It was just after midnight. I was watching TV as my sons played nearby. My younger son was playing with Lego as my older son played on his phone. My husband and another friend were also with us. A normal Sunday night. All of a sudden, I heard a terrible noise. At first, I thought […]
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We exist, Kurdistan exists!
We exist, Kurdistan exists! I remember as a child how afraid I was when my mother spoke Kurdish in public. When I was seven, I needed to go to the hospital every week because of an accident. When the doctor would ask my mom a question about my health, I would quickly answer before my […]
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Should children die?
Should children die? The winter months of late 2015 and early 2016 were a dark time in southeastern Turkey. Our cities were under bombardment. There were military curfews in many Kurdish cities. Children were dying from shrapnel and gunshot wounds. Most of schools in the mainly Kurdish southeast were closed. Many teachers had left. Kurdish […]
*As published on Ahvalnews on 05.12.2017 https://ahvalnews.com/sur/ancient-heart-turkeys-biggest-kurdish-city-ripped The world’s longest 24-hour curfew continues in my hometown. The curfew that began in six districts of Diyarbakır’s ancient Sur neighbourhood has gone on for two years now. These six districts make up 75 hectares of Sur’s total 148 hectares, that is, about half of Sur. The curfews […]
Why Turkey is posting paramilitary forces to its own cities *As published in Ahvalnews on 12.11.2017 https://ahvalnews.com/pkk/why-turkey-posting-paramilitary-forces-its-own-cities When the Turkish state needed help protecting Kurdish villages in its southeast region in the mid-1980s from insurgents belonging to the Kurdish-separatist Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), then-president Turgut Özal began a “village guard” system. The controversial system, established in 1985, recruited villagers […]
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Some Notes for the Warmongers
Some Notes for the Warmongers In the last couple of weeks, İnsan Hakları Derneği (Human Rights Association) Diyarbakır Branch has published an important report on human rights violations between the dates July 24, 2015 and July 24, 2017, which attests to the atrocities faced by our society in numbers. According to this report, in the […]