Our allies, the Turks and the Kurds

Anyone who commits the land power of the United States to the Middle East ought to have his head examined –Douglas MacArthur, generously paraphrased

Hurriyet Daily News:

As Turkey’s first full-time Kurdish TV Channel, TRT-6, is about to be launched, bans remain on the use of letters in the Kurdish alphabet such as w, q, and x, which are absent in the Turkish language.

The head of the Kurdish Writers’ Association, İrfan Babaoğlu, dismissed the channel initiative as tragicomic and said the dilemma Turkey faces now is the use of the Kurdish language, speaking to the Hürriyet Daily News & Economic Review yesterday.

“People cannot name their children, streets, or parks in Kurdish. Just today (Sunday) in Diyarbakır, 12 parks were opened; all their original names were in Kurdish. They were then given to the municipality and the names were changed by the district governor,” Babaoğlu said. “Most of them did not even have w, q, or x in the name. …

Parliament Speaker Köksal Toptan requested minute keepers of Parliament to refer to the Kurdish not as “an unknown language” that has been the practice since 1991, but as “a non-Turkish language.”

These are our friends.

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