October 11-13
Fulfilling a campaign promise, the new Rohani Administration last month allowed a school teaching in Kurdish to open—but it has now shut it down, suggesting that hardliners are fighting against Rohani’s policies.
Iranian authorities shut down the school in Ilam in western Iran only a few weeks after allowing it to open. Local activists said it was because so many in the predominantly Kurdish city had shown an interest in learning in their own tongue and officials in Tehran feared the implications.
“The people of Ilam were very receptive to this Kurdish language school and many women and university students attended its courses,” Kurdish activist Mosa Omedi told Rudaw, a Kurdish news agency based in Erbil, Iraq.
“The authorities didn’t expect the courses to be so popular. That is why, when they saw the huge number of people attending, they did not let it continue anymore,” he added, saying the school was closed by the police.
Activists said that the school, which had been licensed by the authorities to teach in the Sorani dialect spoken mainly by the Kurds of Iran, had enrolled students in large numbers, in a city where most of the 200,000 residents are Shiite Kurds.
The Iranian constitution designates Farsi as the country’s official language, but also entitles other ethnic groups the right to learn in their own languages. However, since the 1979 revolution, ethnic groups have been officially encouraged to assimilate into the Farsi mainstream, and the country’s linguistic minorities have found few opportunities to use their own languages academically.
Rudaw quoted activists in Ilam as saying some in Tehran fear Kurdish schools would revive a sense of nationalism among the Kurds, who complain that they live in some of the country’s poorest and most neglected provinces.
“The Kurds of Ilam have felt a stronger sense of their identity and nationalism in recent years and the Iranian authorities do not want that,” Omedi said.
Omedi criticized President Rohani, who promised greater rights to ethnic groups, who generally threw their support behind him in the June elections.