A crackdown on grieving mums in Turkey

EVERY SATURDAY morning, Ikbal Eren, a retired teacher, used to travel by bus from her home on Istanbul’s western fringes to a small square in the middle of Istiklal Avenue, the city’s main shopping street, put on a T-shirt adorned with a black-and-white photograph of a young man, and sit down with dozens of other, mostly elderly women. Their vigil would begin at noon. The man pictured on Mrs Eren’s shirt, her brother Hayrettin, was detained by police in Istanbul in the autumn of 1980, months after the army toppled Turkey’s government. Hundreds of thousands of people were rounded up in the wake of the coup. Another wave of arrests followed years later, when war erupted between Kurdish insurgents and Turkish security forces. Scores were tortured in custody. Several hundred, including Hayrettin, were never heard from again. “We haven’t found any record of his arrest in 38 years,” says Mrs Eren.

Today, Mrs Eren and the other Saturday Mothers, the group she and other relatives of the missing founded in 1995 to hold the state accountable for abductions and extrajudicial killings, have no place left to grieve. In August the government of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan banned their sit-in, claiming the group was becoming a front for the separatist Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK). When the Mothers and their supporters defied orders to disperse, riot police doused them with tear-gas. Around 40 people, including Emine Ocak, a woman in her 80s whose son disappeared two decades ago, were briefly detained. Police have prevented the group from gathering every Saturday since then.