JINHA

ISTANBUL - Lawyer İpek Bozkurt says that the recent use of sexual torture against women in the escalating war in Turkey constitutes a war crime.

As the environment of war escalates in Northern Kurdistan (in Turkey), the Turkish state has utilized a range of tactics that echo the dirty war of the 1990s in the area. Soldiers have evacuated villages. Police have arrested Kurdish politicians. Curfews have been declared in many areas.

Another of the tactics that echo the psychological effects of the 1990s is the increasing attack on women. Police and soldiers have repeatedly treated women as sexual objects to be degraded as a tactic of war.

On August 10, Kurdish woman guerrilla Kevser Eltürk (nom de guerre Ekin Wan) cut off a road near the Kurdish town of Varto. Police tortured Ekin to death, dragged her across the ground, and took a photograph with her naked body. Recently, on August 23, police arrested 25-year-old Figen Şahin in the city of Adana, after a mainly Kurdish neighborhood declared self-government. Police used sexual torture on Figen and threatened to share photographs of her naked body.

İpek Bozkurt is a lawyer with Turkey's activist platform We Will Stop Women Homicides, which works against femicide and violence against women. She said that in the recent war, the state has waged a pitched battle on the field of women's bodies.

"With the combat boots on their feet and their at-ease postures, the people who killed her are actually trying to show--by exposing the body of a woman guerrilla--how much they see her as a sexual object, how much they covet her honor," said İpek.

İpek said that the display of the naked body of Ekin Wan as a sexual object constituted a war crime under the Geneva Convention. She called it an example of behavior incompatible with respect for human dignity, a principle of the Geneva Convention. She noted that the convention recognizes rape and the maltreatment of women as war crimes.

İpek said that women's activism could play a key role in peace. "In the last fifteen years, the women's movement has covered a lot of ground in this country," said İpek. "I believe that women can fulfill an important role if they come together to call for a civilian-led politics that doesn't want any more deaths."

(ro/dc/fk/cm)