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Kurd: The Forbidden Word in Turkey
17.12.2007
By Manal Lotfi
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December
17, 2007
Diyarbakir, Kurdish Southeastern region of
Turkey, -- Many of the Turks dislike the city
of Diyarbakir; the ‘political capital’ of the Kurds
worldwide. Located southwest of Turkey, it is
considered the second-largest city in the Anatolia
region after Gaziantep.
When the name Diyarbakir is mentioned in Ankara,
Istanbul or Izmir, comments made by the Turkish
people include “city of thieves”, “city of violence
and death”, “city of poverty… there’s nothing there”
and “city of dust and terrorists”.
A carpet vendor in Istanbul’s bazaar, in response to
a question by a customer whether the carpets made in
Diyarbakir were cheaper, said “Who would go to
Diyarbakir to buy carpets? Diyarbakir has nothing
but thieves.”
But the truth is that Diyarbakir is not as many have
described it; it is a beautiful city that suffers
from poverty and neglect.
However, the residents of Diyarbakir describe this
poverty and neglect as intentional on Ankara’s
behalf and that it aims to break the moral spirit of
the Kurds and preoccupy them with the obstacles of
earning a living, rather than politics.
However if this is the intention then it has most
certainly failed since the Kurds in Diyarbakir only
discuss politics and the Kurdish issues and those
relating to the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), their
problems with the authority in Ankara and what must
be done about it. The residents of Diyarbakir are
significantly more politically inclined; it may
prove to be difficult to discuss political
activities with Turkish students whereas the Kurdish
students at Diyarbakir are extremely politically
active.
Due to the recent security and political
developments and the social problems in Diyarbakir,
including unemployment, it is quite normal to
witness dozens of Kurds sitting in cafes all over
the city playing dominoes or chess. And when they
tire of playing they discuss politics, then they
resume their game. No signs of rest or happiness
appear on their faces; rather, the signs of fatigue
and exhaustion are visible.
“Life in Diyarbakir is hectic. All the Kurdish youth
who obtain a good education and find work in
Istanbul or Izmir or Ankara leave the city and do
not return except during Kurdish holidays, such as
Nowruz [New Year celebrated on 21 March]. In cities
like these,www.ekurd.net
they forget about the
problems related to identity and become preoccupied
with making a living. Some of them do not even admit
that they are Kurdish Turks, except when their
Turkish accent gives them away,” according to Omar,
a 23-year-old Kurd.
Despite the fact that the Kurds in Diyarbakir try to
lead a normal life to the best of their abilities;
the heart of the city is seething with political,
economic and cultural conflict and concern for the
Kurdish identity in Turkey. Abdul Raziq Sagakin who
works in the Sur municipality [one of Diyarbakir’s
metropolitan municipalities] told Asharq Awsat,
“Turkey is gradually retreating with regards to the
few cultural reforms that it granted the Kurds with
its aim to join the European Union (EU). Today, all
that remains is a few hours of broadcast in Kurdish
on Turkish television. The Kurds do not believe that
this is sufficient and it does not represent
recognition of the Kurdish identity. These are only
temporary solutions.”
Diyarbakir is part of Turkish Kurdistan which
constitutes approximately one-third of Turkey. It is
also considered part of the mountainous region of
Kurdistan, which is home to the majority of Kurds
worldwide. The mountains of Kurdistan range between
northern Iraq, northwest Iran, northeast Syria and
southeast Turkey; however, Iraqi Kurdistan also
ranges between southwest Armenia, Lebanon and
Azerbaijan.
The recent clashes between the PKK guerrillas and
the Turkish forces is not a new development; there
is a general sentiment among the Kurds that there
has been an international alliance against them as a
“people” since World War I when the major powers
agreed to divide the Kurdistan region and the Kurds
between Iraq, Iran, Syria and Turkey after the
Treaty of Lausanne in 1922.
Conflicts between the Turks and Kurds did not emerge
until during Mustafa Kemal Ataturk’s regime after he
made the Turkish language and culture the only
official ones and closed down Kurdish schools and
banned the use of the language in government
institutions, official bureaus and schools, and even
in books, magazines and newspapers. He also banned
the formation of political parties.
Since the Turkish republic was in its early stages,
and thus was relatively still gaining strength, the
Kurds, along with other minorities, including Arabs,
Circassians and Armenians staged a rebellion [Sheikh
Said rebellion] under Sheikh Said Piran (1865-1925)
in an attempt to gain their freedom and cultural
rights, however it was quickly quelled and Piran and
his aides were executed on 30 May 1925.
