ISTANBUL, Turkey – Holding red carnations and pictures of their missing loved ones, hundreds of people, mostly Kurds, held a sit-in protest in the heart of Istanbul's bustling shopping district for the 500th time on Saturday, demanding justice for their relatives who were killed or disappeared at the hands of the Turkish state during the early 1990s.
Joined by thousands of supporters, some of the so-called 'Saturday Mothers' - female and male relatives of more than 1,000 people who disappeared mainly from Turkey's Kurdish southeast during the height of the Kurdish insurgency - read out statements calling on the state to release information on their family members and for those responsible to be tried.
“For 20 years, this state has not taken one step. Sitting here I always knew my husband would never come back. However, we are protesting so that never again should anybody be abducted in front of his house, right in front of his children's eyes,” said Hanim Tosun, whose husband Fehmi Tosun was never seen again following his arrest in Istanbul in 1995.
“No mother should be without her child and nobody should be left without a father. I have been beaten many times and arrested. For days we were arrested and in the end we found ourselves in prison. But nobody could make me abandon this struggle,” she said.
The vigil has become a familiar fixture at noon every Saturday on Istanbul's busy Istiklal Street. It began when the family of Hasan Ocak held the first sit-in protest in 1995 following the 30-year-old's 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 vigil grew in number each week but faced increasing police violence and in 1999 the Saturday Mothers were forced to abandon their protest. In 2009, after a ten year break, the protesters resumed their sit-ins on Istiklal Street and have met each Saturday ever since.
While Saturday's 500th vigil passed off peacefully, scores of riot policemen and a water cannon truck stood watch only metres away as a grim reminder.
Noticeable forced disappearances in Turkey started after the 1980 coup, mainly of left-wing political figures, but dramatically increased during the early 1990s as the Turkish military responded to a strengthening insurgency by Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) militants.
A state of emergency giving local authorities extensive powers was declared in much of the country's southeast during this period and was only finally lifted in 2002. Many Kurdish villages were razed and their inhabitants forcibly removed to other cities. Families say relatives with no links to the PKK were executed by the state, died in custody or disappeared.
Many have taken their cases to the European Court of Human Rights after being denied justice in Turkey but despite numerous rulings against it, rights groups say Turkey has done little to put those responsible on trial. They say getting justice for the state-sponsored killings and disappearances should be part of a current peace process between Kurdish militants and the state.
Ankara launched tentative negotiations with the PKK two years ago to try and end an insurgency that has cost around 40,000 lives, mainly Kurds, and has devastated the southeast of the country. Turkey has enjoyed a relative calm since the PKK's jailed leader, Abdullah Ocalan, called a ceasefire in march last year.
Turkey's current Justice and Development Party (AKP) has arguably done more than any previous government to enhance the rights of Turkey's Kurds who make up around a fifth of the population, and holding direct talks with the PKK would have been unthinkable only a few years ago.
However, most Kurds say these measures do not go far enough and for many of those holding vigil in Istanbul on Saturday, their struggle continues.
“We want the bones of our disappeared child. We want those who have bereaved not to cry anymore. We are not crying. We want justice for those who have killed our children. Nobody more should die. No more death. No more torture,” said one elderly woman whose relative was disappeared in 1992.
“We have hope. Whoever resists will rise up. Those who give in will lose. Justice is not given, it is taken,” she said.
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