1.1 million Kurds are ignored - Kurdish ethnic group must finally be officially recognized!

On the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the signing of the German-Turkish labor recruitment agreement - which was celebrated in Berlin - the Society for Threatened Peoples (STP) accused the federal government on Wednesday, to systematically repress the existence of the second-largest non-German group of immigrants. "It is absurd that the existence and identity of the Kurds - who make up about a third of the approximately three million "Turkish" fellow citizens in Germany - is simply not recognized," said the STP's Secretary General, Tilman Zülch in Göttingen. "Thus, the suppression of Kurds in Turkey also continues in this country, instead of them being given an opportunity to maintain their culture and language and to emancipate themselves as an ethnic group." 

Today, the human rights activists urged the federal government to review the existence of around 1.1 million Kurdish immigrants - with about 300,000 of them who acquired German citizenship - and to officially recognize and equate them with other immigrant communities. This would include Kurdish-language counseling, care facilities and Kurdish programs on the public broadcasting stations.

At the same time, the federal government should finally start to demand equal rights for the Kurds in Turkey. It is disgraceful, that the Turkish prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan demands Turkish grammar schools in every German federal state on one hand, but on the other hand not a single Kurdish primary school for the 15 million Kurds in Turkey has ever been permitted.