Turkey Clamps Down on a Group Erdogan Once Championed: Grieving Mothers

ISTANBUL — In a narrow side street of Istanbul riot police, with gas masks pushed up on their heads, advanced on a small band of demonstrators marching in silence.

Police were there to stop a collection of aging mothers and their relatives, who were protesting the disappearances and extrajudicial killings decades ago of their family members, mostly activists from Turkey’s Kurdish minority.

Holding photographs of their missing relatives, the protesters, known as the Saturday Mothers, sat briefly on the ground before dispersing as a police commander threatened over a bullhorn to break up the gathering by force.

The aggressive response to a peaceful, long-established protest by grieving mothers was seen by government critics as evidence of a continuing turn toward authoritarianism in Turkey under President Recep Tayyip Erdogan — a leader who had once pledged to help these families find their loved ones.

Authorities had allowed the Saturday Mothers to rally every week for years, with the protests becoming such a well-known fixture on Istanbul’s most famous shopping street, Independence Avenue, that police usually coordinated with the group to minimize disruptions.

The government largely ignored the protests, which, even under the state of emergency of the last two years, were allowed to continue as others were stopped.

But for the past five weeks, the government has banned the rally, blocking off Independence Avenue and preventing the women from marching toward it, leaving everyone to wonder: why, and why now?

The government said that the Saturday Mothers were being exploited by terrorists, suggesting that Kurdish militants of the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party were using the group to advance their cause.

“Those measures we have taken became compulsory, as particular groups have turned this place into a terror propaganda center,” the government spokesman, Omar Celik, said.

The terrorist label has become an accusation used to jail many civil society activists in recent months.

To government critics, the move was seen as an early signal of how Erdogan intends to use the vast, new powers he amassed after his re-election in June. Under a new presidential system, he can now issue many orders by decree, without the need for lawmaker approval.

After leading a two-year crackdown against his political enemies in the wake of a failed coup in 2016, Erdogan has been accused of growing authoritarianism: jailing opponents, firing judges and academics and controlling the media.

So when he recently lifted the two-year state of emergency, few expected government oppression to ease. And the action taken against the Saturday Mothers seemed to confirm that worry.

“Maybe the concern is that Saturday Mothers, who have become a rightful, legitimate and proud political identity, would become a base for a massive struggle,” Kemal Can, a prominent columnist, mused in the opposition newspaper, Cumhuriyet.

Yuksel Taskin, a professor of political science, put it down to the return in recent years of “revanchist” security officials in the Interior Ministry. “Where you see a human rights struggle, they see terrorists,” he said.

The Saturday Mothers started gathering in silent solidarity in the mid-1990s, demanding answers from the state about their sons, husbands or brothers who were abducted in the dark days of police brutality that started after a 1980 coup d'état and lasted through the mid-1990s.

Many of those who disappeared in Istanbul were Kurdish activists, men who had moved with their families to the city, often to escape operations by security forces in the southeast of Turkey, where the Kurdistan Workers’ Party was waging an insurgency.

Hasan Karakoc’s brother, Ridvan, was a political activist who disappeared on Feb. 15, 1995, in Istanbul. Weeks later a child playing in the woods found his mutilated corpse.

At about the same time, the body of Hasan Ocak, another Kurdish activist, was discovered in the same woods.

The families of the two men decided to begin a campaign of protest to demand an investigation. In May 1995 they started a weekly sit-in in front of the Galatasaray High School on Independence Avenue, and they were soon joined by other families whose loved ones went missing under mysterious circumstances.

Hundreds of Kurdish activists disappeared in the 1990s from urban areas in Turkey, according to Amnesty International.

The rallies eventually drew hundreds of demonstrators. Each Saturday, the mothers sat in silence on the ground holding photographs of their missing sons. Each week the story of one of the disappeared was read out.

“At first the police were astonished,” recalled Karakoc, who accompanied his mother. Then as the protests swelled and drew international interest, police began to break them up, arresting and beating the women.

“That was the bloodiest period,” he said. “They started to use pepper spray and police dogs, but people were very determined and we intended never to leave that square.”

For four years every Saturday, they endured the beatings and abuse. The mothers never got any answers — government officials always denied any knowledge of the missing — but the human rights organization Amnesty International credited the Saturday Mothers with single-handedly checking the abductions by Turkey’s security forces.

“There is no question that it was their courageous and determined stand that turned back the wave of ‘disappearances,’ which reached a peak in 1994,” Amnesty International wrote in a report in 1998.

Yet, exhausted and intimidated, the mothers called a halt in 1999. It was not until 10 years later that they resumed their protests — under the Erdogan government.

In 2009, Erdogan was a populist prime minister who had cast himself as a champion of the poor. He was working to have Turkey join the European Union, had instituted judicial and human rights reforms and was moving toward making peace with the Kurdish guerrillas. In 2011 he invited some of the mothers and relatives to meet with him.

“Erdogan listened to our stories, one by one. He never interrupted and he took notes,” said Karakoc, who was among those present.

Erdogan appeared especially affected by the oldest woman present, Berfo Kirbayir, 103, whose son, Cemil Kirbayir, had disappeared in 1980.

“Right today I am going to give orders, I am going to expose the perpetrators,” Karakoc quoted Erdogan as saying.

Even though some suspected Erdogan was only showing interest for political gain before an election, he did set up a parliamentary commission to uncover what had happened to Cemil Kirbayir.

The commission confirmed that he had been detained by the state and tortured to death. Yet his body was never traced, and prosecutors did not bring any perpetrators to trial. The commission ceased its work after that. “He said: ‘Mother Berfo, I am going to find your son,'” Fatma Gulmez, Berfo Kirbayir’s daughter, quoted Erdogan as saying. “He promised our mother and he did not keep his promise.”

When he was mayor of Istanbul, Erdogan was widely seen as a man of the people; he is now closely identified by many with the state and its security apparatus.

“When he was mayor, he did good things for the people,” said Hanim Tosun, whose husband went missing from police custody in 1995. “Then he became a lawmaker, prime minister and president, and he began to smash people’s heads.”

Amid fierce criticism for mistreating the mothers after the first crackdown by police in late August, the government spokesman gave a brief acknowledgment of the group’s suffering in a generally harsh statement. “There is nothing more respectful than the pain of a mother who lost her child, her longing for him,” said Celik, the spokesman.

But police have been out in force to prevent the mothers from rallying every Saturday since. An opposition lawmaker, Sezgin Tanrikulu, said Erdogan was looking to find a scapegoat amid an economic crisis. “He is continually looking for tension and confrontation, to make everyone enemies of each other and create the perception of terrorism for his own support base,” he said. “This is his aim.”

The mothers expressed shock at how the police handled them.

“I did not kill anyone, why did you do this to me?” said Emine Ocak, the mother of Hasan, addressing Erdogan directly at a news briefing after the police crackdown. “I am hurting, I am in pain, don’t you have a conscience?”