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| Urmia University |
Students Organizing the Event: The Islamic Association has no right to interfere in the way the ceremony is conducted.
Kurdish Students Attending the Ceremony: If our presence is used as an excuse by the Islamic Association to include Persian in the ceremony, we will leave so the program can be conducted entirely in Turkish.
The International Mother Language Day conference was held on Tuesday, February 21, 2006 (2 Esfand 1384) at the amphitheater of the Faculty of Engineering at Urmia University.
Despite opposition from university officials to speeches by invited guests, including Isa Nazari, a lawyer and member of the editorial board of the Navide Azerbaijan magazine, the students of Urmia University successfully held the ceremony at a very high level.
At the beginning of the event, Alizadeh, a professor at Urmia University, discussed to the independence process of Bangladesh and its separation from Pakistan due to Pakistan’s cultural unification policies and its chauvinistic stance against the Bengali language and culture. He also explained how the declaration of the National Martyrs’ Day of Bangladesh as International Mother Language Day came to be. Moreover, Alizadeh emphasized that the most important form of pluralism is cultural pluralism and identified the barriers and opposition to cultural pluralism in Iran as being even greater than those against religious pluralism.
Following that, Mehdi Haj Mohammad, Behrouz Tavakoli, Tohid Ayubi, Mehrdad Chahkherli, Elaheh Radmehr, and other students recited poetry. Rasul Jafari, a student from the Faculty of Engineering, also presented his article on the topic of mother language.
Special programs for International Mother Language Day in Urmia were performed by young artists from the "Sevinc" group; Ayshan, a member of the group, beautifully recited the poem "Ana Dilim" (My Mother Tongue), and the musical theatre performance was very well received, with repeated applause from the students. The plot of the musical theater performance by the Sevinc group was about a crow who tries to force other birds to croak like it. He takes away their joy and teaches them to croak by force. Ultimately, the crow, who fails to change any bird's language except for a parrot who mimics the crow, is driven away, and the birds continue to sing in their own voices happily.
Akbar Pashayi, a member of the Shahriyar Students' Association at Urmia University, was the master of ceremonies.
Side Notes:
The ceremony was approved by the Islamic Association of Urmia University.
Prior to the event, there was a verbal conflict between the students organizing the event and the members of the Islamic Association. The organizing students believed that the Association, due to its lost authority from recent political changes and with the aim of regaining popularity among the students, had sought permission to hold the ceremony, and thus had no right to interfere in its execution.
The Islamic Association opposed holding the ceremony entirely in Turkish and insisted that parts of the program be conducted in Persian. They cited the presence of several Kurdish students among the audience as the reason for their insistence. However, the reaction of the Kurdish students was remarkable: they declared that if their presence was used as an excuse for including Persian in the ceremony, they would leave so that the program could be conducted entirely in Turkish.
Members of the Islamic Association (who were themselves mostly Azerbaijani Turk) eventually relented when they saw that all the students, including the Kurds, wanted the event to be conducted in Turkish. However, some of them, led by "Sajjad Niknam," the secretary of the Islamic Association, left the hall in anger.