Over the past few days, all versions of the Kurdish language instruction book, in Kurmanji, has been banned by the Intelligence Service in Xorasan (Khorasan Razavi province), despite having permission from the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance.
Elîreza Sêpahî Laîn, a Kurdish known journalists and authors of Xorasan in an open letter said ban of this book is a tragic geographic event that is hard to believe for civilised people and patriotic.
The book’s authors, regarding the cause of the banned book, announced the only excuse provided by the intelligence officers is using the Latin alphabet in this book that the orthography follows by the terrorist groups and it was not in the benefit of Iran to allow the publication of books written in the Latin alphabet. The Kurmanji dialect uses the Latin alphabet. While the script is authorised and used in the Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting TV (Sahar) and just not permitted for book’s authors!.
The Kurdish author, Elîreza Sêpahî Laîn, has been arrested in 2011 and has been held in detention for 8 months on charges of writing critical poems against the Islamic Regime of Iran. He unveiled the continuing pressures of the security forces on Kurds and cultural-literary activists in Xorasan. He added that the security forces against the Kurdish authors, collecting books, preventing the cultural meeting, prohibiting the names of writers on the TV and stopping poet to read their poems and in Xorasan.
Sêpahî Laîn added the Kurdish authors must stop writing and publishing their work in accordance with the standards of Kurdish linguistic in Xorasan or if they want to write in the taste of security offices they have to forget about the scientific principles or completely not publishing their books.
The book, “Nivîsîn û xwendina Kurdiya kurmancî” (Reading and writing in Kurdish Kurmanji) was written by four authors, Ebas Îsmaîlî, Muhemed Teqewî, Mêhdî Ceferzade and Cewad Elîniya in 2015 and was licensed by the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance and published by Emû Elewî publications last month.
Kurdistan Human Rights Network ─ KHRN