The recovery of the body of the missing schoolgirl Narin Güran last week has spurred renewed calls for justice for student Gülistan Doku, who disappeared from Turkey’s Kurdish majority city of Tunceli (Dersim) over four years ago.
Dersim Labour and Democracy Platform organised a demonstration in the city on Tuesday calling for justice for both Narin and Gülistan, to coincide with the funeral of the schoolgirl. Gülistan‘s family also made a renewed plea for information on social media platform X.
Large numbers of civil society organisations and individuals joined the demonstration while the Tunceli branch co-chair of the Health and Social Service Workers Union (SES) Serap Kahraman read out a press statement on behalf of the platform.
Kahraman commented on the delays in DNA sampling and media speculation which clouded the investigation into Narin’s case. “The fact that Narin’s body was found so close to her house reveals the extent of the negligence,” she said, referring to the stream bed where the body was discovered having been searched more than once.
Turning to the unresolved case of Gülistan Doku, a university student in Tunceli when she disappeared in January 2020, Kahraman asserted that her case was also “full of negligence and contradictions”, which exposed the state’s policy of protecting the perpetrators. “Steps need to be taken to eliminate the perception of impunity that disturbs society,” the co-chair said.
The main suspect’s stepfather was a police officer, who worked closely with the investigators, and had access to the case file. It was not until a year later that the officer was dismissed and charged for publishing social media posts revealing private information about the missing student, intending to “create a perception” that she had committed suicide.
The calls for justice highlight a lack of accountability by Turkish authorities over missing children, with high-profile cases left unresolved or closed before prosecution. The crisis comes against a backdrop of the national statistics on missing children being eight-years out of date, pointing to systemic failures in child protection in Turkey.
