The Earthquakes, Language Violence, and Nationhood
Our incredible team has been mobilizing to support victims of the devastating earthquake, translating resources and services into Kurdish Kurmanji, Sorani, Arabic, Armenian, and Turkish. We highlight this important work by sharing this powerful piece written by Respond community member Leila Lorenzo.
Leila Lorenzo is a Respond Crisis Translation team member who has led over 60 Persian, Pashto, and Kurdish translation projects for Respond. Currently, she leads the Respond Language Democracy Project. Below, Leila writes about institutionalized language violence and how it must inform our communal response to this systemic, violent disaster. [And, support interpreters on the ground by contributing here!]
The Earthquakes, Language Violence, and Nationhood
The February 6th earthquakes in the internationally recognized territories of Turkey, Syria, and Lebanon have caught global attention for the level of destruction left in their wake. Unfortunately, however, a dearth of knowledge of the history, social, and ethnic dynamics of the SWANA region on the part of global and humanitarian audiences is contributing to the erasure of a narrative that needs to be swiftly amplified: that of the question of nationhood status and its ties to language violence in this earthquake response.
It is a deadly mistake to think that the only victims of the earthquake that hit this region are solely Turkish or Arabic speakers based on a map alone: West Asia is incredibly ethno-linguistically heterogeneous. For example, about 20% of Turkey is Kurdish, while other groups such as Armenians, Assyrians, Afghans, and Circassians comprise 6-11% of the population. In the case of neighboring Iran, only about 51% of the population is ethnically Persian – the rest of the country is composed of minorities such as the Lurs, Bakhtiaris, Arabs, Azeris, Armenians, Afghans, and Turkmen.
These demographics reveal a broader problem throughout the region – not everyone has an internationally-recognized homeland of their own, a centuries-long problem fraught with harrowing histories of attempts to wipe groups like Armenians, Yezidis, Kurds, Assyrians, and Circassians off the map. The Circassians, for example, were systematically murdered by Tsarist Russia from 1763-1864, resulting in their nearly complete annihilation, forced Russification, and expulsion into present-day Turkey. Armenians, whose struggle for security, self-determination, and autonomy has persisted through their history of enslavement, forced relocation, and beyond the Armenian genocide during WWI. It persists today with the current fight for sovereignty in the Republic of Artsakh, an Armenian-majority territory given to Azerbaijan by the Soviets currently under the Azerbaijani blockade. Azerbaijan aims to cut off Artsakh from the rest of the world through food, medicine, electricity shortages, and hybrid warfare.
Then there are the Kurds, Yezidis, and Alevis (the latter two are Kurdish-speaking religious minority groups), whose historic homelands go unrecognized by the international community. Their homeland of Kurdistan is divided into four regions in the present-day territories of Iran (Kurdish: Rojhelat), Northern Syria (Rojava), Southeastern Turkey (Bakur), and Northern Iraq (Bashur). Throughout these lands, Kurds have been systematically attacked for decades by numerous governments. The last dynasty of Iran, the Pahlavis, as well as the founder of modern-day Turkey, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, had unified the modern nation-states of Iran and Turkey at the expense of minorities like Kurds. Turkey deported hundreds of thousands of Kurds from their homelands from 1916-1934 and imprisoned many of their prized intellectuals and political leaders. In the 1940s and 1980s, Qazi Mohammad and Abdul Ghassemlou, two Kurdish advocates for democracy in Iran, were both murdered by the Shah and then the Islamic Republic government. And in recent months, the murder of Jina (Mahsa) Amini, a Kurdish girl from Saqqez, whose crimes were only a mere few misplaced strands of hair and being born a Kurdish woman, was a powder-keg moment igniting mass protests. Yet it still is widely unknown that parts of the SWANA region are ruled by ethnocentric and racist autocrats.
If one revisits the maps of the regions hit by the earthquake with this context in mind, it becomes clear how, and why Kurds, alongside Assyrians, Afghan and Syrian refugees, Armenians, and Circassians are the primary victims of this earthquake. Their home has been destroyed not only because of the earthquake but because of Turkish and Syrian state violence and intentional neglect that has directly resulted in the infrastructural decay of many buildings in the affected regions. President Erdogan was caught on video boasting about lax building regulations in the epicenter of the earthquake, sparking outrage at the high death toll now estimated to be over 50,000. Experts for decades admonished Turkey’s government over its pro-developer ‘construction amnesty’ policies but to no avail. Turkey is also obstructing aid sent through channels other than the government Disaster and Emergency Management Authority and blocked Twitter to silence criticism of the government while people under rubble were using the app to share their locations. The Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria (Rojava) has been trying to deliver humanitarian relief to those affected in Afrin, a Kurdish-populated Syrian region before a Turkish military operation in 2018 was part of the AANES, only to be blocked by Turkish militia. Meanwhile, 1,200 people have died in the Kurdish-majority town of Jindires within Afrin Canton and no international rescue workers have been present to help find survivors.
The work of translation is not devoid of history and politics – it is actively political, and the question of nationhood in the SWANA region is directly tied to the politics of translation, language violence, and humanitarian assistance. In Turkey, it is illegal to teach Kurdish in public and private schools. Since the earthquake, Respond has learned of instances in which critical documents containing earthquake-related humanitarian aid information are being translated into languages other than Kirmancki/Kurmanji spoken by most Kurds living in Southeastern Turkey. And language violence against the Kurds has been a longstanding issue all over the region – just last week, thanks to international attention and pressure, Zahra Mohammadi, a Kurdish schoolteacher and language activist living in Iran who was jailed for the crime of teaching Kurdish in school, was released from prison thanks to international pressure.
Given the context of the region, and the status of Kurds and other minority groups within SWANA, denying Kurds language access is the sort of institutional, state-sanctioned language violence that is unsurprising and must be monitored and denounced by the international, INGO, and watchdog communities. It is our responsibility as translators to be aware of this history, the social capital and stigma that languages carry, and the power, class, racial and ethnic dynamics in the contexts in which we offer language support.
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