The Urfa (Riha) branch of the Education and Science Workers’ Union (Eğitim-Sen) has announced that it will lodge formal complaints against the Turkish authorities for removing Kurdish from elective courses in schools, Mezopotamya News reported on Sunday.
Students in Turkey have started choosing their elective courses for the spring term as of 3 January, however most of the schools in the Kurdish majority southeastern province of Urfa are not offering courses in the Kurmanci and Zazaki dialects of Kurdish despite students’ desire to study their mother tongue.
According the union, the courses have been removed by 90% of the schools in the Halfeti (Xelfeti) district of Urfa.
Lawyer Fırat Melik from the Urfa Bar Association said that school principles were acting on a circular issued by the Education Ministry that allowed them to decide for themselves what elective courses to offer, taking into account the physical capacities of the schools. Malik added that the Bar Association could make an application for the annulment of the circular if a formal complaint is lodged.
The Turkish government announced in 2012 for the first time that elective Kurdish language courses would be offered to students in grades 5-8 for two hours a week, under the heading “Living Languages and Dialects”.
This move of the government move was linked to efforts for a peace process to solve the country’s Kurdish question, and followed the opening of Kurdish language departments in several universities.
However, opportunities for students to learn Kurdish have remained minimal from the outset and have been further restricted since the collapse of the peace process in 2015.
In 2022, the Ministry of Education appointed around 20,000 teachers in Turkey, but only three of them were Kurdish language teachers. Only 82 Kurdish language teachers have been appointed by the ministry in more than 10 years, although around 100 students each year graduate from Kurdish language departments of the universities.
Özlem Ulutaş Şengül, co-chair of the Urfa Branch of the Education Union, said that Kurdish courses are available in theory but not in practice. “School administrations tend to interfere in the students’ choices of elective courses. Most of the time, the school principles choose the courses themselves and then send the form to the parents for their signatures,” she said.
“The lack of sufficient teachers and the tendency of the students not to choose those courses are generally cited as grounds for this. However, in our research we saw that this is not the case. School administrations usually guide students towards religion courses. Elective courses turn into obligatory elective courses,” Ulutaş Şengül said.
The Turkish Republic has repressed the use of Kurdish language as part of its assimilation policies since its foundation in 1923. Studies show that only a small proportion of Kurdish people living in Turkey can speak their mother tongue.
