Cyprus-Forum.com

[Kurdistan]

I support your stuggle and pray that you someday will take back the occupied northern Cyprus. I have been browsing the web for a couple of hours and I am SO PROUD over my Cypriot brothers, you are very very active in your issue.

I would be honored, as a Kurd, to have a free Cyprus as one of my neighbour, a neighbour to Kurdistan, wich also is occupied.

My question to you, friends, is:
How many Kurds are there in Cyprus?

/îsa from Kurdistan

[Tim Drayton]

I support your stuggle and pray that you someday will take back the occupied northern Cyprus. I have been browsing the web for a couple of hours and I am SO PROUD over my Cypriot brothers, you are very very active in your issue.

I would be honored, as a Kurd, to have a free Cyprus as one of my neighbour, a neighbour to Kurdistan, wich also is occupied.

My question to you, friends, is:
How many Kurds are there in Cyprus?

/îsa from Kurdistan

There were two chaps who used to work on a building site near where I live (in Limassol) who I heard speaking to each other in Turkish as I passed. I am fluent in Turkish, and one day I stopped to inquire about them. It seems they were Kurdish refugees who claimed to be involved in the struggle for a "great, free Kurdistan". It always strikes me as odd that so many Kurdish nationalists from Turkey actually speak in Turkish among themselves.

I once did interpreting work at Heathrow Airport in the UK for the immigration department of the Home Office. On many occasions I was interpreting for assylum seekers who claimed to be fleeing oppression as Kurds in Turkey, yet they asked for an interpreter from Turkish, not Kurdish.

Is it not rather odd that so many people who are claiming political assylum as Kurds here in Cyprus or in the UK don't actually seem to speak Kurdish?

I lived in Turkey for a long time, and have met plenty of people of Kurdish origin living in the West of the Turkey who are running successful businesses or have good, professional jobs and who are perfectly happy with their lot and turn red faced with anger if you even mention the PKK or Abdullah Öcalan. I also once met somebody who had a well-paid job as a science teacher at a private school in Istanbul who proudly flashed his refugee papers granted by France to me. He said that every summer he travels to to France, via a third country so that the French authorities do not realise that he is actually still resident in Turkey, and renews his refugee papers on the grounds that he is a poor, oppressed Kurd in the Republic of Turkey, then returns back to his good job in Istanbul for the next academic year.

I have been to the east of Turkey, and seen the deplarable living conditions there. However, people of all ethnic origins face these living conditions there. It is a question of uneven development rather than any kind of systematic discrimination.

I am not totally unsympathetic to the fight for Kuridsh cultural autonomy in Turkey, and I can even speak a few sentences of Kurdish, but you have to admit that a lot of very fishy things are going on.

[Oracle]

I agree Tim seems to attract a lot of "fishy" shenanigans

I thought part of the problem, is that Turkey denies the Kurds easy access to educational facilities where their native tongue and culture is predominant?

[Tim Drayton]

I agree Tim seems to attract a lot of "fishy" shenanigans

I thought part of the problem, is that Turkey denies the Kurds easy access to educational facilities where their native tongue and culture is predominant?

Point taken. This is one of the arguments used to explain this phenomenon, and it has some validity. However, you would think that people who have a strong ideological commitment to a nationalist cause would take the trouble to learn the language, or keep it alive in their family.

Call me a cynic, but I am sure that most of these people arriving at Heathrow already have a job lined up washing dishes at a restaurant owned by a member of the extended family, who tell them to claim to be Kurdish when asking forassylum because this grants them automatic entry - which it does, I have seen it.