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EDICOLA / KIOSK | LADINBolzano/Bozen, Göttingen, 30. August 2006
The Society for Threatened Peoples (GfbV) has today sent a
letter with the same text to the governments of the 25 member
states of the EU and the Directorate-General for the Enlargement
of the EU calling urgently on the EU candidate Turkey to end the
persecution of its large Kurdish ethnic group. The new terror
attacks of Kurdish extremists must be taken as an opportunity,
not only to combat the terror, but also to bring to an end the
intolerable discrimination of the Turkish Kurds. Courts, army
units stationed in the Kurdish region and Turkish provincial
authorities still treat the Kurdish population as third class
people.
"We call on the government and above all the generals, who are
still the real power in Turkey, to begin at long last the
reconstruction of the 3000 villages destroyed in South-east
Anatolia in the Kurdish-Turkish civil war", says the letter of
the General Secretary of the GfbV, Tilman Zülch. This is the
only way to begin the return of the expelled Kurdish country
families, who are at present forced to live in the slums of the
Turkish and Turkish- Kurdish towns and cities.
These approximately two million people provide in the opinion of
the GfbV a potential reservoir for the future recruiting of
extremists. The Kurd problem in Turkey can only be solved by the
complete equality of Kurdish alongside the Turkish language in
schools and universities, in the mass media and in the other
spheres of public life in the Kurdish language area of South-East
Turkey. In the field of recognizing Kurdish as an official
language Turkey has not gone beyond a few symbolic steps,
criticised the GfbV. There are some 15 million Kurds living in
Turkey.