Kurds Mark International Women's Day . . . In Chinese

From the blog Cafebabel Istanbul:

The city of Diyarbakir, in the Southeast of Turkey and with a mostly Kurdish population, celebrates International Women's Day in a different and interesting style. Kurdish district Yenisehir Municipality prepared posters in Chinese for 8 March International Women's Day. Chinese posters celebrating Diyarbakiri Women Day displayed at billboards in town center. Yenisehir Municipality officers were interrogated lots of times and accused of being separatist in the reason of adapting Kurdish language in official documents and petitions. Whereas Diyarbakir has no Chinese population we wanted to protest ban on Kurdish language by celebrating Women Day with posters written in Chinese, Diyarbakir is a metropolitan city and we wanted show that language is not so important, but the most important thing is the given message, said Mayor Aid Sefik Dincer from the Democratic Society Party. Also Turkish and Kurdish translations of the Chinese sentences are visible on the distributed posters.

For additional information on Diyarbakır's linguistic diversity and the recent campaign, see Erhan Üstündağ's story on the BİA-Net website.