The debate over legal defense in Kurdish, currently one of the most controversial issues in Turkey, is spreading to include mother toungue defense for other ethnic communities.
Speaking to the Hürriyet Daily News, Caucasian Associations Federation Head Vacid Kadıoğlu said, “The right to defense and education in one’s mother tongue is everyone’s right. Manipulating this right for politics, as is done with Kurdish, is a wrong deed.”
“They made us forget our own mother tongue, the Circassian language. So we cannot bring the right to defense in mother tongue to the agenda,” Kadıoğlu said.
“First of all, we demand the return of our right to receive education in [our] mother tongue. The government put into force the law of elective mother tongue and dialect lessons, but also enacted a 10-person quota condition. They are not sincere,” Kadıoğlu said.
