HALABJA, Kurdistan Region of Iraq – Several Turkish officials and politicians on Friday slammed the Turkish parliament for an X post featuring Parliament Speaker Numan Kurtulmus reciting a Kurdish poem during an address in Diyarbakir (Amed).

Turkey’s Grand National Assembly (TBMM) wrote in an X post in Kurdish on Friday, "Bi hev re bibin dil bi dil, dest bi dest; aştî li nav me ra best," quoting an excerpt from a speech by Parliament Speaker Kurtulmus at the opening of the new academic year at Diyarbakir's Dicle University.

The excerpt, translating to "Let us be together, heart to heart, hand to hand; let peace be with us," marks the first time the legislature has shared a post in Kurdish, a language spoken by over 15 million people in the country.

The post was followed by several Turkish officials and lawmakers taking to X to slam the move by the country’s legislature, arguing that the post violates Article 3 of the Turkish constitution, which stipulates that Turkish is the official language of Turkey.

“The State of Turkey, with its territory and nation, is an indivisible entity. Its language is Turkish. Its flag, the form of which is prescribed by the relevant law, is composed of a white crescent and star on a red background. Its national anthem is the 'Independence March.' Its capital is Ankara,” reads the article.

Umit Ozdag, head of the far-right, ultranationalist Zafer party, reposted the parliament’s post hours later, with the caption “You are committing a constitutional crime.”

Alongside Ozdag, several lawmakers also denounced the move, including Good Party lawmaker Ayyuce Turkes, who wrote, “It is a clear violation of Article 3 of the Constitution and Article 96 of the TBMM Rules of Procedure, as you have done in your capacity as the Speaker of the TBMM!”

Turkes called for Kurtulmus’ resignation over his usage of the Kurdish language, saying that “A parliamentary speaker who blatantly violates the Constitution must resign immediately” in an X post in which she tagged Kurtulmus.

The Kurdish language has long faced severe repression in Turkey, with Turkish officials in the past having banned the use of the language in public, closed Kurdish-medium schools, and Turkified Kurdish surnames.

A Human Rights Watch report from 2024 noted the abundance of “outrageous cases over the past year in which Kurdish language songs, dances, and promotion of cultural and linguistic rights have been interpreted by the police and prosecutors as evidence of links with terrorism.

Despite the lifting of the prohibition of public use of the language, a publication by the Human Rights Foundation (HRF) in 2024 asserted that Ankara has been “actively repressing” Kurdish, pointing out “persistent efforts to discourage and eliminate the use of the Kurdish language.”

Crackdowns by successive Turkish regimes on the use of the Kurdish language by Kurds in Turkey have led to a majority of Kurds abandoning their native language in favor of Turkish.

The HRF article, citing a May 2024 study by the Socio-Political Field Research Center, found that only 42.2 percent of Kurds in Turkey use Kurdish regularly at home, while nearly 40 percent of children of Kurdish descent between the ages of 12 and 17 "cannot speak their Kurdish mother tongue."

Of the 1,267 people sampled across 16 provinces, "64.8% of the participants indicated that they primarily used Turkish at home," the report added.

Selcuk Turkoglu, an MP from the conservative, nationalistic Good Party, described Kurdish as an “unknown” language, which he argued the Parliament Speaker cannot make an address in. “I STRONGLY CONDEMN THIS!” he wrote. “I strongly condemn the posting in Kurdish from the official social media account of the Grand National Assembly of Turkey.”

“Everyone should know that; the official language of the Republic of Turkey is Turkish,” said Ridvan Uz, another lawmaker of the Good Party.

“We are determined to uphold the fundamental principles of our state while preserving the brotherhood of the Turkish Nation in all its colors,” he added.

Senior Key Party official Ahmet Murat Hatabay, meanwhile, lashed out at Kurtulmus over reading out the poem in Kurdish. “You have always been an enemy of the Turks,” Hatabay said on X. “Our nation is greater than all of you; we will not sacrifice our national ideals to your agendas!”

The denunciations come amid a delicate peace process undertaking between Turkey and its decades-long archfoe, the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), who decided to disband and disarm after a February call by their jailed leader, Abdullah Ocalan.

Earlier on Friday, Ocalan called on Turkey to integrate Kurdish rights into state law. “Kurds as a whole must be included within the law… Until today, Kurdish rights have been ignored and kept outside the law, but today a democratic integration law needs to be built,” Ocalan’s lawyers quoted the leader as having said. Ocalan argued that the provision of the Kurds’ rights is what “true peace” is.