“I have been coming to this place for 21 years. I do not where my daughter, sister and nephew are. I do not know their whereabouts,” a mourning mother lamented.
The Saturday Mothers gather at 12pm every Saturday in Galatasaray square in Istanbul carrying photographs of their lost loved ones. They hold a silent sit-in in protest of the forced disappearances and political murders in Turkey after the 1980 military coup.
The protest began in 1995 when the family of Hasan Ocak held the first sit-in following his arrest in Istanbul. After weeks of trying to find out his whereabouts from the police, his tortured body was finally uncovered in a graveyard for unidentified people.
The sit-ins continued and grew in size until they were forced to stop in 1999 because of increasing police violence. They resumed 10 years later, in 2009, and have since met every Saturday, yesterday for the 600th time.
An MP from the Turkish parliament told Rudaw that they will not give up until the government “heeds our request.”
Artists, intellectuals, and opposition politicians have joined the sit-in, sharing the grief of the mothers who have lost their children.
Aragats Akhiyan, of the parliamentary assembly of Armenia, attended Saturday’s protest, saying that even if they have to protest 60,000 times, they will do so.
Of the speakers on Saturday, any who voiced heavy criticism of the Turkish government were arrested.
In a statement from the Saturday Mothers read at the vigil, they called on the government to keep its promise to end the war in Kurdistan, which they say continues to this day, referring to the conflict with the Kurdistan Workers Party in southeastern Turkey.
Security forces cordon off the protesters every week in order to prevent violence.
