An 82-year-old sick and disabled woman has been released from a Turkish prison after eight months of incarceration for ‘aiding and abetting an [illegal] organisation.’
Makbule Özer, a Kurd from the Edremit (Artemêtan) district of Van (Wan) in eastern Turkey, was released from prison on the morning of 31 August. She had originally been arrested together with her husband in a raid on their home on 23 July 2018, but was released on bail three days later. According to a report by the news agency Rudaw, she had been treating a woman for an umbilical hernia. A woman by the name of Şükran Yıldız was arrested in the raid, and charged with membership of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK).
Özer and her husband were both sentenced to two years and six months in prison, rearrested when their sentences were finalised by the Supreme Court in May 2022 and imprisoned in Van High Security Prison.
Özer’s sentence was suspended, and she was released in September 2022 on the basis that she was suffering from poor health and was 61% disabled. However, Turkey’s official Institute of Forensic Medicine issued two medical reports stating she was fit to remain in prison, and she was rearrested and imprisoned again in April of this year.
Human rights and peace activists, including Turkey’s Saturday Mothers and Peace Mothers, who conduct weekly justice vigils for forcibly disappeared family members, and the Istanbul branch of Turkey’s independent Human Rights Association, have been campaigning for Özer’s release, particularly after her rearrest in April.
Upon her release, Özer sent a message to the press, saying, “They [the authorities] brought me out early in the morning… They did not let people welcome me because they were terrified.”
Tuncer Bakırhan, Co-chair of Turkey’s pro-Kurdish Peoples’ Equality and Democracy (DEM) Party, visited Özer in her home after her release on Saturday. Özer said that she had been bundled out of the prison in the early hours of the morning, and left out in the open for hours. “I wish all the other prisoners could be released too,” she added.