Following this rebellion, the Turkish authorities
tightened its control over the Kurds and according
to Western sources throughout the past nine decades
over one million Kurds have been killed. Today, the
number of Kurds in Turkey is unknown and there are
no accurate figures available; however, estimates
indicate that they form between 30-40 percent of the
Turkish population that numbers approximately 75
million. According to this estimate, the Kurds would
number approximately 20 million inhabitants.
Nowadays the word “Kurd” is still forbidden in
Turkey; an example is the broadcast of Kurdish news
on the official Turkish television channel in which
the phrase “local residents” is used rather than the
“Kurds of Diyarbakir”.www.ekurd.net
According to Jalal Akin
of the Kurdish Cultural Center the word Kurdish is
not allowed to be used to the extent that the center
in Diyarbakir is known as the “Cultural Centre” and
the Kurdish Arts Centre in Diyarbakir is known as
the “Arts Centre” and the same applies to the “Music
Centre”.
Akin told Asharq Al-Awsat that the Kurdish Cultural
Centre was established in 2002 with the intention of
educating the new Kurdish generation in Kurdish
culture and art. “Today Kurdish youth just want
quick fame. The doorway to that is through singing
in Turkish, not Kurdish. What we are trying to do is
to teach Kurdish youth about traditional Kurdish art
and heritage and to hold on to that rather than
follow the trend of singing in the Turkish language.
The truth is that all the prominent singers in
Turkey today are Kurds who sing in the Turkish
language.”
He added, “No one supports the center financially,
all the teachers work voluntarily and do not receive
any pay. We need help from Kurds who are capable of
supporting us. Even the smallest cultural centre is
in need of financial support. We wanted to set up a
studio to record Kurdish songs, but that too
requires money.”
Akin pointed out that there was a small studio in
the city where Kurdish songs are recorded and
illegally distributed but that they cannot be
distributed through the official Turkish
distribution companies. During our exchange, a young
Kurdish man walked in with a lute and began to play
a sad song, singing the words, “I am my mother’s
only child,” to which Akin said, “Kurdish songs
contain a lot of grief.”
Serdar Sengwl, foreign affairs adviser at the
Diyarbakir mayor’s office told Asharq Al-Awsat that
he was forced to complete his PhD studies outside of
Turkey because the university refused to discuss his
dissertation, which included the word “Kurd”. He
explained that, “In 2001, I decided to resume my PhD
studies in anthropology. I applied to Hacettepe
University, which is a liberal university that
adopts an open approach to study. I passed the
written examination and all that remained was an
oral examination and an interview with the
department professors. During the interview they
asked me what my proposal was and I told them that I
wanted to examine Kurdish schools in Turkey,
stressing that it was important and that a study of
modernization in Kurdistan would be impossible
without considering the impact of schools. They
asked me if I would use the words ‘Kurd’ or
‘Kurdistan’ in my thesis, ‘of course,’ I replied.
They looked at me briefly and said, ‘It would be
best if you did not use these words.’
‘But why?’ I asked, ‘This is an anthropology
department, do you want to eliminate Kurdish
ethnicity?’
‘Of course not,’ they said, ‘however, we believe
that the words ‘Kurd and Kurdistan’ are banned from
use in academic studies and if you use them the
department will be shut down and we will all be sent
to jail.’”
“This is one example,” Sengwl said, “Another is the
case of the Turkish sociologist Ismail Besikci who
used the word ‘Kurd’ in his thesis 30 years ago and
was jailed for 20 years.”
Sengwl moreover revealed that Kurdish letters were
also forbidden from official use, such as the letter
‘w’, which does not exist in the Turkish alphabet
and that whoever uses it is tried before courts.
The people of Diyarbakir feel indignant at the way
the Turkish government portrays the Kurdish
situation to this day, the most recent of which was
Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s
statement that the Kurds do not know what they want.
In response to that, Sengwl said, “Erdogan does not
know what he is saying… We want our identity and our
cultural rights; the first of which is the right to
speak our mother tongue. We have been saying this
for a century. Why is it difficult for them to
understand? Why are identities at war? I am Kurdish,
I was born into another language that is not
Turkish, so why must I eliminate my Kurdish identity
to become Turkish? Why can’t I keep my Kurdish
identity and still be a Turkish citizen
simultaneously?”
Diyarbakir is a Kurdish ‘ghetto’, over 95 percent of
its inhabitants are Kurds and the rest are Arabs,
while Turks are a rare minority. Due to political
and economic problems there have been increasing
rates of migration over the past few years,
especially amongst the younger generations.
