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        On his visit late last month to Sanandaj, the capital of Iran’s Kurdistan province, President Hassan Rouhani made an important announcement. For the first time, Kurdish language studies will officially be offered to university students. With the opening of a Kurdish Language and Literature program at the University of Kurdistan, Article …

    Diyarbakir’s Kurdish community has a long tradition of resistance. Many in the younger generation grew up with images of dead relatives – martyrs from the PKK-Turkey war of the nineties.   By Dominique Soguel DIYARBAKIR, TURKEY — In her flowing dress, leather sandals, and sunglasses, Ozgur Yesha, whose name …

Bookchin’s municipalist ideas, once rejected by communists and anarchists alike, have now come to inspire the Kurdish quest for democratic autonomy   Boris Leverink The introduction to the new book The Next Revolution: Popular Assemblies and the Promise of Direct Democracy (Verso, 2015), explains how Murray Bookchin – born to Russian Jewish immigrants …

      By Joris Leverink On August 1, 2015   For years, the Turkish central government, led by the former prime minister and current president Erdogan, has claimed that there is no such thing as a “Kurdish problem”, denying the fact that the country’s Kurdish population has been discriminated against on the …

        In Diyarbakır, southeastern Turkey, there are at least 20,000 refugees, including many Yazidis, who dream of reaching Europe.  Dimitri Bettoni | Diyarbakır 24 July 2015 Refugees’ camp – Anna Pazos In Diyarbakır, euphoria for the electoral results [of the parliamentary elections of June 7th, ed.] is …

      Photo: Kurds demonstrate in Strasbourg calling for Ocalan’s release, February 2015. Demotix/ Jonathan Rae. All rights reserved. Past experience suggests that this unclarity about the peace process may once again open the door for brutal conflict. Turkey and the Kurds share the aim of ending their long-standing …

  The 21-year-old is one of dozens of members of the autonomous Kurdish region’s peshmerga forces studying at a school in the northern Iraqi village of Bahra, some three kilometres (two miles) from the closest Islamic State (IS) group position. A sign on a house in the village reads “Peshmerga School”, …

    The Kurdish institute is about to disappear, is in danger of dying! It has no more money. The best, the biggest Kurdish Institute, which represents 25 million Kurds — perhaps even 30, the only people without a State — the Institute is threatened. So, please, it must be …

  The state The State is a social contract, a guarantee of social order in exchange for which the citizens agree to reduce their freedom. According to Carré de Malberg, one of France’s leading constitutional scholars, “the state is a community of men attached to a territory with an organization, from which …

Historically, the Al-Faili name was generated from the Arabic language, and the actual name was (Pahla), meaning Parthia, which was a kingdom that was based in the modern day of Iran, and it was contemporaneous with the Roman Empire. This change occurred due to the Arabic alphabet, that lacks the …

  Cuma Çiçek 15 June 2015 HDP success cannot be understood without taking into consideration the ongoing Kurdish spring in Iraq, Syria and Turkey over the last decade.   Turkey left behind it a thirteen-year-long period of single-party majority governments in the June 7 election. AK Party (Justice and Development Party) …

  Dr. Hussein Tahiri Recent developments within Turkey’s mainstream political framework have led some to suggest an alternative strategy based on peaceful engagement might succeed where violence has failed. Indeed, the stunning electoral gain made by the Peoples’ Democratic Party, HDP, at the recent elections raises the question as to …

        As Iraqis and Syrians fight, Kurds are holding elections and drafting laws. After Kurds also won in Turkish elections, nationalists hope the 100th birthday of the Sykes-Picot may be its last and borders will be redrawn. As Turkish voters went to the polling booths, Iraq’s Kurds …

For the first time, a pro-Kurdish party has entered into the Turkish parliament, throwing a spanner in the works of Erdoğan’s autocratic ambitions. Turkey must be one of the few countries in the world where the supporters of the smallest party in parliament celebrate as if they are the masters …

                              Înfowelat: Considering the existence of Ehl-i Heq believers and a different dialect of Kurdish which is open to Persian influence in this southernmost border of Kurdistan, is it possible to speak about very different religious …

    Infowelat: How have you implemented Kontseilua’s strategic plan for whole country at the towns’ level? Paul Bilbao Sarria: the first years of work we had done something in small towns but now we have new project for towns. We have chosen a town place for pilot project. Firstly …

    Paul Bilbao-Sarria is the Secretary-General of KONTSEILUA which is the umbrella organization for organization working in the field of Basque language. Bilbao-Sarria participated Symposium on Mother Tongue Education held in Amed (Diyarbakir) two weeks ago and gave interesting information about Basque language preservation that some of them are …

  Interview of Infowelat with Basque independentist EH Bildu’s member Jon Inarritu Garcia. He was a member of Spanish Parliament between 2011-2015 and he is currently a member of Spanish Senate for the same party.  Necat Ayaz:  Why Basque leftist nationalist political forces have been unsuccessful to create a strong …

THOMAS BENEDIKTER is an economist and social researcher in Bozen (South Tyrol, Italy, 1957), graduated in Economics at the University of Munich (D) and in Political Economy at the University of Trento (I). Besides many years of professional activity in empirical social and economic research in his home region South …