Children across Kurdistan have boycotted schools on the first day of the 2013-2014 education year on Monday, answering BDP (Peace and Democracy Party) and DTK's (Democratic Society Congress) call for mass participation in the boycott organized and led by TZP-Kurdî to voice Kurdish people's demand to be educated in their mother language.

Schools were silent and empty in in the main Kurdish city Diyarbakır (Amed) where children who joined the boycott were seen sitting in front of the schools in groups. Police took strict measures with armored vehicles around almost all schools as of early morning hours.

The school boycott of children have been supported with mass marches in a number of provinces where tens of thousands demanded to have education in their mother language and the removal of oath ceremony in which students have to recite the pledge of allegiance to the Turkish state every morning.

The major demo in Amed was joined by thousands who sent the message “We will be living in Kurdistan as Kurds, speaking Kurdish and being educated in Kurdish”.

The protest march, organized by DTK and BDP Amed provincial organizations, started from Koşuyolu Park and ended at the Ofis district.

Having already surrounded the entire area before the march, large numbers of riot police blocked the crowd with riot control vehicles as they started their march which was allowed only after BDP Amed chair Zübeyde Zümrüt's talks with police authorities.

Children have also boycotted schools in Amed's Kayapınar, Bağlar, Yenişehir, Silvan (Farqîn), Çınar and Bismil districts where the boycott was supported with marches and demos where people condemned the state's assimilation policies and demanded their right to live with their own identiy and culture.

Thousands of people joined the march Kurdi-Der and BDP organized in the province of Van to voice the demands for mother tongue education.

Ninety percent of the children in Van have taken part in the one-week school boycott for mother tongue education on the first day of the 2013-2014 education year on Monday, answering BDP and DTK's call for mass participation in the boycott which has mainly been joined in the neighborhoods of Şabaniye, Karşıyaka, Yeni Mahalle, Xaçort and Yüniplik.

Plainclothes police officers have visited a number of schools across the city early in the morning and gathered information about the percentages of the participation in the boycott which has highly been supported at the M. Akif Ersoy High School in the container city and the Süphan Primary School where only 200 out of 1400 students took the classes yesterday.

The boycott has also been lergely supported in the province of Hakkari where almost all the schools were empty on the first day of the education year, with teachers waiting inside empty schools as of early morning hours. The number of students who took to classes at the city center was less then a hundred.

Schools in Şemdinli, Yüksekova, as well as its Esendere and Büyükçiftlik towns were also empty yesterday. It was only staff and some teachers who went to schools.

Children in Şırnak and its Cizre district also joined the boycott which was supported by local people who staged a march and conveyed the signatures collected for mother tongue education to the director of national education.

The march in Adıyaman, organized by Kurdî-Der, was joined by hundreds of people who also collected signatures and delivered them to the director of national education.

Students and people in Dersim also supported the boycott in mass, demanding the provision of education in mother tongue and the abolishment of compulsory religion lessons.

The one-week school boycott for mother tongue education has also been largely supported in the provinces of Muş, Batman, Iğdır, Urfa, Siirt, Mardin, and its Dargeçit, Derik, Savur and Nusaybin districts.

The boycott has been joined not only in Kurdistan but also many other provinces across the country including Istanbul, İzmir, Manisa, Bursa, Mersin and Adana.

Kurdish children and their families in Istanbul, in the districts of Şişli, Ataşehir, Sancaktepe, Fatih, Bağcılar and Eyüp, also joined the boycott and took to the streets yesterday to protest against the assimilation policies of the state and to voice their demand to have education in their mother language.