The Kurdish People Demand Education and Training in their Native Language – The Turkish Government Respond with Repression

This Oppression Must End!

Students in North Kurdistan and Turkey have for some time now been campaigning for Kurdish to be permitted as a subject of choice at universities. As individuals or groups they have been submitting formal requests for such to university vice-chancellors and faculty deans.

The Turkish government have responded to this peaceful demand with the deployment of police and gendarmes and have also resorted to repression, interrogation and court proceedings. The Turkish state Board for Higher Education (YÖK) have imposed disciplinary sanctions against the applicants and have expelled them from the universities.

The action began with students in Istanbul and spread quickly to Ankara, Adana and the Kurdish provinces. They are now also being supported by parents and pupils from primary and middle schools.

The students’ requests state that:

·         the constitutional reforms provide a wider scope for the use of the Kurdish language.

·         Turkey denies the existence of other peoples within the country, particularly the Kurdish people.

·         in line with the country’s multi-ethnic and multi-cultural structure, all administrative bodies and institutions have a task of creating a participatory and democratic society. We call on the vice-chancellors of our universities to permit Kurdish as a subject of choice.

This legitimate and reasonable demand, from a people whose language has been forbidden for decades, is being articulated through democratic and peaceful means. But the Turkish regime is not prepared to accept it. They know nothing other than repression, suppression and the imposing of bans. They do not even recognise the right of people to submit formal requests.

University administrators refuse to accept the requests. They claim that the submission of such requests is an offence. They have had posters distributed within the universities warning against participation in such action. Vice-chancellors are not content just to refuse to accept the requests but they are also taking disciplinary measures, with many students being expelled or suspended.

At Dicle University in Diyarbakir special police units have surrounded the campus with armoured vehicles to prevent such peaceful demands taking place.

The teachers Mesut Firat, Rojhat Kayran and Leyla Durmus were detained in custody because the slogan “We want our lessons in our native language” was written on the walls of their grammar school in the district of Bismil (Province Diyarbakir).

Medeni Alpkaya, the general secretary of the teachers union Egitim-Sen in Diyarbakir, was arrested because in a press statement he gave support to the demand for education in Kurdish.

Ten students from the Inönü University in Malatya were expelled because they had protested against the education board and demanded education in native languages.

In the village of Carikli (Province Diyarbakir) 6 school pupils aged between 8-10 years were arrested and questioned by gendarmes because they had shouted “We want education in the Kurdish language” as they left school.

Such primitive and repressive measures, which the Turkish state continue to pursue into the new millennium, are neither constitutionally nor democratically compatible.

With such an attitude the Turkish Republic are just trampling over the UN’s General Declaration on Human Rights. They violate the principles of the OSCE and disregard their own promises to the European Union. Such repressive practices are a clear breach of the Copenhagen Criteria and the requirements within the EU’s entry partnership document.

In short, the Turkish Republic treat citizen rights and humanity with contempt.

To ban a people’s language in respect of communication and education & training, in this century, is nothing other than irrational tyranny. Such a ban is to be seen as fascist and racist in their truest sense.

We, the Socialist Party of Kurdistan (PSK), support the democratic demand from these young Kurds and call for solidarity with them.

The democratic, intellectual and working people of Turkey must back this basic demand of our people and defend themselves from irrational tyranny and despotism.

The democratic public cannot not remain silent much longer on such hostility by the Turkish regime.

The member states of the European Union, in particular, may not remain as on lookers much longer to violations to the Copenhagen Criteria.

The Turkish Republic must finally bring an end to this primitiveness and violence!

Socialist Party of Kurdistan

25th December 2002