Histories and geographies of Kurdish suppression
Photo by Rebaz Majeed
This blog is part of Respond’s Kurdish storytelling project. Visit the main project page here.
by Leila Lorenzo, Raman Salah
The Kurdish language is the 40th most spoken language among the world’s 7,000 languages.
Kurdish speakers are dispersed across borders, leading to diverse linguistic environments shaped by different state policies. There are an estimated 35 million Kurdish speakers representing linguistic minorities spread across five different countries, Turkey, Iran, Iraq, Syria, and Armenia, and to a lesser degree, the countries that historically comprised Soviet Turkestan. Together, Kurds comprise the fourth-largest ethnolinguistic group in the Southwest Asia and North African or SWANA region (SWANA being the widely accepted decolonial term for Middle East), after Arabs, Persians, and Turks. Despite this, there has never been an internationally recognized state of that name (Martin van Bruinessen, Agha, Shaikh, and State, 11).
The following map shows approximately the area where Kurds constitute a majority of the population. It is based on a map created by Kurdish nationalists and presented to the United Nations in 1948.
Kurdish is most accurately described as a group of dialects, each with their own sub-dialects, most of which are not mutually intelligible. This condition of mutual unintelligibility is the product of multiple factors, including state suppression, lack of language unification policies unlike those employed by nation-states within the last century, a lack of standardized or general Kurdish language instruction, the current geopolitical condition of Kurdistan as a stateless nation, and geographic isolation due to very mountainous terrain in Kurdistan.
Kurmanji (also called Northern Kurmanji or Northern Kurdish), which is spoken by the majority of Kurds, dominates in all countries where Kurdish is spoken. Sorani (also called Southern Kurmanji or Central Kurdish) is prevalent in Iran and Iraq, while Southern Kurdish and Kermashani (Kelhorî) dialects primarily exist in Iran. Hewramî (Gorani), spanning Iran and Iraq, and Zazakî (Dimilkî), spoken in Turkey, constitute the fourth and fifth groups.
Most of the current states in Kurdistan have histories of concerted efforts to suppress their local Kurdish communities and their respective spoken dialects from the moment their modern borders were drawn.
The division of Kurdish populated areas among nation-states in the early 20th century turned Kurdistan into a site of inter-state conflict. This division paved the way for the suppression of the Kurdish language as political borders became barriers, enabling state authorities to enforce linguistic policies aimed at assimilation and control.
Linguicide was part of a broader set of strategies employed by the states of Turkey, Iran, Syria, and Iraq in the aftermath of World War I to suppress burgeoning Kurdish national movements. With the fall of the Ottoman and Qajar Empires, the formation of new nation-states throughout the Middle East, increasing state suppression, and the rise of nationalism coming from Europe, Kurdish resistance erupted but was ultimately crushed.
Bakur (Turkish-occupied Kurdistan) - Kurmanji and Zazakî Kurdish
By the end of World War I, the Ottoman Empire had disintegrated, resulting in no homeland for a number of ethnic groups, including the Kurds. While the Treaty of Sèvres proposed recognition of Kurdistan, Turkish Kemalists did not abide by the treaty, and Western powers failed to enforce its terms.
During the war, Kurds and Turks had fought together to secure the current borders of the Turkish state against external threats and perceived domestic enemies. However, once Turkey gained international recognition of its borders, the Turkish government, under the leadership of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, assumed a policy of assimilation of the Kurds and other non-Turkish groups after having consummated ethnic cleansing campaigns against other groups, such as the Armenians, Assyrians, and Pontic Greeks. Kurdish revolts in 1925 and in 1928-1931 resulted in increasingly forceful assimilation policies. Kurdish leaders and tribesmen faced mass executions, exile, and deportation.
Following the violent suppression of a Kurdish revolt in 1925, Turkey pursued a policy of linguicide, criminalizing the use of the Kurdish language and banning all terms affiliated with Kurds and Kurdistan. Use of the Kurdish language in schools and law courts was verboten – meaning absolutely no Kurdish education. Schools and gendarmerie posts fell under the control of the Turkish state. Students were taught that they were not Kurds anymore, but Turkish citizens, or“mountain Turks.” Anything and everything that carried a remnant of Kurdish names – language, dress, names, and tribes – were eliminated. The word Kurdistan itself was removed from all geography books and wiped off the map. Since then, a state policy of linguicide has persisted in de jure and de facto manners. For example, speaking Kurdish was illegal in Turkey through 1991. This prohibition included bans on Kurdish publications, radio and television, and Kurdish-language religious activities. Even today, out of the thousands of newspapers and magazines in Turkey, only one Kurdish-language weekly newspaper, Xwebûn, remains.
