Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan introduced a series of liberalizing reforms giving long anticipated overtures to the country’s Kurdish minorities. Students enrolled in private schools will now be permitted to receive teachings in their native language, while another reform will remove Turkey’s forced nationalist student pledge from primary and middle school classrooms.
Additional changes will lift the ban that prohibits public servants from wearing head-scarves – with the exception of judges, prosecutors, police officers and army members. Headscarved women will also be allowed to work as civil servants and become parliamentarians, and the 80 year long ban of Kurdish letters (q, w and x) will be removed.
The democratization package follows decades of demands from the Kurdish, who are estimated to form 20% of the country’s total population. The concessions aim to continue the year-long peace process between the government and Kurdish rebels. According to Prime Minister Erdogan, the changes are “not a first and will not be the last package of such reforms” and “Turkey is progressing irreversibly toward democracy. This package is a fundamental and historic phase of this progress.” Erdogan also suggested lowering the national voting threshold for electing political parties for parliament, making it possible for pro-Kurdish and other minority parties to qualify.
Akif Wan, member of the Kurdistan National Congress, said “we are disappointed [because] the Kurdish side has not been involved in the preparation of this package.” The Kurdish Peace and Democracy Party (BDP) describe the reforms as “falling short” and that Erdogan failed to address other pressing minority issues.
Since September 2012, Turkish parliament allowed Kurdish language courses as a foreign language elective in state schools, but most oftentimes lacked competent teachers and state support. Turkey’s state schools will still not offer general Kurdish education and will only be accessible in private institutions.
Korey Caliskan, a political scientist at Istanbul’s Bosporus University, said “offering this only to children of the rich is not a step towards more equality in Turkey, but towards greater inequality.”
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