Thursday, April 10, 2008
Diyarbakır nongovernmental organizations reiterate their demands for broader cultural rights at the presidential palace. Education and public services in a mother tongue were among the expectations of NGOs from main opposition leader Deniz Baykal and the prime minister, with varying results
Members of several nongovernmental organizations from the southeastern province of Diyarbakır visited President Abdullah Gül yesterday, the latest in a series of meetings with political leaders to convey their demands for cultural rights.
Gül met with members of Diyarbakır NGOs led by the chairman of the Diyarbakır Chamber of Commerce, Mehmet Kaya, who previously carried messages from mainly trade and commerce NGOs about education and public service in a mother tongue.
Kaya met with the main opposition Republican People's Party (CHP) leader, Deniz Baykal, together with representatives of 16 other NGOs Tuesday. “We support that you live your culture and preserve your identity, but we are one nation,” Baykal said. NGO representatives shared their demands for education and public service in their mother tongue with Baykal. “Our criteria for ethnic rights is that of the European Union. We believe that Turkey must go further on the way to fulfilling EU accession criteria,” Baykal said and added that Turkey's Kurdish question should be handled through democratic means. “I will lay bare the details of our new approach at our party congress on April 26 and 27,” Baykal said.
The NGOs earlier visit to Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan went awry when a NGO representative brought up points of view on Turkey's Kurdish question different than the prime minister's. Diyarbakır Bar President Sezgin Tanrıkulu argued with Erdoğan over providing education in a mother tongue.“You were going to declare a package. You always speak of the economy, the problem has a political dimension as well,” he said. When the prime minister reiterated that he has an economic approach to the problems of the Southeast, Tanrıkulu stressed that he meant the use of the Kurdish language in education and public services with emphasis on the word “political.” “Education in a mother tongue does not exist anywhere in the world,” Erdoğan said and cited Germany as an example. Erdoğan accused Tanrıkulu of dishonesty when the latter refused to compare Turks in Germany with Kurds in Turkey, upon which Tanrıkulu left the meeting. Education in a mother tongue was included in the report of nongovernmental organizations that were presented to the prime minister.
The Prime Ministry's press center yesterday issued a written statement on Erdoğan's meeting with the NGOs, and reported that the prime minister pointed to private courses where learning Kurdish is possible, but asserted that formal education should be in the official language. The prime minister said there are no classes for mother toungue education in schools in Europe. “Depite the prime minister's concrete exemples based on his trips to Europe, the representative insisted, and he was reminded that such propogandizing that aims to manipulate the press and the public opinion is incompatible with honesty,” read the statement.
Members of Diyarbakır NGOs were not able to meet with Nationalist Movement Party (MHP) leader, Devlet Bahçeli.