JINHA

ANKARA - Children's rights advocate Emrah Kırımsoy says that killings of children and impunity around them have been on the rise in Turkey, with the assassination of two teenage boys in the town of Diyadin just the latest example.

Despite the peace process in Turkey, the rate of killings of children did not fall and children's rights activists say there is an ongoing state of impunity for rights violations against children in the country. Last week, police special operations teams killed two teenage children, 16-year-old Orhan Aslan and 15-year-old Emrah Aydemir, in the bakery where they were working in the Kurdish town of Diyadin, in Ağrı province. Police then dressed the bodies in guerrilla clothes, claiming that the two boys were fighting in the clashes in the town.

"They're killing children and putting guerrilla clothes next to them, then declaring them 'terrorists.' But this can't undo the fact that these are children," said Emrah Kırımsoy of the Agenda: Child Association. She noted that many problems stem from the fact that adults never ask children to take part in decisions that affect them--such as the environment of clashes in the Kurdish region.

"Children live according to the situations, the conditions that they find themselves in and they react. When the occasion arises, some of them do this by being silent, some do this by throwing stones, some do this in other ways," said Emrah. She called for mechanisms for speaking and listening to children about their experiences.

Emrah said that the police's dressing of the two boys in guerrilla clothes recalled the year of the 1990s, when Turkish security forces killed hundreds of children and then declared them terrorists. When police repeatedly shot 12-year-old Uğur Kaymaz in front of his house in 2004 in the Kurdish town of Kızıltepe, they had likewise planted a gun alongside his body. Those responsible for the killing have never been investigated. As a result, said Emrah, such killings of children by police have continued.

"For there to be a real, sincere project of living together, there need to be meetings, negotiations," said Emrah. However, she said that punishing those responsible for rights violations was a necessary step to ensuring that such violations of children's rights never occur again.

(de/mg/cm)