Students will no longer read the lie ‘Gypsies kidnap children’
The book ‘Yonca Girl’, which contains discriminatory, derogatory and targeting expressions against Roma people and was included in the list of 100 basic works that should be read by children, was removed from the list.
The book ‘Yonca Kız’ (Yonca Girl), which contains racist expressions against Roma, was removed from the list of 100 basic works recommended by the Ministry of National Education (MEB).
The book, written by the now deceased Kemal Bilbaşar and published by Can publishing house, tells the story of a girl who is kidnapped by Gypsy Hasan and subjected to various tortures.
In Turkey, where the phrase ‘If you misbehave, I will give you to the Gypsies’ is still used to scare children, the book reinforces this discriminatory and hateful discourse.
The book, which was recommended for children to read by the Ministry of National Education, was discovered when it was used in a reading competition at a primary school in Artvin.
MONE Contains negative expressions
The Zero Discrimination Association (SAD) immediately filed a complaint with the Ministry of National Education about the book, which was discovered last November as part of the Project on Increasing Roma Access to Legal Aid.
A criminal complaint was also filed with the Istanbul Chief Public Prosecutor's Office.
Upon the complaint, a commission formed by the Ministry of National Education reviewed the book from beginning to end and found the request to be justified, and removed the book from the list of 100 Basic Works because it contained ‘inappropriate behaviour and negative expressions’.
The publishing house will remove those statements
SAD lawyer Zeynep Duygu Ulusoy stated that they were informed by the Ministry that other books on the list of Basic Works would also be subject to examination in terms of hate speech, similar negative expressions and behaviour.
The application to the Prosecutor's Office has not yet been finalised.
Since the author of the book is no longer alive, the association contacted Can Publishing House and received a commitment that discriminatory and insulting expressions against Roma will be removed from the content of the next edition of the book.
Stating that this is an important human rights issue, the lawyer of the association also stated that the fact that the readership of the book is children of primary school age increases the importance of the problem even more and that they will follow up on the commitment made as a result of this meeting with the publishing house.
Excerpts from the book
The discriminatory sections of the book are as follows:
Page 59: ‘... his bride was the granddaughter of the sultan, but she was more degenerate than his Gypsy wife.’
Page 122: ‘Sultan Baci's eyes widened with fear when she saw the gypsies.’
- ‘Oh my, we didn't know there were gypsies around here, let's not come here alone again, young lady.
- ‘Why, Sultan Baci, do Gypsies do anything?’
They steal children too
- ‘Those blind bastards steal everything in their path. If they get the chance, they even kidnap children in their sacks.’
‘He was going to tell how the Gypsies kidnapped his little sister when she was little, but he was afraid of scaring Shamrock Girl too much, so he kept quiet.’
Page 123: ‘I am very afraid of gypsies. They kidnapped my sister Shirin when I was little. She was never found again.’
Page 173: ‘But the girl told the police that the Gypsies had kidnapped her from the mountain, that's what the newspaper says. Those bloody Gypsies must have kidnapped him.
Nilay Vardar
28.02.2014
Source: BİANET