“Turkey viewed the Kurdish language as a threat to the territorial integrity of the state.”
Christian Sinclair, assistant director of the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at Arizona University (quoted in Rudaw)
Rojhelat (Iranian-occupied Kurdistan) - Sorani, Kurmanji, Hewramî, and Kelhorî Kurdish
Reza Khan Pahlavi, the founder of the Pahlavi dynasty, unified the modern state of Iran under an Iranian nationalist mythology. To do this, Reza Khan engaged in a process of Persianization, or the forced assimilation of all ethnic minorities in Iran, who comprise about 50% of the population of Iran.
Like Ataturk in Turkey, Pahlavi aimed to create a centralized state. The government imposed exclusive use of the Persian language in media, bureaucracy, and education. Reza Shah banned Kurdish dress, literature, dance and language as part of a larger restriction on expressions of cultural identity by virtually all of Iran’s minorities, such as the Lors, Turkmen, Baloch, and Azeris. The language was, by official statements by the government, rebranded as a dialect of Persian.
Persian language dominance exists to this day in Iran, with the Islamic Republic government perpetuating forced assimilation policies despite allowances for the use of “regional and tribal languages” under the Islamic Republic’s constitution. For example: While there is a Kurdish language program at one Kurdish university, in 2019, Iran’s Department of Education announced testing for “Persian-language sufficiency” in Iran – if non-Persian children in Iran fail a Persian language sufficiency test, they will be classified as “special needs students” for merely being a speaker of a minority language.
Perhaps no case is as relevant at demonstrating the Iranian state and society’s current animosity towards Kurdish as that of Zara Muhammadi, a Kurdish activist and language teacher. She was sentenced to five years in prison for teaching people the language, which the Iranian court considered to be undermining national security. She was released after serving one year of the sentence thanks to international pressure.
Rojava (Syrian-occupied Kurdistan) - Kurmanji Kurdish
In Syria, the Kurdish language was banned by Presidents Hafez Al-Assad and his son, Bashar Al-Assad, who both pursued policies of Arabization. This meant bans on the Kurdish language, including banning Kurdish names, written materials, and private schools as well as prohibitions on businesses without Arabic names. Additionally, until the Syrian Civil War, Arabic was the state-mandated language of instruction.
In 2011, the Syrian regime moved troops from Kurdish areas to Damascus to fight off rebels, creating an opening for Kurds to take back their land. Under the Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria, or Rojava, Kurdish is now taught in schools at various levels and is recognized as one of three official languages. These advancements, while promising, remain under threat by the Syrian regime and by the Turkish government, which have been responsible for numerous bombing campaigns and chemical weapons attacks in Kurdistan and the seizing of Kurdish lands, as well as the struggle to keep Rojava afloat amidst a small, struggling economy and threats of resurging violence after fighting off the Islamic State just a few years ago.
“Suppression of the ethnic identity of Kurds by Syrian authorities has taken many forms. Restrictions have included: various bans on the use of the Kurdish language; refusal to register children with Kurdish names; replacement of Kurdish place names with new names in Arabic; prohibition of businesses that do not have Arabic names; not permitting Kurdish private schools; and the prohibition of books and other materials written in Kurdish.”
Bashur (Iraqi-occupied and semi-autonomous Kurdistan) - Sorani and Kelhorî Kurdish
The British played a significant role in the shaping of borders, internal political configurations, and policies toward ethnic and linguistic minorities in an infant Iraqi state following World War I. After the war, the League of Nations granted Britain the mandate to administer Iraq. In the process of creating the unified state of Iraq, the drawing of borders prioritized geopolitics over the ethnic and cultural realities on the ground, failing to accommodate diverse groups, including Arabs, Turkmen, and Kurds.
The British-backed monarchy favored Arab political elites, who influenced policies within the country. The Anglo-Iraqi Treaty of 1922 recognized Iraq's independence, but failed to address Kurdish rights. When Kurdish uprisings occurred, such as the Sheikh Mahmud Barzanji-led revolt in 1920, the British, along with the Iraqi government, suppressed these rebellions. The British were also complicit in supporting Iraqi Arab officials’ efforts to assimilate the Kurds, including imposing the use of Arabic.
