JINHA

ÊLIH – For 68-year-old FeleknasBatur, living in the Northern Kurdish city of Batman, there is only one thing she wants before she dies: to find her children's bones.

Feleknas is a member of the Peace Mothers Assembly, a group of women who advocate for peace in Kurdistan. Many of them have lost loved ones in the 1990s, when countless people in Kurdistan were lost at the hands of the state—disappeared in captivity, captured or killed in battles, lost and perhaps buried in the mass graves that dot the landscape here.

Feleknas has now dedicated her life to the painful journey to find the remains of her two sons, Süphetullah and Fehmi, and to the liberation struggle for which they died. Her sons joined the PKK and lost their lives, but Feleknasand her family are still searching for their remains.

"My only wish is that my children have a grave," she said.

Both her sons had promising futures, in spite of their painful life stories in the violent Kurdish region in the 1990s, when they joined the PKK.

"My son Süphetullah was in Diyarbakır Prison," she said, referring to the prison that became the country's most notorious torture center in the 1980s and 1990s. "They tortured him severely then. A month after he got out, he said, 'Mom, I'm going.' And I said, 'go my son, go, good luck.' I readied his bag and sent him off. That was 24 years ago."

Süphetullah had been admitted to university and was on track to become a teacher. Her other son, Fehmi, was engaged and preparing to start work as a doctor when, a year later, he decided to join the PKK, as well.

"The day he went Fehmi was shining like a star," she remembered. "In fact, I said to him, 'my son, you look so good today,' as he was going."

Feleknas said the state informed her during the period when PKK leader Abdullah Öcalan was arrested that Süphetullah was alive, but she doesn't know when he died or where his remains are. The family learned the location of Fehmi's body years ago.When her daughter crossed the border to Iran to find his remains, she was arrested and sentenced to 3.5 years in Iranian prison.

Now, says Feleknas, as the only woman in her conservative village to have lost children in the freedom struggle, she fears for her safety from her fellow villagers. Most are reportedly sympathizers of Hizbullah, the Islamic paramilitary organization that carried out much of the state's violence in Kurdish villages and cities during the dirty war. Villagers mocked her late husband, the village imam, for reading and educating himself on the struggle, calling him the "newspaperman imam." Then, they started harassing Feleknas. They watched her house. She stopped having guests over.

Nevertheless, Feleknas tried to keep her spirits up every Newroz, the Kurdish national holiday and day of resistance. Every year, the 68-year-old woman decorated the posts and pillars in the village in red, green and yellow and lit a tire on fire to jump over to start her Newroz day. Villagers called her crazy.

"They came in my house and broke my window once," she recalled, among the incidents that led her to move in with her daughter. Out of fear that the villagers would find the photographs of her sons, she buried them long ago in the garden. She took them out before she left the village to find them damaged by water. She says most of the photos are now gone for ever.

"But letthem put my body in a clamp and tear my body to pieces," she said. "I will never give up my struggle for those beautiful young men, my sons who left behind everything for what they believed in. I'll never give up their cause and I'll never retreat. As long as I'm alive, even if I'm the only one left in the family line, I'll dedicate my life to them and their cause."

(za/mg/cm)