Memories of anti-Kurdish discrimination and forced assimilation
Photo by Rebaz Majeed
This blog is part of Respond’s Kurdish storytelling project. Visit the main project page here.
by Raman Salah
“This language is my language. As someone whose language has been restricted, banned, prohibited, and many people went to jail and got punished for speaking or writing in, for publishing in it – yeah, definitely, I feel a personal connection to the concept of language violence.”
– Berivan*, Sorani speaker in Bashur
Policies of anti-Kurdish linguicide, which states continue to implement through today, have led to and coincided with other, less official, and more everyday forms of language violence.
Altogether, they create an environment that coerces Kurdish speakers to abandon their languages and assimilate.
Kurdish speakers shared with Respond the myriad ways they have experienced discrimination and forced assimilation in Turkey, Syria, Iran, and Iraq. Some have been subject to physical violence for speaking their mother tongue; others have been discriminated against and have not been able to access the same educational or employment opportunities. Some of these stories are recounted below.
Bakur (Turkish-occupied Kurdistan) - Kurmanji and Zazakî Kurdish
Rojda Arslan, a Zazakî speaker living abroad, is an attorney specialized in public international law and European human rights law. She recounted how her family, and she herself, experienced the consequences of the Turkish state’s “Turkification project” – meant to erase all ethnic and linguistic diversity – firsthand.
Her parents faced beating, bullying, and physical violence when they spoke Kurdish in public. This was part of a broader effort to censor her mother language since the genocide of her hometown, Dersim, which in 1937 and 1938 was the site of anti-Kurdish massacres and forced migration:
“When you prohibit a certain community from speaking their language, it actually means that this community will be extinct in the future. … That’s a tool of assimilation. … That’s more than a violation of a language, it’s a violation of a cultural identity through violating a language.”
Sevim Zelal Tonbul, a lawyer from Kayseri Province, Bakur, in 1983 to a family of shepherds and farmers, recounted a story of violence and discrimination from her own childhood.
“My grandfather had a gramophone, which was a very precious thing to us. … The songs were mainly Kurdish songs, ‘dengbêjî’, from the southeast. … My first memory of which I felt really oppressed was seeing my grandfather digging a hole in our garden in front of our house. He put the gramophone and all the disks into the hole, then covered it with dirt and laid a carpet on it. I didn't understand! … They said, ‘Don't talk at all and sit where you are.’ A few minutes later we heard an army vehicle coming. they were on an operation apparently to search and look for anything which they suspect. My dear grandfather’s music and our language (us speaking Kurdish/or a single word of Kurdish) were something we strongly believed they would be interested in taking away from us. Others in the village were taken away for not doing what my grandparents did. This event was so traumatic for me! I must have been five or six years old back then. I will never forget it and remember it vividly.”
From that experience, Sevim learned, “the Kurdish language is the language that we are suppressed for and the fact that we are Kurds, not Turkish is unacceptable.”
Hêvî*, an activist, translator, and Kurmanji speaker from Bakur, likewise grew up with stories from his family about state suppression of Kurdish, including one from his grandparents eerily similar to Sevim’s. About them, he said:
“When they were listening to Kurdish songs on their old hi-fi/gramaphone, Turkish soldiers would come, find the cassettes’ owner, and torture him/her or even kill! Imagine how brutal it is to get killed just because you listen to your own language songs.”
Hêvî* experienced violence for speaking Kurdish, as well.
“It was very difficult when I joined the university, we always had to watch our mouths when we talked. Some of us got beaten up, got in prison, and threatened by the authorities. We have many friends who have been killed and we know their stories. We are the witness of these stories. I got lucky not being beaten up or prisoned because of speaking very well Turkish and English, but I still remember so many of our friends got in trouble.”
Additionally, Hêvî said, “Some of our friends could not continue studying just because they are Kurds, and they were very much discriminated against. Many of them left university and went back to their towns and villages.”
