Survey reveals alienation of Kurdish youth in Turkey

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Turkish police search Kurdish youths during a security operation in Diyarbakir, southeast Turkey. A survey says the youths feel that they are being discriminated. (AP/File)

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Turkey-backed Syrian fighters break open the front door of a house at a position that they are holding in the Syrian border town of Ras al-Ain, in this file photo taken on October 19, 2019. (AFP)

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Updated 21 December 2020

MENEKSE TOKYAY

December 20, 2020 21:48

Survey reveals alienation of Kurdish youth in Turkey

Majority of young Kurds feel deprived of their language and would be happy to emigrate

Updated 21 December 2020

MENEKSE TOKYAY

December 20, 2020 21:48

ANKARA: A survey conducted by YADA Foundation, Kurdish Studies Center and Rawest Research Company reveals the growing alienation of the Kurdish youth in Turkey.

The survey, which was carried out with support of the British Embassy and the Heinrich Boll Stiftung, was conducted in Istanbul, Izmir, southern Mersin and Adana, southeastern Diyarbakir, Mardin, Sanliurfa and eastern Van provinces with more than 1,500 young people between 15 to 29 ages.

Kurdish youth appeared pessimistic, with a lower rate of happiness and life satisfaction compared to the rest of the society. Those who live in the western half of Turkey feel much more pessimistic due to the discrimination they face.

Besides supporting the national team, they feel strongly attached to Amedspor, the football team of Kurdish-majority Diyarbakir province, as a symbol of their identity.

Over half of Kurdish youth have been internally displaced in Turkey generally with their families whether in search of employment, fleeing fighting between the state and the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) and/or for education purposes.

Almost 70 percent of the Kurdish respondents say they have been subject to occasional or frequent discrimination because of their Kurdish identity. Those who are voters of the pro-Kurdish Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP) experienced more discrimination than supporters of other political parties.

Some of the respondents said that they were prevented from renting a house when they were asked about their city of origin, or they couldn’t buy even a bottle of water when they attended an Amedspor match in a western province of the country.

In a similar pattern, players of Amedspor have been frequently exposed to harassment by rival fans, while the team’s Kurdish supporters were occasionally banned from attending matches.

Kurdish youth increasingly use Turkish in their daily communication with friends and family members after years of crackdown on cultural rights and after failed attempts to make Kurdish language as part of the educational system.

FASTFACT

Kurdish youth appeared pessimistic, with a lower rate of happiness and life satisfaction compared to the rest of the society.

Kurdish respondents say they cannot even dream in Kurdish.

According to another survey, only about 18 percent of the 600 young Kurds surveyed could speak, read and write in Kurdish.

Kurds make up about 20 percent of Turkey’s population of 82 million. But the survey found that only a third of Kurdish youth are employed, while a quarter are working as unskilled labourers and the rest are unemployed.

Their mother tongue is the top priority issue (38.4 percent) among Kurdish youth, followed by discrimination (24 percent), education (12.5 percent), unemployment (9.8 percent), freedom of speech (7.4 percent), injustice (5.5. percent) and identity (2.4 percent).

Regarding the failure of the short-lived “Kurdish peace talks” between the Turkish state and the PKK in 2015, Kurdish youth who are pro-HDP blame both their party and the PKK for the failed peace attempts, while 65 percent think that the infighting will never end.

The survey also found that the majority of Kurdish youth is inclined to de-radicalize while they consolidate their cultural identities as Kurds.

Roj Girasun, director of Diyarbakir-based Rawest Research, thinks that Kurdish youth is being de-radicalized because they are satisfied with the increased visibility of the HDP on the political arena as a legal actor.

“However, they mostly think that the current government is not able to resolve the decades-long Kurdish conflict in the country,” he told Arab News.

A new party looking to appeal to Kurdish conservative youth is launching soon, although the opposition claims it intends to divide Kurdish votes in Turkey.

The survey also found that, given the chance, the majority of Kurdish youth would emigrate to Western countries out of pessimism over both freedom of expression and employment.

While Twitter is a source of information for about 30 percent nationally, it increases to 44 percent among Kurdish youth.

“It shows that Kurdish youth feels disappointed by the mainstream media which doesn’t give enough space and visibility to their problems, and they refer to the alternative news channels to fill this gap,” Girasun said.

Although the use of Kurdish is on the decrease among Kurdish youth, they are still holding on to their political identity and demanding more cultural rights from the state authorities to keep their mother tongue alive because those living in the western provinces are increasingly forgetting their Kurdish.