Binyamin, a Kurd in his early twenties living in
Diyarbakir, told Asharq Al-Awsat that he wanted to
study medicine so he applied for a scholarship
granted by the Kurdistan government in Iraq, because
he knew that they give grants to Turkish Kurds to
resume their studies in universities in northern
Iraq.
“I love Diyarbakir but I hope to study abroad. Here
we suffer human rights violations. There are Kurdish
children in Turkish prisons. We have suffered
massacres and forced displacement. Four thousand
Kurdish villages were vacated of their residents in
1980 following Kenan Evren’s military coup. Mehdi
Zana who was the mayor of Diyarbakir at the time was
arrested and imprisoned for 15 years ? of course,
there was no other choice… elements of the PKK fled
to the mountains after the coup and began to carry
out armed operations against the army. What do you
expect the people to do?”
Diyarbakir is a city that lacks color, it is a
desert land and the climate is hot and dry. Most of
its streets are unpaved, and unlike Turkish cities
Diyarbakir is not clean; the streets are filled with
heaps of garbage and muddy water. When you raise
these concerns with the mayor of Diyarbakir, Osman
Baydemir or any other official in the city, the
response you always get is that the Turkish
government grants a “politicized budget” to
Diyarbakir and that the officials cannot fulfill
their roles or establish new projects or even
improve the infrastructure of the city.
Anyone visiting Diyarbakir is always asked, “Which
Diyarbakir did you visit?” In reality the city is
divided into two cities; the old city with its
historical tall walls, the second-highest wall in
the world after the Great Wall of China, and the
so-called modern city. Despite the fact that the old
city is unpaved and despite the difficult economic
situation and the unemployment rates, the worn out
buildings are still characterized by unique
architecture. The narrow alleys are crammed with
buildings and passing pedestrians.
As for the ‘modern’ city; it is mainly a number of
long paved roads and tall brightly colored
buildings, painted red and yellow for example. In
the heart of this part of the city is a huge
building belonging to the ruling Justice and
Development Party (AKP), which is an
Islamist-inclined party that the Kurdish residents
accuse of attempting to reinforce the Islamic
movement in Diyarbakir as a means of countering the
Kurdish national force.
Some may assume that Diyarbakir has a higher
percentage of veiled women than the rest of Turkey
and mistake it for a growing Islamic influence,
however the reality is that the traditional Kurdish
garb for women is modest and it includes a head
cover.www.ekurd.net
However, Diyarbakir
remains to be in contact with the outside world,
there are McDonalds and Burger King franchises in
the city.
The modern part of the city is inhabited by
government officials and middle class Kurds. The
city suffers as a result of its weak economy and
many of the Kurdish politicians accuse the
government of Ankara of deliberately neglecting
Diyarbakir economically. There are small textile
factories and small-scale foodstuff manufacturing
factories; however they cannot absorb the workforce,
which results in high levels of poverty and
unemployment in comparison to Turkish cities.
The average monthly salary ranges between US
$100-500, which is less than half the average
monthly salary around Turkish cities. The rampant
poverty in Diyarbakir has generated a number of
alarming social phenomena, such as children begging
and dropping out of school or running away to the
extent that the Turkish government in cooperation
with the Diyarbakir municipality has launched a
project entitled “Let’s Go to School Girls” to urge
poor families in Diyarbakir to send their daughters
to school instead of sending them to factories or
letting them beg in the streets.
The Kurds of Diyarbakir agree that the crime levels
are high and that there are cases of theft; however,
according to Abdul Raziq Sagakin who works in the
Sur municipality, “After 4000 Kurdish villages were
displaced following Kenan Evren’s military coup,
many Kurds headed to Diyarbakir in a random manner
to take up residence there. The problem is that
their lives in the villages were much better; they
were farming and raising cattle on land that they
owned. After that coercive displacement many, as a
repercussion of unemployment, were forced to steal.”
A Kurdish citizen who agreed to speak on condition
of anonymity said, “I fled from Turkey to Syria at
the beginning of the ‘90s because of security
reasons and I returned three years ago. Now I want
to leave again due to economic conditions and the
harassment. If I didn’t have a family I would have
fled by now. I do not even use my real name so as to
avoid security pursuing me. There are children in
Diyarbakir today who only speak Turkish while their
parents only speak Kurdish. I do not want to be in
this situation with my children.”
But this is not only what causes discontent among
the Kurdish community; stereotypes of Kurds on
television and in cinema also raise objections, “A
Kurdish person is either portrayed as one who causes
hardships or who is a simpleton. It is not overtly
stated that he is Kurdish; he appears as a rural
character who speaks Turkish with an accent. This
means he is Kurdish and this is the distorted image
that we suffer from,” said Sagakin.
