey’s efforts. But pressure intensified—including via an editorial in Haber, a Turkish daily, that was laden with antisemitic attacks on the studio’s heads and MGM co-founder Louis B. Mayer, which read in part: “The Forty Days of Musa Dagh presents the Turco-Armenian struggle during the World War in a light hostile to the Turks. Its author is a Jew. This means that MGM, which is also a Jewish firm, utilizes for one of its films a work by one of its companions.”
Ultimately, the pressure proved too much and the film was killed. An on-screen adaptation of the novel would not be made until 1982, as an independent film produced by Armenian American real-estate developer John Kurkjian.
Attempts to control the global narrative around Turkish identity have continued under President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who has held office since 2014. Turkey complains about media productions through conventional diplomatic channels, often using its leverage as a NATO member and interlocutor between the West and powers including Russia and Iran. For instance, Turkey has threatened to cancel arms deals or limit refugee cooperation with nations that have moved to recognize the Armenian genocide.
Turkish censorship efforts have increasingly moved from government-to-government interactions to global media corporations, as in the case of Famagusta. Here, Turkey’s economic strength is a powerful bargaining chip. The Turkish diaspora is a vocal asset, too. (It is worth noting that disapora leverage has worked both ways; in 2023, Armenian activists were successful in canceling a planned Disney+ series on the life of Ataturk.)
Eric Esrailian, producer of the 2016 film The Promise—the first mainstream movie about the Armenian genocide—told the Hollywood Reporter that the Turkish government actively attempted to prevent the film’s distribution around the world after previous interference had failed to halt its production. “It became clear that the government of Turkey was going to have an influence on this movie,” Esrailian said. “I would say at the highest levels from different studios, we were just basically told that no matter how good the film would be, it was never going be released by certain companies.”
In 2021, the Arab American news site Al Monitor accused the Turkish government of blocking the award-winning documentary The End Will Be Spectacular from showing at the Slemani International Film Festival in Iraq’s Kurdistan region. The film is about Kurdish militants who, in 2016, battled the Turkish army for control of Sur, the heart of Diyarbakir—a province in southern Turkey that has long been the focal point of conflict between Turkey and Kurdish separatist groups. Al Monitor alleged that Turkish officials applied pressure to film festival organizers to remove the film, although the organizers continue to deny that this was the case—instead citing a technical violation.
Most recently, Greek media reported that the Turkish Radio and Television Corporation will review Greece’s entry into this year’s Eurovision song contest, alleging that the song alludes to the massacre of ethnic Greeks by Ottoman Turks and Turkish nationalists over a century ago. If Turkish authorities judge the references to exist, they may file a complaint with Eurovision’s sponsor, the European Broadcasting Union. A successful complaint could lead to the song’s removal from the contest. Eurovision prides itself on being “apolitical”; just last year, Israel was forced to replace its entry after complaints about its first selection, “October Rain,” which was about the Oct. 7, 2023, attack.
Turkish dissidents have found that the long arm of Turkish censorship can reach them abroad, too. This month, X blocked access to at least 42 accounts belonging to Turkish journalists, activists, and media organizations abroad, complying with a demand from the Turkish government. The social media site did the same to nearly 100 similar accounts last October.
Turkey has been a frontrunner in extraterritorial censorship. Whether—and to what extent—governments and corporations continue to cave to further Turkish demands for media control sets the standard those entities will follow when other countries make similar demands. As just one example, U.S. President Donald Trump has maneuvered to exert more control over the arts and tech sector, demanding that U.S. cultural institutions herald in a “golden age” that is “not going to be woke.”
For the world to continue valuing free expression and the honest telling of history, it is imperative that media conglomerates reject Turkey’s demands for silence, no matter the pressure Ankara may exert. Famagusta may have been nothing but one of Netflix’s middling limited series, but it deserved to be seen. And we should all be dismayed that it was not. Because if Famagusta can be deleted, so can any part of history.
The post The Long Arm of Turkey’s Global Media Censorship appeared first on Foreign Policy.
