Report
from the Congress of the Kurdish PEN Centre,
Berlin, March 2003.
On the
invitation of president Zaradachet Hajo I was invited to attend the Congress of
the Kurdish PEN Centre, held in Berlin, March 8, 2003. Their Congress is held
each three years, and I also attended the last one, in year 2000, then held in
Brussels. Their board and officers are thus elected for three years, but as they
underlined, they have at least one annual meeting every year.
The Congress,
held in the ‘Litteraturhaus’ in Fasanenstrasse in Berlin, had attracted some
fifty of the 60-70 members. Among
invited guests was our vice-president Lucina Kathman, with special links to
Kurdish PEN, although neither of us two speak Kurdish. One might observe that
many of the Members who gathered only had Kurdish in common, with a second
language being German, English or French. The proceedings were thus naturally
held in Kurdish, with a very efficient interpreter at our disposal.
My early
address to the Congress, influenced by the pressing circumstances of the ongoing
Iraqi crisis, was followed by presentations by Kurds representing the various
areas where Kurdish is the spoken language. (Please see note below). Extremely
briefly, it is said that there are some 20 million Kurds in the Kurdish regions
of Turkey, Syria and northern Iraq and Iran, and some 20 million Kurds abroad.
Those in northern Iraq and Iran are called ‘Eastern Kurds’, those in Syria
‘southern Kurds’, and those in Turkey might be called ‘central Kurds’.
The Kurdish language is of very ancient origin, but the ‘classics’ and most
of the present separate dialects seemingly by and large understood between the
different groups. Those attending the Congress were obviously interested on
hearing personal reports from the different areas, This is also reflected in the
main strategy of Kurdish PEN, which has recently been prepared to introduced
branches of Kurdish PEN in these areas as an organisational model of
cooperation.
The proceedings
were chaired and conducted in a most efficient and friendly manner. In the
afternoon, matters of organisation and priorities were discussed. My
understanding was that the WfP-letter to Secr.General Kofi Annan of the UN met
total acceptance by the representatives of Kurdish PEN. No resolution texts with
marked party-political bias were, as far as I know, even discussed. Mr.
Zaradachet Hajo was re-elected as president, and the board renewed with several
members, among these two women.
One of the
ideas ventilated in the side-lines was that maybe the Translation and Linguistic
Rights Committee could be invited to host a regional conference on language and
literature in Diyarbakir at which both Kurdish and Turkish PEN Centres could
attend as co-hosts, and that a proposal for such a conference maybe also could
be submitted to UNESCO for support. This idea, far reaching as it may seem at
present, will be explored this coming year. A possible cooperation between our
Kurdish and Turkish Centres on a resolution text concerning the area might also
be considered with a view to the November Assembly of Delegates. (I hope to
bring this subject up for informal discussions when I visit Turkish PEN in the
coming May).
After the
proceedings were concluded, and I had again presented Lucina’s and my thanks
for their friendly hospitality, we met, after dinner, at the Kurdish Institute
of Berlin, Brandenburgische Strasse 38; there, the director Mr. Emin Pencmeni
introduced the Institute and it’s aims, after which a poetry reading session
followed. (The web-address of director Emin Pencmeni
and the Kurdish Institut is: http://members.aol.com/kurdins/
)
It was fairly
late in the evening that we eventually parted company – my general impression
was that the meetings of the whole day were seen as a great opportunity of
‘getting together’ for the Members of our Kurdish-speaking Centre.
-------------------------
Note:
President Zaradachet Hajo has offered the following linguistic information
“The
Kurdish language belongs to the Iranian branch of the Indo-European languages
and is spoken by around 40 million people. The homeland of the Kurds widely
known
as
Kurdistan is currently divided between Turkey (20million), Iran (8 million),
Iraq (5 million) and Syria (3 million). Since the wars and economic hardships
many Kurds were compelled to move to the major cities of these states such as
Istanbul, Ankara, Izmir, Damascus, Aleppo, Baghdad and Tehran, as well as to
live in exile in the Commonwealth of the Independent States (around 1 million),
Europe ( more than 1 million) and other parts of the world (chiefly in North
America, Australia, Pakistan, the Persian Gulf states, Egypt and Israel).
As
far as the Kurdish language is concerned, it has unequivocal parallels with the
language of the Avesta, the holy book of the Zoroastrians. Kurdish has a written
literary tradition since at least the 10th century AD. Until recently the Kurds
applied three scripts, that is, adopted Arabic, Latin and Cyrillic ones. The
major literary dialects of the Kurdish language are North and South Kurmandji
(the latter being also named Sorani), Kirmanci (or Dimli), Hewrami and Luri. The
only place in the world where Kurdish has an official status is South (Iraqi)
Kurdistan.”
President
Hajo goes on to explain their present concerns: “South (Iraqi) Kurdistan is
now under the threat of a Turkish incursion. The Kurdish PEN protests against
this because the Kurdish writers know very well how badly their language and
literature have been suffering throughout the history of the Republic of
Turkey.”