Kurdish culture has generally been demonized over the years, with Kurdish language being categorized as “unknown language” in the judicial system.

“This atmosphere affects their romantic relationships. 44 percent of Kurdish respondents do not want to marry a Turkish girl. They are building very high walls around their Kurdishness vis-à-vis Turks,” Girasun said.

Apart from such social distancing, the restriction of academia and arts in Kurdish fuels disappointment among Kurdish youth. In July, Turkey’s Council of Higher Education banned students studying Kurdish language and literature at Turkish universities from writing their dissertations in Kurdish, and obliged all dissertations at Kurdish language departments to be written in Turkish.

In October, the Turkish authorities banned a play performed in Kurdish in Istanbul by the Nobel prize-winning Italian writer Dario Fo over the allegations of terror propaganda.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan recently claimed that “Turkey has no Kurdish issue.”

Topics: Turkish kurdish community Syrian Kurdish

UN investigator says possible to find ‘enough’ proof for Syria prosecutions

Updated 7 sec ago

AFP

December 22, 2024 23:00

UN investigator says possible to find ‘enough’ proof for Syria prosecutions

Since Assad’s fall, Petit has been able to visit the country but his team still require authorization to begin their work inside Syria which they have requested

Updated 7 sec ago

AFP

December 22, 2024 23:00

DAMASCUS: The visiting head of a UN investigative body for Syria said Sunday it was possible to find “more than enough” evidence to convict people of crimes against international law, but there was an immediate need to secure and preserve it.
The doors of Syria’s prisons were flung open after an Islamist-led rebel alliance ousted longtime ruler Bashar Assad this month, more than 13 years after his brutal repression of anti-government protests triggered a war that would kill more than 500,000 people.
With families rushing to former prisons, detention centers and alleged mass graves to find any trace of disappeared relatives, many have expressed concern about safeguarding documents and other evidence.
“We have the possibility here to find more than enough evidence left behind to convict those we should prosecute,” said Robert Petit, who heads the International Impartial and Independent Mechanism (IIIM) set up by the UN in 2016 to prepare prosecutions for major international crimes in Syria.
But he noted that preserving evidence would “need a lot of coordination between all the different actors.”
“We can all understand the human impulse to go in and try and find your loved ones,” Petit said. “The fact is, though, that there needs to be a control put in place to restrict access to all these different centers... It needs to be a concerted effort by everyone who has the resources and the powers to do that to freeze that access, preserve it.”
The organization, known as the Mechanism, was not permitted to work in Syria under Assad’s government but was able to document many crimes from abroad.
Since Assad’s fall, Petit has been able to visit the country but his team still require authorization to begin their work inside Syria which they have requested.
He said his team had “documented hundreds of detention centers... Every security center, every military base, every prison had their own either detention or mass graves attached to it.”
“We’re just now beginning to scratch that surface and I think it’s going to be a long time before we know the full extent of it,” he told AFP.
According to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights monitor, more than 100,000 people died in Syria’s jails and detention centers from 2011.
The Saydnaya complex, the site of extrajudicial executions, torture and forced disappearances, epitomised the atrocities committed against Assad’s opponents.
Petit compared Saydnaya to the S-21 prison in Cambodia’s capital Phnom Penh, which came to stand for the Khmer Rouge’s wider atrocities and now houses the country’s genocide museum.
The Saydnaya facility will become “an emblematic example of inhumanity,” he said.
Petit said his team had reached out to the new authorities “to get permission to come here and start discussing a framework by which we can conduct our mandate.”
“We had a productive meeting and we’ve asked formally now, according to their instructions, to be able to come back and start the work. So we’re waiting for that response,” he said.
Even without setting foot in Syria, Petit’s 82-member team has gathered huge amounts of evidence of the worst breaches of international law committed during the war.
The hope is that there could now be a national accountability process in Syria and that steps could be taken to finally grant the International Criminal Court jurisdiction to prosecute crimes committed in the country.

Topics: Fall of Assad Syria

Tunisian women herb harvesters struggle with drought

Updated 32 min 51 sec ago

AFP

December 22, 2024 22:23

Tunisian women herb harvesters struggle with drought

Tunisia produces around 10,000 tonnes of aromatic and medicinal herbs each year, according to official figures

Updated 32 min 51 sec ago

AFP

December 22, 2024 22:23

TUNIS: On a hillside in Tunisia’s northwestern highlands, women scour a sun-scorched field for the wild herbs they rely on for their livelihoods, but droughts are making it ever harder to find the precious plants.
Yet the harvesters say they have little choice but to struggle on, as there are few opportunities in a country hit hard by unemployment, inflation and high living costs.
“There is a huge difference between the situation in the past and what we are living now,” said Mabrouka Athimni, who heads a local collective of women herb harvesters named “Al-Baraka.”