Hêvî described how his experience with hostility to his native Kurdish has taken on different, less physical, forms as well. For example, “When I am with my family or Kurdish friends in a bus or a train, and we talk in Kurdish, Turkish people stare at us with a very mean face expression. … They always do not accept our co-existence and they look at us like we are aliens.” Berivan*, from Bashur, described a similar experience on the metro in Turkey of being verbally accosted for speaking Kurdish with a friend. “There were people who shouted at me demanding me to speak Turkish because it’s Turkish and everyone should speak Turkish. It showed me how they enforced their ideology upon the Kurdish people.”
These policies of overt and covert discrimination and assimilation have specific impacts on women, both according to existing research and the testimonies of interviewees. Women have unique difficulties getting access to opportunities, often life-saving medical ones, because of how anti-Kurdish discrimination is compounded by patriarchal societies limiting their literacy. According to research, the majority of women living in the outskirts of the Kurdish province of Amed (Diyarbakir) in southeast Turkey were unable to benefit from cancer-related services in 2022 because they could not speak Turkish. In one story by Kurdish journalist İrfan Aktan for Kedistan, doctors refused to admit an elderly Kurdish woman who did not speak Turkish “because that one has no tongue.” Stories of discrimination against Kurdish women struggling to access health services are not uncommon.
Rojda agreed. She witnessed that her grandmother and other members of her generation, who speak only Kurdish and know limited words and sentences in Turkish, have many difficulties when they go to see a doctor.
Rojava (Syrian-occupied Kurdistan) - Kurmanji Kurdish
Alongside official state discrimination, many Kurds have faced violence from their Syrian co-inhabitants from childhood through adulthood on the basis of their ethnic identity and language.
Tavge*, a Kurmanji speaker participant from Rojava, who moved to Bashur in 2011, described how in Syria, where Kurdish language was prohibited, her childhood was deeply impacted by language-based violence. She recalled an "aggressive environment" in which Kurdish people were regularly threatened by their non-Kurdish neighbors. "We finally decided to leave the village” because of the persecution her family faced.
Rojhelat (Iranian-occupied Kurdistan) - Sorani, Kurmanji and Hewramî Kurdish
Gordyaen Jermayi, an educational activist, civil engineer, and Kurmanji speaker from Urmia in Rojhelat, described how the anti-Kurdish assimilationist aspirations of Iran are embedded in all parts of life.
Gordyaen’s ancestors suffered from this state-sanctioned low self-confidence for not being able to speak, read, or write Persian.
“My grandparents cannot speak Persian. They understand it because they watch TV. … These assimilation programs [are] the way they have brainwashed people. If you ask people from Rojhelat, if you cannot speak Persian, you are basically useless. … And unfortunately, like any other elderly, they are experienced, they have lived a great life, but because they cannot speak or read or write Persian, they always have this very low self confidence about themselves and it’s actually very sad. I think it’s somehow prevented them from creating a better life for themselves in the past.” (Emphasis added.)
Bashur (Iraqi-occupied and semi-autonomous Kurdistan) - Sorani Kurdish
The Kurdish language was officially recognized in Iraq in 2005, following the US army invasion in 2003 that led to the downfall of Saddam Hussein's regime. The Iraqi constitution was established in 2005, stipulating, under the fundamental principles outlined in Article 4, that both the Arabic and Kurdish languages are the official languages of Iraq. Despite this constitutional recognition, anti-Kurdish discrimination and forced assimilation persist, particularly in areas occupied by the Iraqi government, such as Kirkuk.
“My story with language violence started when the Iraqi army took over my city Kirkuk in 2017. As a consequence of that incident Kirkuk fully got under control of the Iraqi government. Half of the city’s population is Kurdish. They are mostly running their small businesses, such as grocery shops, small factories, butcheries, and salons. They are not allowed to write in Kurdish on their shop banners.” Sarah Ali Mohammad Amin
Even though Kurdish language is an official language and recognized in Southern Kurdistan, there is still a lack of services in the language on the official level, Dilan said:
“When I was studying abroad in some other country, I had to go to the Iraqi embassy, and back then my Arabic was not good. … I went and tried to speak English and no one spoke English. I said I didn’t want to speak Arabic because I’m scared it won’t be correct, so [I asked], ‘Can you please provide me a Kurdish or English speaker?’ They said they could not provide the Kurdish service but they have an English speaking employee on certain days. I had to travel very far multiple times to be able to work with an English speaker.”
*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.