A group of international academics, lawyers, trade unionists and activists travelled to Turkey’s Kurdish-majority southeast as election observers to witness the country’s epochal elections to be held on 14 May. In a series of articles to be published every day until the elections in Medya News, Emma Müller, a member of the UK delegation, shares the international election observers delegations’ findings from the ground.
Vala Francis
Nearly every day we visit villages and rural areas. The local organisers often take care to introduce us to the people who live there – sometimes this is via their links to martyrs – their brothers and sisters, fathers, or children who were killed or imprisoned. Who their relation was, and when their life was extinguished by the state. Others take the time to explain the visible long term injuries of campaigning locals, of war injuries from the past. Local residents that live between the mountains and valleys of Hene, Hazro, and Dicle in the rural peripheral regions of Amed (Diyarbakır) city tell us how the people suffered throughout the 90s; the words of tyranny and oppression are still fresh on their lips. A generation of young people “left and went to the mountains”, and thousands of refugees fled to Mersin and other metropoles to escape the burnings or bombings. State military bases that were set up in the 1990s still stand, dotted around the valleys and mountains to observe and intimidate. Since then, small cemeteries have also grown between the mountainsides, with the bodies of the youth who left, returned to their homeland in death.
Vigils for bones of loved ones
For more than 15 years, the relatives of disappeared and imprisoned people have held silent vigils across the country. They demand an end to torture and incarceration, and the return of the bones of their loved ones. We attended one of these vigils. One woman said her father was arrested in Lice in 1994. All the others who were arrested at the time were released – but not Mehmet Ayşin. When the family demanded answers, the military later just said they had not arrested him. He has never been seen again, but his family demand the right to bury him. Other speakers outline their situations, sometimes their words halting in grief. The identities of those responsible must be known, they said. But the state chooses not to act. Between pain, the topic of hope weaves through the speeches: 14 May is a pivotal point for democracy in the entire country, in a regime that normalises torture and tyranny.
After the vigil for the disappeared, an early mothers’ day celebration takes place, where representatives speak about women’s and children’s freedom and struggle. They say that every day is important for mothers, not just this day, and that Yeşil Sol (Green Left) Party is struggling for this not just until the election, but as part of their long term political process. Many chants of “jin, jiyan, azadi” (woman, life freedom)and “biji berxedana dayika” (long live the resistance of mothers) are heard, interspersed with govend (traditional dancing). Yüksel Almas, co-chair of MEBYA-DER (the martyrs association), who was imprisoned for her work and recently released, made a statement that this oppression is unnacceptable, that the people will liberate themselves and that women are organising to stop the torture against their children, adding: “street by street we will succeed in our struggle”. This sentence echoed in my mind; what I have seen is that the work really is street by street, or village by village. What may seem inefficient in a positivist sense – around 20 to 30 people visiting areas one by one where a few families live, greeting them, talking, dancing – is actually the political process and it enables a flow of understanding between Yeşil Sol and society.
“Rise up against tyranny!”
Ceylan Akça on the campaign trail in Hazro, with several generations of women chanting “jin, jiyan, azadi!”
I have seen women as strong political figures in many roles. Of course, women sharing power through co-chairing in local governance structures is a clear example. But today, I was focused on the role of mothers in many contexts; as the guardians of culture and language, but also of justice, experiencing specific forms of love and pain in the prolonged fight against both patriarchy and the state. In their care are the children who are already resisting. Children are nearly always the most visibly excited by the Yeşil Sol Party convoys, especially across the rural regions. They are the first to make victory signs and to grab flags, and they join us in the govend lines during the visits or weddings that the party attends in local areas. The mothers greet us by kissing our cheeks and welcoming us to their homes and to their land.
The election campaign faces constant harassment and obstacles created by the police and the military. During convoys while crossing checkpoints in the countryside, while trying to make announcements, while visiting shops in neighbourhoods – the state says “No chanting slogans, walk in silence!” Rules are made up spontaneously to prohibit the work of politicians and their supporters. In some villages, armoured military vehicles stalked the convoys, with visible snipers guarding local roofs.
The day after I arrived, 126 people were arrested in dawn raids, particularly targeting lawyers, journalists, politicians and people connected to Yeşil Sol Party. The same day, members of the YSP were attacked by police outside the central office in Amed, with one needing hospital treatment as a result. Later that day, the party made an announcement in the central city, denouncing the attacks against democracy and society. This was constantly blocked and fragmented by the police, stifling the voices of those attending by creating intense intimidation through hundreds of armed riot police, intelligence officers, and equipped vehicles enclosing every civilian who attended. Angry mothers at the front of the protest against the police line shouted slogans – telling people to “rise up against tyranny!”. A few days after the mass arrests, more than 40 of those in custody were remanded, and further arrests have been made every few days across the country.
An act of care and resistance
A Yeşil Sol Party visit to Eğil
Each day, our friends help us to understand the situation, taking great care over the speeches and discussions made in Zazaki or Turkish and translating this into Kurmanji, despite my sometimes tenuous understanding of the language.
Even in the structure of language we meet with the architecture of tyranny: When I have asked well-spoken friends how they learned such academic Kurdish, their response has sometimes been: in prison. Usually, their sentences have been close to a decade.
Dozens – or possibly hundreds – of people have spent hours collectively building my knowledge of their language word by word. Like the morning mist, tangible forms emerge, clarity grows, and the obscured becomes known. The language unfolds itself. This process is inevitably social in nature; it only exists as much as I exist in relation to other speakers, who are kind enough to share knowledge both of and through their mother tongue. That connection is, in itself, an act of care and resistance.
See also: Election Diaries – 3: Police tactics fail to disempower collective excitement
