Kurdish mother Emine Ürek marked Mother’s Day in Turkey still searching for her son’s remains 34 years after his death, as Turkish and Kurdish politicians linked the day to calls for peace in the Turkish-Kurdish conflict.
Emine Ürek’s son, Mikail, a member of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), was killed in 1991 during a clash with Turkish forces in the Savur (Stewrê) district of Mardin (Mêrdîn) in southeast Turkey. Now elderly, Emine Ürek has spent decades seeking her son’s body, joining the Saturday Mothers, a group of mostly Kurdish women who gather weekly in İstanbul’s Galatasaray Square to demand answers about loved ones who disappeared during the conflict. “The greatest gift for me would be my son’s bones,” she told Fırat News Agency, expressing her longing to bury him and visit his grave. Her story reflects the pain of thousands of families, particularly Kurdish ones, still seeking closure from the peak of the conflict in the 1980s and 1990s.
The Turkish-Kurdish conflict, ongoing since 1984, has claimed over 40,000 lives, mostly those of Kurdish civilians. Enforced disappearances, especially in Kurdish-majority regions like Mardin, remain a festering wound for families. The Saturday Mothers, formed in 1995, have faced regular police crackdowns but persist in their vigils, highlighting cases like Ürek’s. The remains of at least 4,201 disappeared individuals lie in 348 identified mass graves, with over 1,000 disappearance cases still unresolved.
The second Sunday in May, which Turkey celebrates as Mother’s Day along with a number of other countries, saw politicians address this shared grief. At a rally in Van (Wan) on Saturday, Özgür Özel, leader of the main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP), wished a Happy Mother’s Day to all mothers, and particularly Kurdish and Turkish mothers, in both languages: “We want the tears of mothers to stop,” he said, adding, “Roja dayikan pîroz be” (Kurdish: Happy Mother’s Day). Özel’s message, shared on X, highlighted a call for peace to end the suffering of families divided by the conflict.
Tuncer Bakırhan, co-chair of the pro-Kurdish Peoples’ Equality and Democracy (DEM) Party, issued a Mother’s Day message stating: “The greatest gift for mothers who have paid a heavy price in conflicts is peace.” He highlighted the suffering of mothers in the region, adding that the DEM Party’s struggle aims to create “a peaceful country where mothers’ tears will cease,” and pledged to bring peace to Turkey.