Mabrouka Athimni, who heads a local collective of women herb harvesters named "Al Baraka" ("Blessing") shows oil extracted from plants in a laboratory in Tbainia village near the city of Ain Drahem, in the north west of Tunisia on November 6, 2024. (AFP)

“We’re earning half, sometimes just a third, of what we used to.”

SPEEDREAD

Yet the harvesters say they have little choice but to struggle on, as there are few opportunities in a country hit hard by unemployment and high living costs.

Tunisia produces around 10,000 tonnes of aromatic and medicinal herbs each year, according to official figures.
Rosemary accounts for more than 40 percent of essential oil exports, mainly destined for French and American markets.
For the past 20 years, Athimni’s collective has supported numerous families in Tbainia, a village near the city of Ain Draham in a region with much higher poverty rates than the national average.
Women, who make up around 70 percent of the agricultural workforce, are the main breadwinners for their households in Tbainia.
Tunisia is in its sixth year of drought and has seen its water reserves dwindle, as temperatures have soared past 50 degrees Celsius in some areas during the summer.
The country has 36 dams, mostly in the northwest, but they are currently just 20 percent full — a record low in recent decades.
The Tbainia women said they usually harvested plants like eucalyptus, rosemary and mastic year-round, but shrinking water resources and rare rainfall have siphoned oil output.
“The mountain springs are drying up, and without snow or rain to replenish them, the herbs yield less oil,” said Athimni.
Mongia Soudani, a 58-year-old harvester and mother of three, said her work was her household’s only income. She joined the collective five years ago.

“We used to gather three or four large sacks of herbs per harvest,” she said. “Now, we’re lucky to fill just one.”

Forests in Tunisia cover 1.25 million hectares, about 10 percent of them in the northwestern region.

Wildfires fueled by drought and rising temperatures have ravaged these woodlands, further diminishing the natural resources that women like Soudani depend on.

In the summer of last year, wildfires destroyed around 1,120 hectares near Tbainia.

“Parts of the mountain were consumed by flames, and other women lost everything,” Soudani recalled.

To adapt to some climate-driven challenges, the women received training from international organizations, such as the Food and Agriculture Organization, to preserve forest resources.

Still, Athimni struggles to secure a viable income.

“I can’t fulfil my clients’ orders anymore because the harvest has been insufficient,” she said.

The collective has lost a number of its customers as a result, she said.

Topics: Tunis Tunisia women

Civilians suffer as rival forces seek foothold in wider Darfur region

Updated 7 min 46 sec ago

Reuters

December 22, 2024 22:13

Civilians suffer as rival forces seek foothold in wider Darfur region

Rapid Support Forces seize back control of key logistical base

Updated 7 min 46 sec ago

Reuters

December 22, 2024 22:13

DUBAI/CAIRO: Sudan’s Rapid Support Forces (RSF) seized back control of a key logistical base in North Darfur on Sunday, the paramilitary group said, a day after it was taken by rival forces allied with Sudan’s army.
The conflict between the RSF and the army erupted in April 2023, and some of the fiercest fighting has taken place in North Darfur as the army and allied Joint Forces — a collection of former rebel groups — battle to maintain a last foothold in the wider Darfur region.
The Joint Forces and the army said in statements they had taken control on Saturday of the Al-Zurug base, which the RSF has used during the 20-month war as a logistical base to channel supplies from over the nearby borders with Chad and Libya.

BACKGROUND

• The conflict between the RSF and the army erupted in April 2023, and some of the fiercest fighting has taken place in North Darfur.

• Since fighting picked up in Al-Fashir in mid-April, at least 782 civilians have been killed, according to a UN human rights report.

Dozens of RSF soldiers were killed, vehicles destroyed and supplies captured as they captured the base, they said.
The incident could inflame ethnic tensions between the Arab tribes that form the base of the RSF and the Zaghawa tribe that forms most of the Joint Forces, analysts say.
The RSF accused Joint Forces fighters of killing civilians and burning down nearby homes and public amenities during the raid.
“The Joint Forces carried out ethnic cleansing against innocent civilians in Al-Zurug and intentionally killed children, women, and the elderly and burnt and destroyed wells and markets and homes and the health center and schools,” it said in a statement on Sunday.
The Joint Forces said the base had been used by the RSF as a “launching point for barbaric operations against civilians” in areas including Al-Fashir, the capital of North Darfur state and one of the most active frontlines in the fighting.
Since fighting picked up in Al-Fashir in mid-April, at least 782 civilians have been killed, according to a UN human rights report, the result of attacks via “intense” heavy artillery and suicide drones from the RSF and airstrikes and artillery strikes by the army.
On Sunday, activists from the Al-Fashir Resistance Committee reported an onslaught of at least 30 missiles fired on different parts of the city.
Seizing control of the city would bolster the RSF’s attempt to install a parallel government to the national government in Port Sudan, analysts say.

