COPENHAGEN, Denmark – A Kurdish mother, convicted for selling books related to the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), begins her jail sentence in Turkey later this month, along with her twin infants.
Mulkiye Demir Kılınc was convicted for selling books related to the PKK at the Mesopotamian Culture Center. After one of her clients, who was sending the books to the PKK, was arrested, Kilinc also was charged with “aiding a terror organization.”
The new mother, whose jail term starts on May 19, has asked for the sentence to be postponed for a year, so that her six-month-old twins are a little older and can walk.
“If the sentence is postponed for a year, they will be one-and-a-half years old, so they will be able to walk. They will not spend their infancy, when they only can crawl, at prison. I can take care of them more easily if they can walk,” Kılınc recently told Turkey’s Hurriyet newspaper.
On Sunday, Mother’s Day in Turkey, the Human Rights Association (IHD) has arranged a demonstration in Istanbul to protest the sentence.
A board member of the IHD in Istanbul, Seza Mis Horoz, told Rudaw that the prison sentence is a great injustice.
“To get such a big punishment for selling books and even come to prison with children is unbelievable. How should a mother go to jail with her children under such circumstances?” Horoz asked.
Over a year ago, the PKK and Turkey’s government started a peace process to end a bloody war that killed more than 40,000 people in a 30-year conflict. In return for the pullout of PKK guerrillas from Turkey, it was expected that the Turkish government would give the Kurds greater cultural and linguistic rights, even though details of the agreement between the two sides remain unknown.
According to Horoz, there is an inexplicable contrast between negotiating with the PKK, and imprisoning a woman for selling books to the same organization.
"What kind of peace does the Turkish state want with the PKK, when they at the same time imprison people with accusations of ‘selling books to the PKK?’”
She feared that such actions could damage the peace process between Turkey and the PKK.
"It creates frustration among people who thus lose faith in the government's desire for peace," she said.
Hejar Dashti, an expert on Kurds at Copenhagen University, told Rudaw that despite the peace process the PKK is still a banned organization in Turkey, according to the country’s terror laws.
“PKK is officially still the enemy number one in Turkey, therefore any connection to the organization is forbidden and is charged with terror paragraphs,” he explained.
He further added that both parties in the peace process are accusing each other of not living up to the process, and therefore the process is somehow put on standby.
Sympathizers of Kılınc have started a petition campaign online (change.org), which among other things asks Turkish President Abdullah Gul to intervene.
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