Kurds Renew Vigils For 'Disappeared' In Turkey

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A woman holds a banner that reads "Kurdish or Turkish, no more mothers should cry," as Turkish Kurdish women stage a recent sit-in protest.

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A woman holds a banner that reads "Kurdish or Turkish, no more mothers should cry," as Turkish Kurdish women stage a recent sit-in protest.

On a recent afternoon, nearly 100 people gather at Istanbul's Galatasaray Square for the weekly demonstration of a group known as the Saturday Mothers.

Kneeling on the pavement, they protest the disappearance of their relatives, mostly ethnic Kurds, caught up in a decades-long fight between the Kurdish separatist movement and the Turkish government.

The protesters hold red carnations and photos of their loved ones, most of whom disappeared in the early to mid-1990s. They hold the Turkish government responsible for the disappearances of about 1,200 Kurds.

The protests started about 15 years ago, but they were halted in 1999 and resumed only recently.

This year, a court case brought by state prosecutors against high-level military and government officials inspired the Saturday Mothers to come back. The prominent Turks are accused of plotting a military coup against the government of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

Sebla Arcan, an economist and a leading member of Turkey's Human Rights Association, believes that some of the military people on trial in the plot to overthrow Erdogan's government are also responsible for the disappearances in the 1990s.

"We want the people now under custody to also be tried for the disappearances," Arcan says.

Turkish judges are yet to be convinced of the link between the disappearances and the court case. But the uproar generated across Turkey by the trial has given the families of the disappeared renewed courage to speak out.

"We thought of this case as an opportunity. And that's why we started the protests again — to show we haven't forgotten the people who were made to disappear and the people who were responsible for these disappearances," Arcan adds.

The Kurdish movement has spent decades fighting for the rights of Turkey's largest minority: Kurds account for about 18 percent of Turkey's population of 77 million. In the 1980s, a splinter group — the Kurdistan People's Party, or the PKK — took to the mountains in the Southeast and started an armed struggle against Turkey's central government, with the intent of carving out a separate state for Kurds. The PKK is regarded as a terrorist organization in the United States and Europe.

Turkey's security apparatus responded forcefully to the PKK, raiding villages throughout the Kurdish region.

Many Kurds, such as Kasim Alpsoy, were caught in the middle of that fight. Kasim went missing in 1994 from Adana, a city in southern Turkey, where he was a worker in a leather factory. His son, Mehmet, recalls the day.

"There was a police raid at 6 a.m. on our house, and my father was taken into custody," Mehmet says. "He was questioned and tortured. But then he was released. Only they kept his identification card and told him to come get it the next day."

According to Mehmet, when Kasim Alpsoy went back for his ID, he disappeared inside the secret services building. His brother-in-law, who had accompanied him, waited outside for hours, to no avail.

"My uncle came back home but not my father. We never saw him again," Mehmet adds.

Mehmet says his father was sympathetic to, but was not a member of, the Kurdish movement. He also says he believes the government took his father because of his ethnicity.

When the protests to prod the government to investigate the disappearances first started in the mid-1990s, they quickly attracted national attention. As the state took notice, however, things soon got ugly.

"We were dragged on the streets, were attacked with pepper gas," says Arcan, whose organization co-sponsors the Saturday Mothers' sit-ins. "It came to the point where it started to threaten the health of the relatives of the disappeared people. That's why we had to stop [in 1999]," she adds.

Since the demonstrations have restarted, one missing person's case is presented each week during the rally.

This day it is the turn of Seyhan Dogan, a Kurdish boy rounded up during a police raid in his home in the city of Mardin-Dargecit in southeastern Turkey.

"Seyhan was 13 years old on Oct. 29, 1995," says an activist reading the boy's story into a loudspeaker. "He was arrested at 3 o'clock in the morning along with his brother Hazni, who was 9 years old at the time."

Dogan, the activist says, was never seen again.

For Mehmet Alpsoy, who lost his father in 1994, the matter is simple.

"I am here because even after 15 years, the people who are responsible for the disappearances are still free," Mehmet says. "I want them to be found and tried."