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Kurdish students in Turkey launch campaign for Kurdish education
KurdishMedia.com
21/11/2001
Kurdish students in Turkey launch campaign for Kurdish education
The Kurdish Students’ Initiative has formed a Reading Table for Instruction and Education in Kurdish, and has prepared a 106-page file on mother-tongue education.
By Veysi Polat - Istanbul
Students acting under the slogans “Our native language is the precondition of our existence” and “The limits of our language are the limits of our world” have mobilized in universities for offering optional courses in Kurdish within the framework of a “Campaign for Instruction and Education in Kurdish”.
The Kurdish Students’ Initiative for Instruction and Education in Kurdish, which has stepped up its activities since September, has carried out a number of activities in the framework of its campaign. Students who have set up a “Kurdish Reading Table” at the Literature Faculty of Istanbul University have prepared a 166-page dossier which examines “Turkey’s Native Language Policy and the Kurdish Language”. The students, who studied the importance of language, the current situation of the Kurdish language, and the instructional programs of countries where Kurdish is currently taught, such as France, Iraq, Sweden, Switzerland, Russia, and Iran, have also placed in the dossier documents on the Turkish government’s policy on native languages and international agreements that Turkey has signed with regard to the “Education in the Native Language and the Right to Education in the Native Language”.
Campaign moves to Internet
The students, who on 13 November held a panel discussion in the Istanbul University Students’ Culture Center with Attorney Fethiye Cetin, from the Istanbul Bar Association, and Hasan Kaya, of the Istanbul Kurdish Institute, are also explaining the importance of native-language education and seeking support for their campaign in a website that they have established at the address: http://www.anadil.8k.com/
The first concrete step in the campaign will we taken in the coming days in Istanbul. Three hundred students studying at Istanbul University, after handing in their petitions seeking the inclusion of the Kurdish language among the list of optional courses, plan to expand their campaign to include the country as a whole.
Call for support
Zeynep Alper and Kemal Genc, two of the participants in the campaign, appealing to faculty members as well as students, said, “Surmounting the social/political chaos that has prevailed for years, making a democratic structure predominant, and living together with different peoples in tolerance, all are dependent on resolving the Kurdish problem, which has become the paradox of the country. Everyone must fulfill his or her own responsibility in this regard. Taking democratic steps on the topic of Kurdish-language education would both uphold the most natural right of the Kurdish people, which number over 20 million in Turkey, by giving them the right to education in their native language, and would also mean taking important steps along the way toward solving the largest single obstacle to democratic development in Turkey.”
Source: Translated from Turkish; originally published in “Yedinci Gundem” weekly newspaper, 17 November 2001. Original Turkish text at http://www.yedincigundem.com/news.asp?id+6814)
