Mizgin Adım/JINHA

ŞIRNEX – Vasfiye Avcı is a Saturday Mother: one of the many women in Kurdistan who have dedicated their lives to seeking justice for the loved ones they have lost at the hands of the state.

"As long as I live, I will follow this cause. As long as I live, I will hold them to account. As long as I live, I will never forget. As long as I live…" Turkish soldiers took the baby in her belly; then they took her husband. But 26 years after the day that changed her life, Vasfiye is a member of a group of women like her who seek justice for state violence through activism.

In 1989, Vasfiye and her husband made their living as migrant pastoralists in the Siirt province of Northern Kurdistan (the part of Kurdistan in Turkey). At that time, Turkish soldiers in the region began tormenting Vasfiye and her family based on the allegation that she had "a relative in the guerrilla." Although the family was on the move constantly to escape the sometimes near-daily house raids and abuse from soldiers, one day the soldiers found Vasfiye milking her animals.

"They tortured me for hours right where they found me," she said. Vasfiye, who was three and a half months pregnant, had a miscarriage on the spot. "As I was lying there on the ground, the gendarmes went to the area where the shepherds were, where my husband was, saying 'there's no God anyway, and the prophet is on vacation.'"

The soldiers executed her husband. Vasfiye, in severe pain from the miscarriage, managed to get to her feet and headed to the local battalion's camp to demand her husband's body. He had been dragged behind a tank for several kilometers.

"They told me they weren't going to give me his body, and that they were going to throw it in the Siirt dump," she said. Vasfiye's father-in-law told the soldiers that if they could just have the body back, they wouldn't file charges. "But I cried out that I would file charges for all of it," recalled Vasfiye.

In the wake of the disaster, Vasfiye and her three children moved to the village of Qesrikê in the neighboring province of Şırnak. She struggled to survive; in the attack, soldiers had burned her home and driven her herd into a desert to starve.

"I have nothing left and I was in no state to send my children to school," said Vasfiye. She worked as a porter carrying heavy loads in order to afford her daughters' education. However, the two of her three daughters who did go to school had to leave after six years.

Now, her daughters have all married and moved away. Vasfiye lives alone in a one-story concrete building in the village, struggling with her diabetes, heart problems and other ailments with only her large garden of fruit trees for company. Although soldiers collected all her photographs of her husband in a house raid, Vasfiye managed to find a handful of photographs in her husband's relatives' photo albums. They decorate one wall of her small home.

Every week, Vasfiye is active with the Saturday Mothers—the group of women who have lost relatives to state violence in Kurdistan. She can often be found at the courthouse with other women like her, seeking justice for the violence they have survived over the years.

"In life, in death, we're together," said Vasfiye of the Mothers. "Because we have nobody except each other."

(zd/mg/cm)