ERBIL, Kurdistan Region - Kirkuk’s education directorate on Friday reversed a controversial decision to replace the use of the Kurdish alphabet in the official records of schools in the province, following pressure from the city’s Kurdish MPs.
In a letter to the city’s primary schools, the education directorate ordered them to use the Arabic alphabet when writing students’ names instead of the Kurdish one.
“This decision is illegal, because Kurdish is an official language, and we have education in Kurdish in Kirkuk,” Sabah Habib, a member of the education committee in the Iraqi parliament, told Rudaw’s Hardi Mohammed on Friday.
Habib said the decision was taken by the primary screening center in Kirkuk’s education directorate, in charge of student records, upon receiving directives from its counterpart in Baghdad, on the basis that this would prevent issues that might arise while recording the names of students, as the clerks in Baghdad do not know how to use the Kurdish keyboard.
According to Habib the education directorate’s order put forth the option to use Kurdish spelling of student names using Arabic letters, which he also deems to be unacceptable.
“We do not accept it like that either, we will send them Kurdish employees, we will provide them with Kurdish font to eliminate their excuses and solve their issue,” he said.
Following the negative reactions from the Kurds of Kirkuk, the education directorate released a statement saying that Kurdish letters will also be used to record students’ names, reversing the controversial decision.
The Iraqi constitution recognizes Kurdish and Arabic as the country's official languages, while also enshrining the rights of minorities such as Turkmens, Assyrians, and Armenians to study in their mother tongues in the state’s educational institutions.
Any move against the Kurdish language is particularly loaded in Kirkuk, where under Iraq’s Baathist regime the use of Kurdish was banned, as a part of the efforts to Arabize the oil-rich city. After Saddam Hussein was toppled in 2003, education in Kurdish was restarted.
The Kurdish language is taught in 515 schools and kindergartens in Kirkuk province. According to data from the Kurdish Studies Department in Kirkuk, 7,600 teachers run these classes and an estimated 98,000 students are studying the Kurdish language.
