Cultural genocide of the Kurds and international Law

[Harold F. Schiffman]

Cultural genocide of the Kurds and international Law

1/9/2006   KurdishMedia.com - By Aatif Ahmad

Genocide is a term that evokes feelings of revulsion and horror in all
decent-minded people. The deliberate destruction of an ethnic group or
race by killing or starving to death large numbers of that group or race
has blighted the 20th century with the worst record for genocide. However,
genocide does not only consist in killing members of an ethnic or racial
group. It can also involve destroying all those traits that combine to
give identity to a group. Cultural genocide, also known as ethnocide, is
the wilful destruction of an ethnic group by bringing about the
disappearance of its culture or anything that underpins its culture, such
as language. In this age of globalisation and consumerism, culture is no
longer about how you live or behave. Clothing, food, habits, and customs
that were specific to individual cultures are fast disappearing and,
rightly or wrongly, giving way to a global lifestyle of cars, Internet,
McFood, and Nike. This is happening everywhere. There is only one thing
that can still confer distinction on ethnic or national groups and give
them a sense of solidarity and community, and that is language and the
culture that it generates. This is why the easiest way of destroying a
nation in the sense of eradicating its distinctness is to wipe out that
nation's language.

The importance of preventing cultural genocide has led to the
international community taking action in this area and setting up bodies
charged with the task of making sure the world's diversity is maintained.
The United Nations Educational Scientific and Cultural Organisation
(UNESCO) is one such organisation. The United Nations has enacted several
legal instruments that impose obligations in international law upon
countries to desist from ethnocidal actions and to make sure ethnic groups
have the opportunity to maintain their identity.

Cultural Genocide: the Case of Kurdish

Cultural genocide is a very surreptitious process. It worms its way
through an ethnic group in the most insidious manner. Bringing about the
disappearance of a language is not an easy task. Although in most
countries, the assimilation of minor ethnic groups into the dominant
national group has been achieved through means that are not on their face
draconian, in the case of Kurdish in Turkey, the most blatantly fascist
means have been deployed to bring about the destruction of the Kurds as a
distinct nation. Not only has the Turkish state refused to recognise the
Kurds as a group with their own identity, not only has the Turkish state
gone to the extent of banning even the speaking of Kurdish, it has
actually been a fundamental feature of Turkey's Kurdish policy to
eradicate any vestiges of Kurdishness.

Generations of Kurds have been forced to obtain their education in Turkish
instead of their mother tongue. The result of this despicable policy of
cultural extermination has been the massive loss of Kurdish speakers in
Turkey's south-eastern areas. To accelerate this process of the
disappearance of Kurdish, the Turkish state has also banned Kurdish music,
dress and other badges of cultural identity. It has even prohibited
Kurdish parents from giving their children Kurdish names. Tens of
thousands of Kurds have been deported from their villages under the
pretext of clearing out possible guerrilla hideouts and dumped in areas
inhabited by Turkish-speakers. Kurdish areas have been deliberately
populated with Turkish immigrants. The policy of Turkifying the Kurdish
people has proceeded without so much as a squeak of protest from Western
countries since Turkey happens to be a close NATO ally. Although the
atrocities committed against the Kurds by the Iraqi government, such as
the massacre by chemical gassing of 5000 Kurds at Halabja, are repeatedly
trotted out to bolster the Western case against Saddam's regime, nothing
is said about the genocidal actions of Turkey against its minority Kurdish
population.

One of the ways in which the extermination of Kurdish has been achieved is
by defaming Kurdish history and culture. Kurds have been portrayed in
Turkish state-sponsored propaganda as a backward primitive people
committed to a religious life, and indeed many apologists for the genocide
against the Kurds actually blame the Kurds for impeding the secularisation
of Turkey. Many ridiculous theories have been floated about the origins of
the Kurds, and the Kurdish language has been so vilified and degraded that
it has now given way to Turkish amongst a large percentage of Kurds. The
Universal Declaration of Linguistic Rights adverts to this pernicious
method of eradicating languages. In the recitals, it states: "invasion,
colonization, occupation and other instances of political, economic or
social subordination often involve the direct imposition of a foreign
language or, at the very least, distort perceptions of the value of
languages and give rise to hierarchical linguistic attitudes which
undermine the language loyalty of speakers." This is what has been
happening in Kurdistan for the last nine decades of oppression. For
Saddam, the best way to destroy the Kurdish nation was to gas the Kurds,
children and women, to death. For the Turkish state, the method chosen is
to destroy what it means to be Kurdish and force the Kurds to assimilate
into Turkish culture. Often the origin and justification of these
chauvinist policies are the actions and ideas of modern Turkey's founder,
Ataturk, who is often championed as a prophet of democracy, despite the
fact that he was no less a dictator than Hitler.

The Kurdish people in Turkey have become the innocent victims of a shrewd
cultural terrorism that has imprisoned their culture in the concentration
camp of illiteracy and underdevelopment and thereby sapped their will to
resist genocide and fight for national independence.

