Kamîran: Yesterday we spoke about the demand for constitutional guarantees. Today the issue has moved from conference halls into schoolyards.

Ronahî: Yes. Syria’s transitional government decided to include the Kurdish language in school curricula. Classes will be three hours per week, and grades will appear on students’ general report cards. Yet for many people the real problem is precisely that three-hour limit.

Ronahî: In Amûdê, children and families gathered once again. The action began with one minute of silence, after which student Feraşîn Îsa read a statement and rejected the three weekly lessons. In Dirbêsiyê, students of Terfa School did the same, and in Qamişlo secondary-school students, in front of their teachers, called the decision unjust.

Kamîran: So it is no longer only the parties; the students themselves have come forward.

Ronahî: The parties are on the ground too. The PYD gave a statement in both Kurdish and Arabic in front of its centre in Dirbêsiyê, read by Ehmed Silêman and Bêrîtan Necîm. The PYD said the decision runs counter to Syria’s diversity and demanded its cancellation. On the human-rights side, the Syrian Federation of Human Rights Organisations stated that protecting linguistic diversity is part of human rights.

Kamîran: Has anyone among them put a concrete proposal for the future on the table?

Ronahî: Two proposals exist. The Committees for the Defence of Democratic Freedoms and Human Rights want students who have so far studied in Kurdish to be able to continue their education in the same way. A lawyer has also called on Kurdish parties to push for official recognition of the language in the constitution. So far the Ministry of Education has given no response to these demands in the reports.

Ronahî: On Friday, the second of October, after Friday prayers in the city of Hesekê a Kurdish flag was burned. Since that day protest actions have been taking place in many areas of the governorate: in Qibûr El Qeracin affiliated with Til Temir, in Zirgan, in Qamişlo and in Çilaxay.

Ronahî: Today the Democratic Society Movement, TEV-DEM, issued a written statement. According to TEV-DEM, the demonstrations were limited to a specific group that intensifies racism against the Kurdish people and other communities. The movement says it has followed the incident carefully and with concern.

Kamîran: But we are hearing this only from one side.

Ronahî: True. The reports contain only the viewpoint of TEV-DEM and the protesters. Who organised the demonstrations and what they themselves say is not among our information.

Kamîran: From the flag and the language let us move to the household table. Here too discontent is growing.

Ronahî: With the end of the summer-vegetable season, from the beginning of October the prices of some foods have risen in Syrian markets. Transport and electricity costs have also increased, at a time when families’ purchasing power was already low.

Ronahî: In Cizîr there is also the farmers’ problem: payment for this season’s wheat has not yet been made. Farmer Xoşnav Esso from Dirbêsiyê says the delay has caused great harm to farmers; debts are piling up and production costs are already heavy.

Kamîran: So prices are rising and money is arriving late.

Ronahî: And this has reached the streets as well. Today in Heleb, Hesekê and Siwêdayê industrialists, workers and employees came out over electricity cuts, delays in financial payments and their still-unregulated working conditions. One of the locations is the industrial city of Rai, north of the Heleb countryside.

Ronahî: The displaced people of Serêkaniyê are preparing to return. This is the third convoy and it includes more than five hundred families.

Kamîran: Where are these families living now?

Ronahî: In the Waşokanî camp and in temporary shelters. The convoy will take them to villages and places in the southern countryside of the city. No specific date for the start of the journey has been given in the reports.

Kamîran: Yesterday we spoke about checkpoints in Quneytire; today there is another report from the same area.

Ronahî: According to local sources, Israeli forces have again begun digging and construction west of the village of El-Eşa, in the southern countryside of Quneytire. Military vehicles have entered the area, digging trenches and building earthen barriers.

Ronahî: The work is described as part of the line known as Sufa fifty-three. From the Israeli side there is no comment in the reports.

Ronahî: Writer and journalist Nagîhan Akarsel, a member of the Jineology Research Centre, lost her life four years ago, on the fourth of October, twenty twenty-two, in an assassination in Silêmaniyê.

Ronahî: Yesterday her family, Jineology members and journalists’ associations remembered her at her grave in the village of Gulyazi in the Cîhanbeyli district of Konya. In Qamişlo the Jineology Academy also held a ceremony attended by the PYD co-presidency.

Kamîran: So the commemoration took place in two countries and one day apart.