ANKARA, Turkey – Relatives and activists gathered last week to bury the remains of Nurettin and Nejat Yalcinkaya, who were among hundreds of victims of Turkey’s ‘enforced disappearances’ in the 1990s.
Nurettin Yalcinkaya, father of two and a shopkeeper, and his uncle, Nejat Yalcinkaya, father of five and a worker at Kiziltepe Municipality, died after being detained by JITEM (Turkish Gendarmerie Intelligence and Anti-Terror Unit) in 1995, said Erdal Kuzu, head of the Mardin Branch of the Human Rights Association (IHD).
Their funeral last Thursday was attended by relatives, members of the Saturday Mothers of Turkey who have gathered every Saturday in Istanbul since 1995 to demand information on their missing family members, activists of the Association of Solidarity and Assistance for the Families of Missing Persons (Yakay-Der) and representatives from IHD.
“We were looking for the bones of those two souls for 19 years. Thousands of people have been looking for the bones of their loved ones for years. This is the picture of the human rights record of Turkey,” Maside Ocak, member of the IHD’s Commission of the Enforced Disappearances, said in her speech at the funeral.
Kuzu told Rudaw that the bones of the two men were found in a water well in 2008.
“The bones were found during an excavation in a water-well in 2008 in the village of Katarlı which was emptied by the Turkish state between 1993 and 1995. The members of the Yalcinkaya family sought legal help from the local prosecutors in 1995 but the prosecutors dismissed the investigation. In 2008, another investigation was launched for all the enforced disappearances and extrajudicial killings in the province of Mardin. And in 2013, the forensic medicine institution was finally able to identify who the bones belonged to,” Kuzu said.
“We have been able to find there have been at least 55 cases of enforced disappearances in Mardin alone. And we have been able to locate six of them in mass graves,” Kuzu added.
“The state knows where, when, how and by whom all those people were killed,” Kuzu said. “The biggest obstacle in our struggle to find the bones of the disappeared people is that the state does not sufficiently share the knowledge it has concerning the enforced disappearances.”
The Turkish parliament has published a report that speaks of 17,000 unidentified murders in Turkey, activists said.
“We think that the estimated number of enforced disappearances is between 1,500 and 2,000, but we do not know th
e exact number because we have not been able to enter many Kurdish villages due to security concerns,” Velat Demir, head of Yakay-Der, told Rudaw.
New York-based Human Rights Watch (HRW) said in its 2014 World Report that great obstacles remain in securing justice for victims of abuses by police, military, and state officials in Turkey.
“The lifting of the statute of limitations for the prosecution of torture was a positive element in the April reform bill, though prosecution of unlawful killings by state perpetrators is still subject to a 20-year time limit, raising concerns about impunity for abuses committed in the early 1990s,” the report said.
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