[News] Izmir Municipality removes billboards written in Arabic, claiming "preserving Turkish identity"

[Guest High King Eslam]

The Turkish government announced a campaign to remove commercial signs written in Arabic on Turkish streets. Municipal teams in different cities removed these signs and changed them to the Turkish language, according to the Turkish municipal law, which prohibits raising signs written in languages other than Turkish, including Arabic and English.

Pursuant to this, the municipality of the Turkish city of Izmir has begun removing billboards written in Arabic from shops. The pioneers of social networking shared video clips that some described as shocking, showing the process of removing billboards that contain some Arabic words by the Izmir Municipality, which is affiliated with the Republican People's Party.

Syrian lawyer Abdel Nasser Houshan, who resides in Turkey, told Al-Quds Al-Arabi: Originally, when licensing a commercial store, establishment, or restaurant, the official documents must include the name of the establishment in the Turkish language. Chamber of Commerce The title and the trademark become the right of the owner of the establishment and may not be revoked except by a decision of the licensing authority or the judiciary in the event of a dispute.

He added: There are municipalities that issue decisions to remove these advertisements without right under the pretext of preserving the Turkish identity, because in this case the Ministry of Culture is supposed to issue these decisions. In general, this phenomenon is confined to specific municipalities, and there are municipalities that do not prevent this, and these decisions come in the context of the administrative decentralization system in effect in Turkey.
In 2019, the Maraş municipality police removed the signs of Syrian shops that were written in Arabic. Turkish reports said that the police conducted control patrols on Syrian shops due to the increase in commercial activities that use Arabic signs in the city center.

The sources stated that the Turkish authorities also imposed on the Syrian shops in the state of Urfa the use of the Turkish language by at least 60% in billboards. Earlier, the Turkish authorities removed the signs of shops that did not comply with this condition in several Turkish states, such as Adana, Gaziantep and Istanbul.

Prior to this, the Fatih Municipality in the Turkish city of Istanbul issued a compulsory decision to remove all commercial and advertising signs written in Arabic.

The decision stipulated the removal of all Arabic inscriptions on the external and glass commercial panels, and restricting the writing to Latin letters. It also set specific standards for the size, length and width of the new panels, in addition to specifying only two colors for use in the new billboards (silver and gold), whatever the brand's colors and logo. The decision also banned other languages, such as Russian and Farsi.

There are no less than 3,000 Arab commercial offices, companies, and restaurants in the areas affiliated with the Al-Fateh municipality, all of which use billboards in the Arabic language, as the presence of Syrian refugees, Arabs, and tourists is concentrated in this central area in the city center.

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