Topics: Sudan conflict Sudan army Sudan’s Rapid Support Forces (RSF)

Jordanian minister criticizes ‘sensational’ reporting of Middle East events

Updated 52 min 23 sec ago

Arab News

December 22, 2024 22:03

Jordanian minister criticizes ‘sensational’ reporting of Middle East events

Mohammad Momani stressed the importance of obtaining verified information
He said media freedom should not be misused to distort regional events

Updated 52 min 23 sec ago

Arab News

December 22, 2024 22:03

LONDON: Jordanian Minister of Government Communication Mohammad Momani emphasized the importance of professionalism and accuracy in reporting Middle Eastern events during a meeting with local, Arab and international media representatives on Sunday.

Momani said that a few international media outlets “sensationalize” regional events at the cost of accuracy, arguing that “this does not serve the public and undermines professional standards.”

He discussed with media representatives the importance of obtaining verified information to ensure accuracy, serve public opinion and uphold the right to knowledge, the official Jordanian news agency, Petra, reported.

Over the past year, some Western media outlets reporting on the Israeli war in the Gaza Strip and the conflict with Lebanon, as well as the fall of the Assad regime in Syria, have investigated some details in the stories they ran.

CNN investigated a recent video report that captures the moment a Syrian prisoner was freed from a secretive prison in Damascus. Critics have claimed that the report was staged and that the man featured in the CNN video was not who he claimed to be.

Momani said that media freedom should not be misused to distort regional circumstances or promote political and ideological agendas, Petra added.

He called on media outlets in Jordan to report on the country’s political and security realities professionally, accurately representing the event in all its aspects while rejecting false or misleading narratives.

Momani said that the Jordanian government was dedicated to transparency and communication with media representatives, including Arab, international and local outlets.

He praised the professional reporting on regional events by Jordanian state agencies and commended the country’s balanced political stance and commitment to stability.

Jordan’s Ministry of Government Communication regularly holds meetings and briefings to enhance communication with media representatives in Jordan.

Topics: Jordan

Weakened Iran could pursue nuclear weapon, White House’s Sullivan says

Updated 41 min 5 sec ago

AFP

December 22, 2024 17:23

Weakened Iran could pursue nuclear weapon, White House’s Sullivan says

Updated 41 min 5 sec ago

AFP

December 22, 2024 17:23

WASHINGTON: The Biden administration is concerned that a weakened Iran could build a nuclear weapon, White House National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan said on Sunday, adding that he was briefing President-elect Donald Trump’s team on the risk.
Iran has suffered setbacks to its regional influence after Israel’s assaults on its allies, Palestinian Hamas and Lebanon’s Hezbollah, followed by the fall of Iran-aligned Syrian President Bashar Assad.
Israeli strikes on Iranian facilities, including missile factories and air defenses, have reduced Tehran’s conventional military capabilities, Sullivan told CNN.
“It’s no wonder there are voices (in Iran) saying, ‘Hey, maybe we need to go for a nuclear weapon right now ... Maybe we have to revisit our nuclear doctrine’,” Sullivan said.
Iran says its nuclear program is peaceful, but it has expanded uranium enrichment since Trump, in his 2017-2021 presidential term, pulled out of a deal between Tehran and world powers that put restrictions on Iran’s nuclear activity in exchange for sanctions relief.
Sullivan said that there was a risk that Iran might abandon its promise not to build nuclear weapons.
“It’s a risk we are trying to be vigilant about now. It’s a risk that I’m personally briefing the incoming team on,” Sullivan said, adding that he had also consulted with US ally Israel.
Trump, who takes office on Jan. 20, could return to his hard-line Iran policy by stepping up sanctions on Iran’s oil industry. Sullivan said Trump would have an opportunity to pursue diplomacy with Tehran, given Iran’s “weakened state.”
“Maybe he can come around this time, with the situation Iran finds itself in, and actually deliver a nuclear deal that curbs Iran’s nuclear ambitions for the long term,” he said.

Topics: Iran US Jake Sullivan

Survey reveals alienation of Kurdish youth in Turkey