As a result of these stereotypes Sagakin added, “The
Kurds themselves are influenced by these stereotypes
and they try to speak Turkish without an accent. The
Kurdish accent sets you apart socially and
culturally and makes it difficult to secure a job
and live among Turks. Many Turks who look for work
in Ankara, Istanbul or Izmir conceal the fact that
they are Kurdish.”
But Gogercin Gul who is a Turkish girl who has never
visited Diyarbakir disagrees, “many of the top-level
bureaucratic posts are occupied by Kurds, no one
asks them about their origins.”
However, Abdullah Demir Paasche, the head of the
municipality of Sur in Diyarbakir argues that
Ankara’s claim that it had permitted Kurdish
language classes is unfounded. “These classes that
they refer to are extra classes that you get charged
for. Those are two conditions that would make anyone
try to avoid them. Kurdish people teach the language
to their children at home so why would they send
their children to classes they would have to pay
for? This is Ankara’s excuse to tell the world, we
set up Kurdish language classes and no one
attended,” he said.
It is difficult for Kurdish newspapers and magazines
to survive whenever a new publication is founded; it
faces the possibility of being closed down. ‘Welat’
(Nation) newspaper was closed down so it began
republishing under the name ‘Welat Ma’ (Our Nation)
and after it was banned again it was reissued under
the name ‘Azadiya Welat’ (Freedom of the Nation).
A journalist from ‘Azadiya Welat’ told Asharq Al-Awsat
that, “The problem with the unbearable constraints
on our freedom of expression is that many
journalists have fled abroad. There are too many
hardships to confront. We have a distribution of
10,000 copies, which we deliver by hand because the
[distribution] companies refuse to distribute
Kurdish newspapers.”
On the walls of the newspaper office are pictures of
youth and children, which the journalists said were
“martyrs” who were
killed by Turkish security men.
Back in Diyarbakir there is only one Kurdish
magazine called ‘al Harf’, its Editor-in-Chief, Omar
Azad told Asharq Al-Awsat, “We began publishing in
2004 and our objective is to protect the Kurdish
language. We focus on Kurdish culture, art, poetry
and prose. We publish small books from time to time.
Since we fund ourselves, we publish a book and when
it sells, we publish another. We do not receive any
financial gain from this; the truth is that we pay
for it ourselves.”
The lack of television channels means that many
Kurds tune into Kurdish satellite channels that are
broadcast from Belgium, which some Turkish Kurds
partially finance.
So what do the Kurdish people want?
“We want recognition of our identity in return for
integration. We cannot fully integrate into the
Turkish republic and stop all the PKK activities if
the Kurdish cultural rights are not recognized
first. Our demands are simple and not difficult to
fulfill: We want the Kurdish language to be
recognized as a second official language, and that
it be used in schools. However, some in the
hard-line secular and nationalist circles absolutely
oppose that and believe that it would lead to the
secession of the Kurds and the fragmentation of the
unity of the state.”
Abdul Raziq Sagakin said, “For a long time I have
felt that our issue has not been fairly [tackled]
because the Turkish media has frequently portrayed
us as terrorists. We often forget how just and
humane our demands are because support for us abroad
is limited.”
aawsat com
**
Kurds are not recognized as an official minority in
Turkey and are denied rights granted to other
minority groups. Under EU pressure, Turkey recently
granted Kurds limited rights for broadcasts and
education in the Kurdish language, but critics say
the measures do not go far enough.
The use of the term "Kurdistan" is vigorously
rejected due to its alleged political implications
by the Republic of Turkey, which does not recognize
the existence of a "Turkish Kurdistan" Southeast
Turkey.
Others estimate over 40 million Kurds live in
Big Kurdistan (Iraq, Turkey, Syria, Iran, Armenia),
which covers an area as big as France, about half of
all Kurds which estimate to 20 million live in
Turkey.
Turkey is home to over 25 million ethnic Kurds,
large Kurdish community openly sympathise with the Kurdish PKK for a
Kurdish homeland in the country's mainly Kurdish
southeast of Turkey.
Before August 2002, the Turkish government placed
severe restrictions on the use of Kurdish language,
prohibiting the language in education and broadcast
media.
The Kurdish alphabet is still not recognized
in Turkey, and use of the Kurdish letters X, W, Q
which do not exist in the Turkish
alphabet has led to judicial persecution in 2000 and
2003
The Kurdish flag flown officially in Iraqi Kurdistan
but unofficially flown by Kurds in Armenia. The flag
is banned in Iran, Syria, and Turkey where flying it
is a criminal offence"
Southeastern Turkey:
North Kurdistan (
Kurdistan-Turkey)
wikipedia
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