Rudaw features Repond’s project on anti-Kurdish language violence after 2023 Turkey-Syria earthquake

Rudaw, a major publication in Iraqi Kurdistan, featured Respond Crisis Translation’s Kurdish storytelling project, “One year since the quake: Linguicide and resilience of the Kurdish language.”

Even though the media extensively covered the Turkey-Syria earthquake that killed more than 59,000 people exactly one year ago, until now, no one has investigated how anti-Kurdish language violence specifically contributed to the disaster.

One year later, Respond published their testimony on state suppression of Kurdish dialects by Turkey, Syria, Iraq, and Iran, including not making disaster response efforts available in Kurdish following last year's deadly earthquakes – despite there being 40 million Kurdish speakers across the region, and Kurdish areas being most impacted.

Rudaw writes in “Lost in translation: the violence of language in the aftermath of the Turkey-Syria earthquake”:

Despite several of the affected provinces being home to a significant Kurdish population, activists and NGO workers claim local authorities did not make emergency resources available in Kurdish in the aftermath of the disaster, while also obstructing access to organizations that wanted to reach the Kurdish majority areas. “We have recorded that there were a lot of Kurdish NGOs based in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq, Bashur [Kurdistan Region], that were trying to help these people with basic aid, but unfortunately, they had a barrier,” said Raman Salah, the head of the Kurdish translation team of international NGO Respond Crisis Translation.

On the same day of the earthquake, Turkey’s Directorate of Immigration Management’s Foreigners’ Communication Center shared a post announcing that it would provide translation support to all earthquake zones in seven languages. Kurdish was not among the seven. 

…

While the Respond team ceaselessly interviewed activists, translators and survivors in the aftermath of the earthquake, in an attempt to record and archive their testimonies regarding the role of language violence in exacerbating the consequences of the disaster among Kurdish communities, as powerful as individual stories are, Salah noted the absolute need for numerical information regarding said impact (emphasis added by Respond). Most of the testimonies recorded by Respond’s team have yet to be shared, said Salah, noting that they are still in the process of determining what the most impactful way to use these oral accounts in pursuit of language justice is. 

“One of the biggest issues is surveying, getting numbers. Okay, we have Syria, we have Turkey… but it's not only about people who speak Arabic or Turkish. There's other ethnicities, there's other languages, so we are trying to call out [to the Turkish government], to start surveying, or let international and Kurdish NGOs conduct surveys in Kurdish areas, to record, build a database of people affected by lack of language access in the context of the earthquake.”

Read more on Rudaw: https://www.rudaw.net/english/world/20022024