The Week of 1000: Fight for Injustice | Avjin Aktop
Every Saturday at noon, a group of women gather at Galatasaray Square in Istanbul to demand information about the fates of their loved ones, who became the subject of enforced disappearances. Each week’s letter to the public is dedicated to one person who disappeared. Their story is read aloud by their mother. After around 30 minutes of sit-in with the photographs of their lost children or relatives, the women leave the square, only to return the following Saturday to continue their peaceful protest. Known as “Saturday Mothers” (Kurdish, Dayikên Şemiyê), the group has maintained non-violent resistance, holding peaceful sit-ins and silent vigils each Saturday. They deliberately avoided affiliation with any political party or ideology to convey the importance of human life [1]. Since they first gathered in 1995 as a small group of not more than 30 people— at a time when the conflict between Kurdish guerillas and the Turkish State was at its peak— the group grew to hundreds in the years following. More and more mothers demanded to know their male relatives’ fate after they were taken into custody by the Turkish government [2]. Gathering for nearly 1000 weeks, the Saturday Mothers represents the longest civil disobedience in the history of Turkish politics [5]. Many of the Saturday Mothers are of Kurdish origin and had migrated from eastern provinces [2]. Their activism in demanding accountability for enforced disappearances also became associated with their ethnicity and social class, creating obstacles for prominent Turkish nationalist groups to be in solidarity with the movement. This essay examines how the foundations of the modern Turkish Republic, shaped by Turkish nationalism and the construction of a novel class structure, have contributed to challenges faced by Saturday Mothers in gaining broader solidarity among the ethnic Turks.
The collapse of the Ottoman Empire brought the challenge of transforming society into a Western republic [3]. The nationalist and secularist reforms— such as removing the caliphate or the nationalization of the education system— paved the way for the transition from the ethnically diverse Ottoman Empire to the Turkish nation-state, substituting Islam with the sense of national identity (Zeydanlıoğlu, 2008). However, creating a homogenous Westernized nation-state demanded work: it required the elimination, or Turkification, of the largest culturally and linguistically different non-ethnic group, Kurds. Without the uniting power of Islam, the assimilation of Kurdish identity became the modern Turkish state’s “civilizing necessity,” which was justified as a Westernization reform (Zeydanlıoğlu, 2008).
Saturday Mothers’ movement of civil disobedience evolved in this process of nation-making. Not even 60 years after the modern republic was founded, the army took control of the government for the third time in 1980, following a period of increasing political violence between Turkish state forces and the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (Partiya Karkêren Kurdistan, PKK). Saturday Mothers’ cause corresponds to this politically chaotic time, frequently referred to as a civil war [8]. The activists who fostered rights for Kurds became the targets of the Turkish government, and many of them who were summoned by the security forces were later declared “lost under custody” [2]. Established to combat Kurdish “separatism,” the Gendarmerie Intelligence Organization (known as JİTEM) became infamous for its role in enforced disappearances. Its operations were symbolized by the use of white Taurus cars, which were widely recognized but unofficially acknowledged—making them a kind of ‘public secret’ [5]. Some of the disappeared individuals’ bodies were found in tortured and deserted conditions in graveyards or roadsides, but most of them were never found or were unrecognizable. This is why Saturday Mothers have been waiting for answers for nearly 1000 weeks.
Furthermore, when it comes to the solidarity of ethnic Turks with the Saturday Mothers, the dominance of Kemalism and the Turkish identity is so pervasive that a human rights violation simply does not stand aloud. The pro-government media often targets them as being affiliated with PKK due to their ethnicity [7]. This ethnic bias ‘others’ the members of the movement, justifying their disappearances in the name of combating terrorism and maintaining order. Their silent chants and sit-ins still recall the growing trauma of Kemalism, rooted in the failure of assimilating all Kurds to achieve a Western, homogenized nation [8]. The Kemalist trauma is further exacerbated due to the failure of denial policies, which were conducted by the state in every means possible, including explicitly state-sponsored or deep-state-affiliated disappearances.
Evoked by the dark history of unjust state coercion in the fight against the Other, Turks struggle to resonate with these mothers’ cause. That’s because substituting Islam under the umbrella of Turkishness became quite successful in modern Turkish Republic, after the uniting glue of Islam in the Ottoman Empire failed. The shift in the unification glue (religion to nationality) is demonstrated especially after the central-right Islamic conservative Justice and Development Party (AKP) came to power in the beginning of 2000s. Even though the party’s usage of political Islam could have laid the groundwork for advancing human rights and offered hope to the Saturday Mothers, the results were disappointing. Not only the the cause of Saturday Mothers— who wore white hijabs— were not resonated in the Islamist conservative base AKP, but also the initial promises of AKP to find those who disappeared were never kept. Therefore, we can infer that the case of Saturday Mothers is definitely not a religious one, yet a structural and institutionalized problem that do not change with differing ruling parties.
Another reason that makes it difficult for non-Kurds to be in solidarity with the Saturday Mothers is the socioeconomic class problem that Turkish nationalism brought as a side effect. Salih argues that the Kurds in Turkey are subject to internal colonization, which corresponds to a structure of social relations based on domination, and exploitation among culturally diverse groups (Kurds and Armenians are only a few instances in the case of Turkey) within the borders of the Turkish state [6]. Rarely acknowledged by the Western provinces, the Kurdish provinces were (and still are) transformed into a militarized zone by the Turkish army during the 1990s [8]. The political conflict and colonization of the Kurdish nation, justified by “reminding their Turkish origin” (Zeydanlıoğlu, 2008), led to great gaps in GDP per capita between the west and east of Turkey, causing migration from eastern provinces to the west and essentially disrupting the order of highly developed urban cities. Also, the masculinist ideal of modernizing women was not quite successful in rural areas [2], creating complicated layers of rural-urban patterns and family dynamics after rapid urbanization and migration, especially in big cities like Istanbul. This is also the reason why Saturday Mothers struggled to attract solidarity from different backgrounds: They are not only Kurds but also “dark-skinned” Kurds who live in the slums of Istanbul’s outskirts, work in low-income jobs, do not speak Turkish properly, and have many children despite their poverty. Given this implicit reference to Kurds in urban areas, the Saturday Mothers’ cause gains an additional dimension of class conflict; the archetype of the “rural, impoverished Kurdish mother,” contrasted with the urban, middle-class ideal, has made the movement an easy target of apathy and dismissal, even to the point of indifference.
In conclusion, this essay argues that the sociopolitical foundations of the modern Turkish Republic is the primary reason why Saturday Mothers fight for justice; thus, it would be difficult to expect recognition from those entrenched in the nationalist discourse. Orientalist narratives and civilizing justifications for the sake of maintaining order have resulted in disappearances, and along with the deepening class distinctions have transformed the predominantly Kurdish East into a region that operates as a colony within the dystopian ideal of Turkish nation-state. Despite the seemingly pessimistic nature of their struggle and the lack of immediate solutions, the enduring resistance of Saturday Mothers serves as a hopeful and peaceful persistence in the fight for justice for human lives, now for nearly 1000 weeks.
Reference
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