Roj Bash Kurdistan

COLOGNE, Germany - A group of Kurds in Switzerland has uploaded 500 Kurdish books, newspapers and other publications to the Internet – and this is just the beginning.

“Our goal is to collect every single document that has been written about the Kurds in Kurdish and other foreign languages,” said archivist Rafat Safali, who has been working with a small group of friends on the project.

“Under the books section novels, political, linguistic, and handwritten historical books can be found, and under newspapers there is a range of magazines and newspapers including Kurdistan, a newspaper that was first published in 1898 in Cairo,” said Safali, 54.

Safali, director of the national platform for collecting Kurdish related publications, said that the books, magazines, newspapers and other documents can be found on their newly created website, www.netewe.com.

He added that, in addition to the digital archives, visitors to the website can access the original copies of the books and documents via a link.

“The archives consist of three parts: First, books about the Kurds, written in the European languages and English; second, the Kurdish magazines and newspapers; the third part includes all the historical documents,” Safali explained.

He said that the focus is on uploading publications from northern (Turkey) Kurdistan and the Kurdish diaspora.

“Under the documentaries category, there are scores of documents about the Kurdish political parties and organizations as well as historical records written by European historians who traveled to Kurdistan,” Safali said.

He added that that the documents, uploaded in PDF format, are “a good source of information for journalists, researchers and historians who want to conduct research about the Kurds.”

Safali, who spent several years in a Turkish prison before migrating to Switzerland in 1994, said that due to financial constraints they could not publish books protected by copyright.

Unfortunately, the site is only in Kurdi or Turkish and therefore not much good at informing the rest of the world about Kurdish history and culture

Whereas the The Kurdish Institute of Paris has the largest Kurdish Library in the Western World available in a great many languages.

Kurdish Institute of Paris (French: Institut Kurde de Paris), founded in February 1983, is an organization focused on Kurdish language, culture and history. It is one of the main academic centers of Kurdish language in Europe. Its main publications include a linguistic journal titled Kurmancî in Kurdish, a monthly press review about Kurdish issues titled Bulletin de liaison et d'information (Bulletin of Contact and Information) and Études Kurdes, a research journal in French.

Much of the activities of the Institute are focused on the Northern Kurmanji dialect of Kurdish. The institute has a library preserving many thousands of historical documents, pamphlets and periodicals about Kurds. Two representatives from the French Ministry of Interior and Ministry of Culture provide the link between the Institute and the Government of France. The Institute is headed by Kendal Nezan as the president and Abbas Vali (Swansea University) and Fuad Hussein (University of Amsterdam) as the two vice-presidents.

To ensure democracy, pluralism and the widest possible participation of intellectuals, writers, research workers and artists of the Kurdish Diaspora in its work, the Kurdish Institute has set up a Cultural and Scientific Council (CCS) consisting of five sections: Social and Cultural Studies, Language and Literature, Arts, Information and Human Rights and Stimulation of Socio-Cultural Activities.

These sections cover the areas of activity covered by the Institute's Rules and Objectives. The CCS also forms the Institute's electoral body. Every three years, its members elect, by secret ballot, the members of the Institute's Board of Directors.

The Kurdish Institute enjoys the support of many Western intellectuals who sponsor its activities. This Sponsorship Committee includes, amongst others:

Simone de Beauvoir †, writer; Maurice Bejart, choreographer; Elena Bonner, wife of A. Sakharov; Sean McBride †, Nobel Peace Prize Winner; Gérard Chaliand, writer and expert on Third World affairs, Associate Professor of Harvard University and of the ENA (National School of Public Administration) (Paris); Bernard Dorin, French Ambassador and member of the State Council; Miguel Angel Estrella, Argentinean musician; Bernard Kouchner, Minister of Health, founder of Médecins sans Frontières and Honorary President of Médecins du Monde; Jean Lacouture, writer and journalist; Claude Lanzmann, writer and author of the film "Shoah"; Claude Lefort, writer and philosopher; Jean Malaurie, ethnologist; Leo Matarasso †, lawyer and President of the International League for the Liberation of Peoples; Rigoberta Menchu, Nobel Peace Prize winner; Danielle Mitterrand; Edgar Morin, sociologist and writer; Henri Noguères †, lawyer and former President of the French League for Human Rights; Adolfo Perez Esquivel, Nobel Peace Prize winner; Madeleine Robérioux, historian and former President of the League for Human Rights; Maxime Rodinson, orientalist and specialist in Islamic Studies; Andrei Sakharov †, Nobel Peace Prize winner, physicist; Laurent Schwartz, mathematician, Professor of Mathematics at the Ecole Polytechnique; Paul Thibaud, director of the periodical Esprit; Germaine Tillon, sociologist; Jean-Pierre Vernant, Professor at the College de France; Pierre Vidal-Naquet, Hellenist, writer and Professor at the Sorbonne; Gunter Walraaf, German journalist; Marguerite Yourcenar †, writer.

The founders of the Institute are Kurdish intellectuals and artists, well known in Kurdistan. Amongst them, the film maker Yilmaz Güney, whose film YOL won the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival in 1982; the Syrian Kurdish poet Cegerxwin; Hejar, Iranian Kurdish poet and linguist, translator of Avicenna into Persian and of the Coran and Omar Khayyam into Kurdish; Tewfiq Wahby, linguist and former Iraqi Minister of Education; Professor Q. Kurdo, grammarian and linguist at the Leningrad Institute of Oriental studies; H. Cindy, Kurdish writer from Armenia; Remzi Rasa, French Kurdish painter; N. Zaza, Swiss Kurdish writer and linguist.

DIGITALISATION OF WORKS

The Kurdish Institute maintains the largest Kurdish Library in the Western World.

This contains over 10,000 monographs about the Kurds, in 25 languages, several tens of thousands of published documents, collections of reviews and newspapers, photographs, videos, post cards and posters, as well as audio archives and music recordings.

This rich documentation fills over a third of the Institute's premises as well as a substantial part of its warehouse, located in a Paris suburb. References to these monographs and the principal documents have been computerised.

They also have an extremely experienced expert who is a well known writer, an expert translator. ands whose knowledge of everything Kurdish is probably the best in the world.

Any digital Library is good for Kurds.

In Kurdish Institute of Paris, we offer publicly all documents without copyrights :

http://bnk.institutkurde.org/?l=en

That's the main trouble, that issue of copyrights. Some books are impossible to find in bookshops but we are not allowed to offer them for free, even if authors do agree because we are not Google for facing publishers