International Law on Language Rights

The 1989 Convention on the Rights of the Child, adopted by the UN General
Assembly provides in Article 29(1) that: "States parties agree that the
education of the child shall be directed to ... (c) the development of
respect for the child's own cultural identity, language and values..." The
United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Persons Belonging to National
or Ethnic, Religious and Linguistic Minorities provides in Article 4(3):
"States should take appropriate measures so that, wherever possible,
persons belonging to minorities may have adequate opportunities to learn
their mother tongue or to have instruction in their mother tongue." The
Universal Declaration on Linguistic Rights confers a number of important
rights on language communities throughout the world. Article 3(3) grants
language communities the right "for their own language and culture to be
taught", and the right "to receive attention in their own language from
government bodies and in socio-economic relations." Article 8 provides
that all language communities have the right to "have at their disposal
whatever means are necessary to ensure the transmission and continuity of
their language." Article 15 is especially pertinent to the situation in
Turkish-Occupied Kurdistan (T.O.K.) for it provides that "all language
communities are entitled to the official use of their language within
their territory." It hardly needs repeating that Kurdish has for decades
been banned in the government offices and schools of Kurdish areas.
Article 18 provides: "All language communities have the right for laws and
other legal provisions which concern them to be published in the language
specific to the territory." Of all the draconian laws that have been
implemented in TOK, of all the laws that have deprived the Kurdish people
of their right to political freedom, the most basic of rights, how many
have been translated into Kurdish?

Education Policy and International Law

The Universal Declaration on Linguistic Rights realises the importance of
education policy for the maintenance of diversity. Hence, Article 23(1)
provides: "Education must help to maintain and develop the language spoken
by the language community of the territory where it is provided." The
education policy that Turkey has forced upon the Kurdish people has been
calculated to bring about their destruction as a national group, to
obliterate all traces of them having been Kurds, to force them to feel
inferior about their own culture and thereby give it up for the supposedly
"superior" modern Turkish culture, even the latter is nothing more than a
cheap and fatuous imitation of Western culture. The Kurds are a brave,
hardy people who are not ashamed of who they are. They do not have to
prove to anyone the strength of character that has allowed them to survive
nine decades of genocide from no less than four different countries. They
do not need to suck up to anyone with meaningless parroting of catchwords
like "democracy" and "secularism". The Kurds are admired by Europeans and
Americans alike for what they are.

Article 26 of the Universal Declaration provides: "All language
communities are entitled to an education which enables their members to
acquire a full command of their own language." Article 29 provides:
"Everyone is entitled to receive an education in the language specific to
the territory where s/he resides." Article 50 provides: "All language
communities have the right for their language to occupy a pre-eminent
place in advertising, signs, external signposting and all other elements
that make up the image of the country." The names of countless towns and
villages in Turkish-Occupied Kurdistan (T.O.K.) have been altered and
given Turkish names. This attempt to stamp out the Kurdish character of
T.O.K. is nothing but part of the bigger genocidal agenda of wiping out
Kurdish nationhood not only within Turkey but also, if possible, in other
parts of Kurdistan.

Enforced Illiteracy -- Handmaiden of Cultural Genocide

The result of illiteracy and lack of education in Kurdish is that this
language is losing out every day to Turkish. More than 25% of the citizens
of Turkey are of Kurdish origin, but only 15% speak Kurdish as their
mother tongue. The psychology of how people perceive language is important
for understanding how the technique of Enforced Illiteracy works. When a
language is reduced to the status of a spoken slang, the elites no longer
regard this language as worthy of even voluntary learning. They regard it
as beneath the "dignity" that they imagine for themselves and their
children. The example they set for their society is then followed by all
those occupying lower rungs in the social ladder. Maintaining illiteracy
in a language is, thus, the best form of propaganda against it. This
policy of forcibly maintaining illiteracy in a language results in its
speakers becoming disaffected with it. They begin to think of it as an
unnecessary burden on their children, and hence as an impediment to their
careers. They also begin to think of their language as backward since
there's no literacy in it. One's language becomes relegated to the bottom
of the pile, it becomes a slang, and the groundwork is laid for its
eventual disappearance.

A ray of hope

In 1991 it seemed that the Kurdish people's suffering would come to an end
when the Western Allies imposed a no-fly zone over Iraqi Kurdistan. The
result of this ban on Iraqi military incursion into Kurdistan was the
establishment of an autonomous Kurdish government in this region. The fall
of Saddam's regime has enabled the Iraqi Kurds to establish a Kurdish
Regional Government, with its own Constitution, President, Prime Minister,
Parliament and Armed Forces. What we are seeing here is the embryonic
stage of a nation that has waited more than nine decades to be born.

The Kurdish people in Iraq are now an independent state in all but name.
Turkey has warned them that it will never tolerate an independent Kurdish
state. It has also become concerned at the possibility of the Iraqi
Kurdish government acquiring control of the oil resources of the Kirkuk
region. These resources would enable the Kurds to build up a robust
economy and finance the development of a military capable of taking on the
enemies of Kurdish independence. Although the recently adopted Iraqi
constitution lays down a federal structure for the country, it is likely
that Iraqi Kurdistan will emerge as an independent state some time in the
future. Such a prospect seems more probable given the precarious state of
inter-ethnic relations in Iraq and the growing chance of a civil war
breaking out. Until then, the Kurds can now freely go about developing and
celebrating their culture. A cultural renaissance has begun in Iraqi
Kurdistan that is bound to inspire Kurds living in bondage in Turkey and
Iran. Furthermore, Turkey's entry into the European Union will also impel
that country to recognise the Kurds as a separate nation, to grant them
cultural autonomy and to put an end to their genocide. Having put with up
unspeakable brutality and oppression, it seems the Kurds are finally
seeing the light at the end of the tunnel.

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