In the shadow of Kurdish: The silence of other ethnolinguistic minorities in Turkey

Middle East Report

Volumn 31, Issue 219, 2001, Pages 45-47

  SmithKocamahhul, Joan ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF CANTERBURY   (New Zealand)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 27844528491     PISSN: 08992851     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.2307/1559256     Document Type: Article

References (15)

1. The Treaties of Lausanne and Sèvres are available on the web at www.lib.byu.edu/∼rdh/wwi/1918p.html.
2. Youssef Courbage and Philippe Fargues, Christians and Jews under Islam (London: I. B. Tauris, 1997), p. 115.
3. The Turkish constitution is available in English at the Washington, DC Turkish embassy homepage at www.turkey.org. It is available in both English and Turkish at www.mfa.gov.tr/grupc/ca/cag/l142.htm and www.mfa.gov.tr/turkce/anayasa/Ana02.htm, respectively.
4. C. Rumpf, "The Turkish Law Prohibiting Languages Other than Turkish," Documentation of the International Conference on Human Rights in Kurdistan, 14-16 April 1989 (Hochschule: Bremen, 1989);
5. and C. Rumpf, idem, "Das Sprachenverbot in der Türkei unter besonderer Berücksichtigung inhrer völkerrechtlichen Verpflichtungen," Orient 30 (1989).
6. Martin van Bruinessen, "Kurds, Turks and the Alevi Revival in Turkey," Middle East Report 200 (Summer 1996).
7. Tove Skutnabb-Kangas and Sertaç Bucak, "Killing a Mother Tongue: How the Kurds Are Deprived of Linguistic Human Rights," in Tove Skutnabb-Kangas and Robert Phillipson, eds., Linguistic Human Rights: Overcoming Linguistic Discrimination (Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 1995).
8. Unlike Arabic, Lazi did not have a writing system of its own. Wolfgang Feuerstein, who first went to the area in the 1960s, developed Lazi writing. He, too, was arrested, beaten, imprisoned and finally deported; see Neal Ascherson, Black Sea (New York: Hill and Wang, 1995) p. 203.
9. Local sources refer to this as the "referendum." The Turkish Daily News cited the "plebiscite" in "Secret Talks Held Amid 'Controlled' Tension," October 19, 1998.
10. Academic sources, including Ataman Demir's Through the Ages: Antakya (Istanbul: Akbank, 1996), make no mention of a referendum per se. The contentious issue was how many seats would be assigned to each ethnic group. It is convenient for the Turkish administration that locals believe that the decision was made democratically rather than bureaucratically.
11. Philip Khoury, Syria and the French Mandate (London: I. B.Tauris, 1987), p. 495.
12. Compare this to Turkish sources for Antakya in 1938 that showed 62 percent of the population was Turkish. Demir Syria and the French Mandate op. cit., p. 110. According to Khoury, "Turkish landowners [required] their Arab peasants to register as Turks, or else be driven off the land. Whole Arab villages were known to have dissolved under such pressures."
13. Demir Syria and the French Mandate Op. cit., p. 507.
14. Turkish Daily News, October 1998.
15. The need to camouflage identify is less pronounced in Hatay itself, where the heterogeneity of the population is acknowledged and more tolerated.