Turkish daily life for 15 million Kurds: torture, arrest, murder, mass expulsion - compulsory "Turkishness”

"The Turkish people is a people of friendship and tolerance”... "Wherever it goes, it brings only love and joy”... "Assimilation is a crime against humanity”

Prime Minister Recep Tayip Erdogan during his visit to Germany in February 2008

The General Secretary for Threatened Peoples (GfbV), Tilman Zülch, has labelled Turkey as Europe’s forerunner in thrusting Islam. In no other European country are the languages and cultures of minorities so grossly suppressed and persecuted as in the homeland of the Turkish prime minister.

The Turkish Prime Minister, Recep Tayip Erdogan, is calling for schools for Turkish migrants in Germany, but there is not in Turkey one single Kurdish school for a people who were living in the country one thousand years before the settlement by Turks and who are always calling for the opening of a Kurdish school of their own. Estimates of the GfbV show that for approximately three million Kurdish children in Turkish Kurdistan at least 10,000 schools are needed. In these in the opinion of international experts on minorities the Kurdish language and history should be taught at all levels besides the Turkish official language. As a comparison: in Iraqi Kurdistan (about 4 million inhabitants) there are 5,303 Kurdish schools, and among them 58 Assyro-Aramaic and – in Arbil – 16 Turkmen schools.

In Turkey Kurdish publications are forbidden and their dissemination is prevented by the Turkish authorities, the military and the courts. The publication of a single Kurdish daily newspaper "Azadiya Welt” is being constantly prevented and its distribution in public is strictly forbidden. Nearly all those working for it have spent at least a year in Turkish prisons. Its editor, Vedat Kursun, was arrested a few days ago, on 6th February 2008, and is still in custody. Hundreds of Kurdish authors have been sentenced in Turkey or have been charged because they have written about Kurdish history, culture or language. A book was recently forbidden by the author Yilmaz Camlibel, who lives in Germany, which tells the story of one of the three Kurdish uprisings which was bloodily suppressed by Kemal Atatürk. About three million Kurdish refugees are still not allowed to return to their destroyed villages.