ERBIL, Kurdistan Region - A teacher named Adnan Furat has been imparting Kurdish courses both in his house and online for over a year, with the long-term goal of opening a private Kurdish school in the Kurdish province of Diyarbakir (Amed). Furat, who has turned a room in his house into a classroom and teaches Kurdish online courses to 50 students from different cities and countries, is trying to use all his legal rights to open a Kurdish school. “We visited Diyarbakir (Amed) education directorate and we said that we wanted to open a private school legally, but they said the requirements were not clear according to the law. We asked the ministry, and the ministry responded to us and sent us the requirements for special courses, but we said we would not teach courses, we want to open a school,” Furat told Rudaw’s Abdulsalam Akinci on Monday. Kurdish language is currently taught only in grades five, six, seven, and eight as an elective course in schools in the Kurdish provinces of Turkey. The Kurdish language had been banned in formal settings in Turkey since the establishment of the state until the government of the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) slightly removed the ban a decade ago, allowing Kurds to speak their language in informal settings and granting them the right to attend Kurdish elective courses at school and continue their studies in their mother tongue language at college.
