ISTANBUL,— A Turkish TV presenter on Tuesday prevented a Kurdish woman from speaking in Kurdish during a live broadcast, drawing ire on social media and criticism from Turkey’s pro-Kurdish Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP).
Didem Arsalan Yilmaz, presenter for the Turkish media channel Show TV, stopped a woman from speaking Kurdish on-air on Tuesday evening, telling her to “speak Turkish properly, we will understand. This is the Republic of Turkey.”
The woman was on the show to resolve a family issue involving her nieces.
Yilmaz presents the daily social TV show Vazgecme, where she uses television to solve people’s problems, reveal secrets, and reunite families. Scores of people are commenting on her response using the hashtag #haddinibildidemarsalan, or “know your place Didem Arsalan.”
Her response also drew critics from members of the HDP.
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“This is enmity against the Kurds,” MP Remziye Tosun said in a tweet.
“The Kurdish language has lived for a thousand of years despite oppression,” the party’s women assembly spokesperson tweeted.
The presenter Yilmaz tweeted on Wednesday that she did not mean to be disrespectful to the Kurdish language and apologized if she hurt anyone. “I have no problem with Kurdish speakers. I apologize our citizens who were hurt.”
She explained that she did not allow the woman to speak in Kurdish so that everyone would understands her, adding that she would do the same if the woman spoke in Arabic or English.
Kurdish is not an official language in Turkey despite having a roughly tens of millions speakers in the country. Kurds are allowed to speak in their mother tongue at home, although the government has allowed some pro-government TV channels to present programs in Kurdish.
The Kurdish language has been banned in official settings in Turkey since the foundation of the state nearly a century ago. The restriction of the language was eased during the peace process between the government and the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) in 2013. However, when the process ended in 2015, things reversed.
The state has at times denied the very existence of Kurds. The word “Kurdistan” is banned from the parliament, most Kurdish private media is closed, and the HDP is under immense pressure with hundreds of its members in jail. An armed Kurdish group, the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), has waged a decades-long conflict with the state.
A Turkish publishing house censored the word Kurdistan in a Turkish translation of a popular novel, only catching the author’s attention in a Twitter movement earlier this month.
In June, a campaign was launched in Turkey to make Kurdish an official language.
Before August 2002, the Turkish government placed severe restrictions on the use of Kurdish language, prohibiting the language in education and broadcast media.
The use of the Kurdish letters X, W, Q which do not exist in the Turkish alphabet are prohibited in Turkey and has led to judicial persecution in 2000 and 2003. Kurdish Newroz must be written as ‘Nevruz’ with Turkish alphabet.
The PKK took up arms in 1984 against the Turkish state, which still denies the constitutional existence of Kurds, to push for greater autonomy in Turkish Kurdistan for the Kurdish minority who make over 22.5 million of the country’s 82-million population. More than 40,000 Turkish soldiers and Kurdish rebels, have been killed in the conflict.
A large Kurdish community in Turkey and worldwide openly sympathise with PKK rebels and Abdullah Ocalan, who founded the PKK group in 1974 and currently serving a life sentence in Turkey, has a high symbolic value for most Kurds in Turkey and worldwide according to observers.
Read more about Kurdish language in Turkey
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