Internet sparks culture clash among Turks

KIRIKKALE, Turkey — Engin Erdogan was just finishing a computer game when two plainclothes police officers strode into his neighborhood Internet cafe for an ID check.

At 14, Engin was a year short of Turkey’s minimum age for using Internet cafes. “We’re taking you to police headquarters,” said one of the officers, not unkindly.

Along with more than 100 other fidgeting underage offenders rounded up in an afternoon police sweep of Internet cafes and video arcades here last month, Engin sat through an hour-long lecture on the evils of idling away his time surfing the Net rather than going to class and doing homework.

“It’s not that we’re against the Internet,” said Behic Celik, chief administrator of this city in central Turkey. “The problem is that we are helpless in controlling pornography and protecting general ethics. We have to take measures to preserve our culture.”

The Kirikkale police department’s assault on one of Turkey’s fastest-growing youth pastimes reflects a seismic cultural struggle in a Muslim nation sandwiched between the technology-driven, fad-intoxicated West and some of the most closed, conservative Islamic societies in the world.

Prodded by the ideals of its founder, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, modern Turkey has embraced American and European attitudes and values for the better part of eight decades, more enthusiastically than perhaps any other Muslim country. Now it is grappling with the backlash of that openness. Social, governmental and religious institutions are trying to salvage a Turkish culture that they fear is disappearing under the weight of urban immigration and a deluge of new technologies and influences expanding faster than the bureaucracy can implement — or amend — laws to address them.

“Some say our culture is being eroded,” said Yilmaz Esmer, who teaches courses on social change at Istanbul's Bosporus University. “I call it modernization. Turkey is going through that painful process.”

In the past month, that tension has been blamed for the crackdown on Kirikkale’s youngest Internet users, the closing of an Istanbul restaurant because the waitresses lacked medical certificates showing they were free of venereal disease, and the banning of Pokemon cartoons from television because they allegedly inspired two youngsters to leap off balconies in the belief they could fly like the cartoon characters.

In a country in which television is strictly controlled by state censors, the Internet has become a particularly threatening medium for some officials, prompting the Interior Ministry to issue regulations governing the 4,500 Internet cafes. Government officials estimate the number of Internet users leapt from 200,000 in 1997 to 2 million in 1999.

Kirikkale, an industrial town of about 250,000 people in Turkey’s central heartland, has 22 Internet cafes, most of them opened within the past few months.

Young people have flocked to the cafes, where a user can spend two hours online for about $1.80 — less than half the price of a movie. Teen-age boys say the hours they once passed on basketball courts are now spent at the keyboard.

Other traditional youth hangouts have also been hit hard.

“All at once the pool halls lost popularity when the Internet cafes opened,” said Dursun Andic, 52, who ran a pool hall for five years. Andic opened his own Internet cafe adjacent to his pool hall.

Police Director Hayrettin Gok said he began getting complaints from teachers and parents that youngsters were playing hooky to go to the Internet cafes to play shoot 'em-up games, surf for cyber dates and look at pornographic Web sites.

“We’re trying to protect children from games and pornographic materials,” said Gok.