Occupy London poster, November 2011. Wikicommons/ Richard Symonds. Some rights reserved.“There is no such thing [as the Kurdish question]. Tell me my [Kurdish] friends what is it that you don’t have?” These were the words recently uttered by Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, who has been negotiating a peace deal with the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK – Partiya Karkerên Kurdistan) to bring about a peaceful solution to the country’s long running conflict.
“Our bones are missing; our graves, our lives are missing” was probably the best answer to Erdoğan, given by a member of Saturday Mothers, an initiative formed by the families of the disappeared during the last four decades of Kurdish conflict. “If the President has got any conscience, he would not ridicule us like this. For 20 years we have been gathering in Galatasaray Square for the bones of our children. We, the mothers are dying from longing for our children.”
Truth and justice for atrocities committed against Kurdish civilians during the 30 year-long conflict with the PKK is one of the most crucial things that is missing from the public debate and official discourse in Turkey. Throughout the state of emergency regime in the Kurdish region, gross human rights violations were committed against the Kurds by the security officers and the paramilitary groups. 30,000 – 40,000 people, predominantly Kurds were killed, over a million Kurdish people were forcibly displaced and thousands of them were subject to enforced disappearances and extrajudicial executions.