These policies turned violent in the early 1960s, when British ministers increased arms exports to Iraq's regime during aggressive campaigns against the Kurds, and thousands of rockets were knowingly sent to Baghdad for the destruction of Kurdish villages. However, Saddam Hussein's Ba’athist regime (late 1970s-2003) stands out for its crimes against Kurds. Arabization policies suppressed Kurdish language and culture by forcibly displacing Kurds from their ancestral land. The use of Kurdish was prohibited, Kurdish names were Arabized, and cultural expressions were suppressed. This suppression reached a tragic climax between 1986-1989 during the Anfal campaign, a brutal effort against the Kurds of northern Iraq to quell Kurdish resistance. The campaign involved the use of chemical weapons, including mustard gas and nerve agents, against civilians and fighters. In the town of Halabja in March 1988, thousands of Kurds were killed in a chemical attack. Villages were systematically destroyed, Kurdish civilians were summarily executed, and inhabitants were forcibly relocated. As many as 100,000 people lost their lives.
The post-Saddam era has witnessed greater recognition and preservation of Kurdish cultural and linguistic rights. The 2005 Iraqi constitution recognizes the autonomous Kurdistan Region of Iraq and acknowledges the cultural, linguistic, and administrative rights of Kurds. The establishment of the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) has allowed the Kurds to have greater control over language rights. Still, tensions remain.
“I am from a stateless nation in the Middle East. … Many call us minorities while we are around 40 million people. We are divided by several different countries. None of these countries except Iraq (after) the US invasion … recognized the language; none of them gave the right to people to study in their language.”
– Berivan*, a Sorani speaker from Bashur
State suppression endangers mother dialects
These historical policies have shaped the current landscape, in which the existence of spoken Kurdish is systematically challenged.
Several Kurdish dialects are endangered or vulnerable, according to UNESCO. Because of state policies deprioritizing or suppressing Kurdish language in education, transmission is largely oral and through families, rather than through formal education (though in Bashur it has become part of school curricula).
“As a lot of us know, the Kurmanjki (Zazakî) dialect is endangered. … For this reason many of the young people in my generation are not taught in their mother language and this has many reasons behind it. I was lucky enough [to be taught]. I can definitely say that is because my family is very politically conscious, in particular, my parents. I remember my father imposed the prohibition of speaking Turkish at home. This is how I learnt my dialect: My parents both insisted for me and my brother to learn our mother language.” – Rojda Arslan
“I learned Kurmanji dialect from my family. Almost everyone learns it from their family, but they can learn to a certain level. Since the Kurdish language is not an official/recognized and a banned language in Turkey, therefore, you cannot learn grammar or writing from your family. Our families have been removed from their own culture and language by the Turkish authorities. They just know the dialect by heart. The Turkish government claims that it’s not a language! They spread [lies] such as, it has no grammar and linguistic rules. In another words, they say it belongs to a very low-class, rural area, and illiterate people. Of course, it is! If you don’t let the people learn its grammar and its rules. We know it has a strong grammar and it is a proper language. Once we grow up learning there are many people teaching the language privately. We reach out to them and ask for support from those teachers and through them we find those books which have been published outside Turkey about the language’s grammar. On the other hand, we ask for support from our older friends who have learnt the grammar, and they teach us more. We know how risky it is to do that, but this is how most of us learn the dialect.” – Hêvî*
“I grew up learning my dialect with my family in our village. We always spoke the dialect in our family. I didn’t learn the dialect in school, I would say learning my dialect is 100% oral transmission from my family and neighbors. I went to elementary school in Iran before leaving the country, the instruction is exclusively Persian. Even though we were speaking our dialect inside the school, in our family, and in the village, the curriculum was exclusively Farsi/Persian. I can only speak it, understand it, I can read it, but I can’t really write it. There is no standard written for it.” – Mariwan
“I learned my dialect from my parents. I never studied my mother tongue at school because the official language at schools was Arabic and we were never allowed to speak our native language at school.” – Tavge*
*Several names have been changed to protect the privacy and safety of our project participants and their loved ones. Because of the fact that several Kurdish names have been outlawed across Kurdistan by occupying regimes, we note here that we have chosen to use names that are banned.