“I saw the parcel with my Agit was there. So, I took the bones and went home,” Halime Aksoy, mother to the late Agit İpek, said to the Mezopotamya News Agency recently. Like so many Kurdish families, Aksoy’s family had been mourning the loss of their loved one without their body. It wasn’t until this […]
May 15 was celebrated as Kurdish Language Day all over the world, except in Turkey. Almost 20 million Kurdish people live in Turkey – the highest Kurdish population in the world – but education in Kurdish is still forbidden. This has serious effects on the educational landscape. When the mother tongue is different from the […]
The streets of Diyarbakır, Turkey’s largest Kurdish-majority city, are crowded despite the COVID-19 outbreak. Half the shops are closed, yet the other half remain open. The city is managed by a state-appointed official, like most of the other Kurdish-majority cities in Turkey. Selçuk Mızraklı, the elected mayor of Diyarbakır, and most of the other Kurdish […]
In the fight against the COVID-19 pandemic, the Turkish government has not declared a full lockdown to protect the health of its citizens. The main reason behind this decision is the country’s economic situation. The government cannot say to its citizens: “Sit at home, just look after your health, we will pay your electricity, water […]
I have a dream of establishing a school of peace in Sur, the historical and poor centre of my hometown, Diyarbakır. About ten years ago, I was able to find the perfect place – a 19th century stone house, complete with a beautiful mulberry tree, which covered the entire residence. When I first saw the house, […]
On the night of April 10, after the Turkish Interior Ministry announced a 48-hour lockdown across 31 provinces, residents of the country’s major cities scrambled to the markets and bakeries to stock up on essentials. But in the southeastern city of Diyarbakır, my hometown, few people were in a hurry to make last-minute purchases. This […]