Nobody in the small village will say if young Berruan’s “name became known”.
But this is not a place where strangers are welcome. Life here, as in many
other rural areas of Turkey, is run along feudal lines little changed for
centuries. It is also a predominantly Kurdish area and the heartland of the
Kurdish separatist PKK guerrilla movement. Berruan’s father, he later
mentions in passing, was imprisoned for 10 years as a terrorist. So, as a
foreign woman asking awkward questions, my presence on his doorstep triggers
alarm.
“What are they doing here?” he shouts at his wife when he returns to find my
male interpreter and I in front of the family home. For us to have gone
inside would have exposed his wife to the risk of being “talked about”; only
he is permitted to show us into the three-room dwelling, which he does,
eventually, to point to the room where his daughter died. He eyes us
suspiciously, but then decides to adopt a more conciliatory stance. He
eventually takes pictures of his daughter as a young girl from his pocket.
“How sweet she was then,” he says. “She used to talk about wanting to join
the police and even about becoming a lawyer. I told her, ‘You are free to do
what you want.’ But then she decided to stay at home, watch television, help
with the cleaning,” he says. “Maybe it was from the cleaning that she learnt
that I kept my gun on top of the wardrobe.”
When I ask if he has any recent photographs of his daughter, he says every
trace of her has been removed from the house. “We put everything that could
remind us of her in a bag, including her Koran, and gave it to the poor.”
When I ask his reaction to the newspaper headline raising questions about
her death, he swats the air with his hand, as if batting a fly. The
interview comes to a swift conclusion after that.
During the past five years, 281 girls and women have attempted suicide in
Batman (population approximately 250,000) – three times the number of
attempts by men – and 43 succeeded, the youngest being a 12-year-old girl.
“Every suicide of a girl or woman should be looked at with suspicious eyes,”
argues Nebahat Akkoc, the director of a women’s support organisation called
Ka-Mer in the southeastern city of Diyarbakir. Just how many suicides are
“forced”, Akkoc and other human-rights workers admit, is impossible to say.
“One girl who survived told us how her family stood watching as she cut her
wrists. They then silently closed the door on her and walked away.” Akkoc
also talks of other survivors, who have made it to the shelter her
organisation runs, describing how their families have told them: “You are
going to die anyway, so why let your brother go to prison for killing you?
Why not do it yourself?”
In the twisted minds of those who would force a wife, daughter or sister to
end her own life, there is a lethal logic. Tragically, it has to do with EU
demands for Turkey to improve its record on human rights if it is to stand a
chance of being admitted as a member in the next 10 years. (Accession talks
formally began in October 2005.) In response to EU demands to crack down on
the widespread problem of honour killings in Turkey, punishments for such
crimes have been increased. In the past a male relative could argue he had
been “provoked” into killing a female relative because she had offended
family honour. This would be enough to diminish the severity of his sentence
to little more than a small fine or short prison sentence or, in the case of
a minor, usually a matter of a few months – a legal get-out that often
resulted in a young brother or cousin being ordered by his family to become
the one to carry out the murder. But since Turkey reformed its penal code in
the past two years, minors are no longer entitled to a reduction in sentence
for committing such crimes. The conditions under which “provocation” can be
entered as a plea in mitigation have also been severely reduced – though not
abolished entirely. On March 3, for instance, a brother convicted of killing
his sister by stoning her in a small community near Diyarbakir had his
sentence of life imprisonment reduced to 13 years on the grounds that he had
been “provoked”. His sister, Semse Allak, had been raped by one of her
father’s friends. It took Semse months to die of her injuries. Her family
refused to give her a burial; her body was claimed and buried by a women’s
organisation.
That those who give voice to women, exposing such atrocities, together with
those who dare to speak out on other subjects long considered taboo in
Turkey, should be silenced, both by the state and private enterprise, is a
damning condemnation of a modern democracy.
Ayse Ozgun drinks coffee in an elegant Istanbul restaurant as she rages
against the cancellation of her TV programme Every Day last year.
“There is a volcano of women’s screams building up in this country, and we
were one of the only ways this pent-up anger could be vented,” says Ozgun.
“They’ve pulled the shows that looked at the serious problems women face in
our society and replaced them with a lot of music and dancing. Ha! Much
easier,” she laughs bitterly.
Ozgun says she was warned more than 20 years ago, when she was the first to
host a talk show aimed at women, that her job was to “entertain, not
educate”. After just three months the state TV show, considered too
controversial, was cancelled. After four years abroad, Ozgun moved back to
Turkey and began hosting her new show, Every Day – again aimed at a largely
female audience – this time on a private channel. But following a lengthy
run, this show was again cancelled in November, after a woman who appeared
on the show to discuss how her family had forced her into a marriage was
shot dead by her father. “You’ve ruined the reputation and honour of our
family in front of millions of viewers,” the father shouted at his
32-year-old daughter, a mother of two, before killing her.
“You cannot change such a sick mentality by expecting rapid change of men, but
rather by educating women, informing them of their rights, giving them a
voice,” says Ozgun. “What we did was go to the nucleus of society, that of
the mother and child. Tell people what was going on… This country will only
develop if women are allowed to develop, and I won’t shut up about that
until they shut me up completely,” says the feisty 61-year-old, who is now
planning to start another programme for women – this time on the radio.
“Where can girls and women go if they have a problem? They have nowhere.
I believe there should be a social worker in every mosque in this country,”
she says, while stressing it’s not in the teachings of Islam that the fault
lies, but in many of the country’s outdated customs that regard women as
subservient.
Yet Aysenur Yazici, host of one of the other cancelled shows, believes it was
partly because she exposed the custom of religious marriages that her
programme You Are Not Alone was pulled by managers who claimed it had become
“a social problem”. This custom, where marriages are sealed with an
unofficial religious ceremony and are not registered as civil unions,
affords women no marital rights or protection. They can be instantly
dissolved by the man, but not the women. “Nobody was killed as a result of
my show,” says Yazici, for 20 years one of Turkey’s most respected news
anchorwomen. “But I kept talking about these religious marriages. I kept
telling women, ‘You don’t have to put up with the way you are being treated.
You can go to the police, to a lawyer. You can fight!’And many did.”
