Stand on your Kurdish political feet

Solin Hacador

By Solin Hacador:

If a nation does not protect its language, it is not fit enough to stand on its political feet. The mother tongue is a most valuable inheritance of human beings. It is a chain that binds us to our own history. Each generation is a link in the mother tongue chain. If any link grows weak, the whole chain will be weak. Every generation has to make sure that their link is strong enough to add the next link. Our personal duty is to transfer the mother tongue to the next generation.

A nation is a collective of citizens whose rights and responsibilities are registered and guaranteed by a constitution. Citizenship is a legal-political quality acquired by being a member of a nation organized under the roof of a state regardless of ethnic, cultural and religious affiliation. So nationhood is a legal political construct based on the will of the people who desire to live together. However, this reality under the Turkish constitution does not apply to Kurds.

The Turkish education system obliges Kurdish children to take an oath in Turkish at school. They are denied their basic rights and forced to take oath to a nation that they do not belong to. According to United Nations Declaration of the Rights of the Child, all children have the right to their nationality (no matter what their race, colour, sex, language, religion, political or other opinion, or where they were born or who they were born to). The Convention on the Rights of the Child is the first legally binding international instrument to incorporate the full range of human, civil, cultural, economic, political and social rights. Turkey has been a signatory to the European Convention on the Exercise of Children’s Rights since 9 June 1999 (entering into force from 1 October 2002).

After the 1980 coup the Kurdish language was banned by the military administration, and the names of Kurdish towns and villages were changed. Kurdish families were forced to give Turkish names to their children. Fortunately this ban and the prohibition of Kurdish publications (which sometimes also included Kurdish music) was removed in 1991. However the scar of humiliation has remained in the Kurdish psyche till this day, exacerbated by the rejection of other demands such as education in the Kurdish language.

Atatürk’s Kurdish policy could be summed up in one word: assimilation. To a certain degree the policy of assimilation has been successful. Some of Turkey’s leading statesmen have been of Kurdish stock, like Atatürk’s close friend and successor Ýsmet Ýnönü and the late president Turgut Özal.

Those who resisted were dealt with forcefully. Sheik Said, a charismatic religious leader, engineered the first major rebellion against the Turkish Republic in 1925; he and his followers were executed. Throughout the 1930s, various Kurdish revolts were brutally repressed, entire villages were burned down and their inhabitants deported to western Turkey.

Failure to acknowledge the multicultural nature of society ended up in the rather restrictive definition of ‘nation’: Turkishness became the criterion for citizenship and Turkish nationalism became the driving force behind nation-building. This restrictive definition of nationhood created a sense of exclusion and marginalization among the non-Turkish citizens of Turkey, a fact which has never been realized by the Turkish èlite.

I interviewed Josefina Piquet Ibañez, the Catalan writer. She is a victim of Dictator Franco. She was exiled with her family from Barcelona to France during Spanish Civil War (1936-1939). Sadly, we have the same story – and many other groups do too – such as torture, prohibition of language and cultural rights, police raids, exile and stolen childhood by the hands of Dictator Franco. She wrote her of experiences in her book, ‘Les Dones Del 36’.

She knows what Kurds are going through and feels sorry for them. She also felt a responsibility to send a message to Kurds, especially to Kurdish mothers. She stated: ‘Please tell Kurdish mothers’ to speak to their children in their native language, to introduce their identification to them in the language they belong to. Failing to do that can damage the Kurdish struggle worse than their enemies. Catalan people healed from their pain but Kurdish pain is not even encrusted. I hope that Kurdish mothers take their part in Kurdish identification properly.’

Her message underlines the importance of language in the struggle for freedom. We Kurds need to realize the importance of our existence. Yes, we can only exist and stand on our political feet by getting rid of our enemy’s language from our daily life. She also shows her strong feeling and respect for Kurdish victims of dictatorships.

Considering what the Franco dictatorship was like, it looks at first glance as though the Spanish, Catalan, Valencian, Basque and Galician people have finally emerged from the long night of fascist repression that lasted nearly forty years. Further, the thorny negotiations over Spain’s full membership in the European Economic Community have finally ended successfully, indicating that Europe sees Spain as a stable democracy.

There are chains of dictators in Kurdish history such as Shah, Atatürk, Assad and Saddam. The worst one was Saddam Hussein who used chemical weapon against Kurds in town of Halabja on 16 March 1998. Creating fire and terrifying explosions, raining napalm and poison gasses, Iraqi war planes flew 14 bombing raids over the village in what has been recognized as the largest chemical-weapons attack against a civilian population in history. Five hours later, up to 5,000 Kurds were dead, another 10,000 were wounded, and many others would die from exposure to the poisonous gases in the years after the attack!

The Irish revolutionary leader Michael Collins was a founder of the Irish Free State. Much of his work helped to secure independence from Great Britain for most of Ireland. He stated: ‘Since we started to use our language, we stood on our Irish feet. We can only achieve success against our enemy and keep them away from us by refusing their language.’ During periods of retreat in the national struggle, Republicans tend to gather within the language movement as they wait for better days. In survey after survey, the Irish people have shown their high regard for their language. The growth of the Gealscoileanna movement is living testimony to this fact. Despite years of failed government policies regarding the language in the south, and outright hostility by the government in the north, and despite the best efforts and endless attempts to marginalize the Irish language, the Irish people still maintain and support their language. For six hundred years the English strove to suppress that mark of the distinct character of the Gael – their language – and failed. But in one generation the politicians did what England had failed to do.

The most effective assurance of continued physical health is preventive medicine. Similarly, demographically and functionally languages require preventive defences well in advance of reaching any stage of definite difficulty. Cultural nationalism was already significant in well-established states such as France, England, and Spain, while in the politically fragmented territories of Italy and Germany, national unification movements developed around cultural nationalism: language, music, art, history, and other modes of cultural expression began to define what was ‘German’, ‘Italian’, ‘Norwegian’, ‘Swiss’, or ‘Czech’.

Kurds have a long history of injustices and of searching for a way to achieve justice and live peacefully. What Kurds have been going through has damaged everything, including the Kurdish language. The Kurdish language is not sufficiently focused on by some Kurdish organizations. Kurds should give priority to the language and put that language back in their mouths. Once this is done, they will be fit enough to stand on their Kurdish political feet forever.

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2 Responses to Stand on your Kurdish political feet
  1. daro
    November 8, 2011 | 08:10

    Hallo Solin
    How are you?

    best Regards
    daro

  2. seyid mihemmed barzani
    November 9, 2011 | 07:54

    dest xosh solin xan jowanh u pir beha bo biji kurd biji kurdistan

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