I grew up in one of the poor districts of Diyarbakır, the biggest city in Turkey’s mainly Kurdish southeast. At the beginning of the 1980s, we began to hear that there was some kind of armed conflict in the mountains, between “terrorists” and the state. After a while, we heard these “terrorists” were called “Apocu”. […]
“It was the evening of Newroz 1992. I was in high school. We celebrated Newroz in Nusaybin without violence, but more than 100 people were killed during the celebrations in Cizre, a neighbouring district. The people of Nusaybin were so sad. While people were talking about the massacre in Cizre that evening, Interior Minister İsmet […]
Every day you hear about the thousands of people who have been affected by government decrees issued under Turkey’s ongoing state of emergency. In a country like Turkey, where thousands have been arrested and hundreds die in violence each month, lives can easily be turned into numbers. Today I want to share one story, one […]