An Open Letter of Complaint by a Group of Kurdish Teachers

A group of Kurdish teachers who have faced coercive, security-oriented, and judicial actions in recent years have issued an open letter demanding justice and urging officials to address their situation. The full text of the letter has been published by the Hana Human Rights Organization.

Open Letter from Kurdistan’s Teachers Addressed to Officials and Public Opinion

“We have nothing to lose but the chains of oppression.”

Esteemed compatriots, dear students and parents, provincial and national authorities,

“As a group of activist teachers who have witnessed the weak and incorrect performance of the ineffective management of Kurdistan’s education system for years, we have never remained silent in the face of the current mismanagement and have borne the imposed costs. We firmly believe that the first lesson we must teach our students and society is the lesson of demanding rights, criticism, and inquiry.”

Without a doubt, in recent years, you have witnessed our cries and field actions to address the accumulated problems in education and to establish educational justice. However, the years of our legitimate demands being ignored by incompetent officials have resulted in the current deplorable conditions, making it difficult, and sometimes impossible, to provide even the minimum requirements for proper education for the students of this region. The dilapidated state of most educational spaces in Kurdistan has become an immediate threat to the lives of both students and teachers. The severe shortage of motivated, relevant, and professional educators, the removal of free nutrition, the division of schools by class, the commercialization of education, the mass dropout of students, the economic pressure on teachers, and forcing them to take second and third jobs, among other factors, provide solid evidence to support this claim.

In such a situation, the ineffective security officials of the Kurdistan education system, due to poor planning, lack of management capacity, and failure to respond logically to demands, have instead resorted to suppressing any cry for justice from the teachers.

The management of the education system in Kurdistan:

1. Criminalized the demands and protests of teachers in early 2022, blocking the doors of education offices and pushing protests onto the streets, which led to the creation of cases, arrests, and beatings of teachers in various cities.
2. In the fall of 2022, deducted the salaries of more than 700 teachers who had protested the entry of military forces into schools.
3. In the fall of 2022, deprived 47 honorable teachers of Kurdistan of their ranking rights by forming a sinister emergency committee.
4. In the winter of 2022, issued an absurd, illegal, and baseless letter declaring the legitimate, well-established teacher associations of Kurdistan as illegal.
5. In 2023 and 2024, militarized educational offices and schools in Kurdistan, creating cases for over a thousand teachers. So far, dozens of teachers have been dismissed, and hundreds have been sentenced to unjust penalties such as dismissal, exile, forced retirement, etc.

The disgraceful record of the officials of the Kurdistan Education Department (including the director-general, security, disciplinary boards, and some regional directors) is more blatant than words can express. Even senior provincial and national officials have expressed their dissatisfaction with the situation. However, due to factors we are unaware of, the current management team remains in place, and their case-making and oppression continue.

Now, we, the oppressed and marginalized teachers, declare that we have sacrificed our youth and lives for teaching, and now we are left with nothing but the chains of oppression and injustice. Therefore, we have nothing to lose, but we will not allow the injustices that have been done to us, our families, our colleagues, and our students to go unanswered. We call on the provincial and national officials to take serious measures to address our legitimate demands within a short time, or we will soon begin our protests in civil and field-based actions with all our strength. We are determined to stand up against these wrongdoings and violations of the law to ensure that no one mocks the people or the law and encroaches upon others’ rights.

1. Revoke the penalties issued against the teachers of Kurdistan in the Education Department’s disciplinary board and compensate for the damages caused by these penalties.
2. Ensure the right to rank for all union activists and remove the barriers preventing their promotion to the rank they deserve.
3. The dignity of teachers, students, and the people of Kurdistan is too valuable to be decided by narrow-minded, despised, and vulgar individuals. It is vital that necessary changes are made and the security-based approach be eliminated so that peace returns to the education system in Kurdistan.

A group of teachers with files, deprivation, and sentences from Kurdistan.