JINHA

ŞIRNEX – When Turkish state forces killed 13-year-old Cemile Çağırga during an assault on the Kurdish town of Cizre, she became the eighth victim of state violence in her family. Cemile’s father, who had previously appeared in front of Turkey’s Parliament to call for peace, is mourning his daughter.

Yesterday evening, the Turkish state assault on the town of Cizre in Northern Kurdistan (in Turkey) intensified after days of non-stop police and military operations. Soldiers and police deployed tanks, helicopters and snipers against local residents. Among the dead yesterday was 13-year-old Cemile Çağırga. According to Faysal Sarıyıldız, one of the province’s Parliamentary representatives from the Peoples’ Democratic Party, a police bullet killed Cemile.

Cemile became the eighth person her family lost to state violence. In 1992, state forces destroyed the family’s home in the course of a shell bombardment on the town, killing seven family members.

“I didn’t just lose my daughter; I lost my comrade,” said Cemile’s father Ramazan, who said that his daughter’s real name was Kurdish: Cizîra Botan. The family could not record her real name on her identity card due to state repression of the Kurdish language. Despite the fact that the state killed seven of his family members in 1992, Ramazan had previously appeared before the Turkish Parliament’s commission on the resolution of the Kurdish issue. There, he had issued a call for peace.

“As long as you call a people ‘terrorists,’ you can’t make peace. Come, take the hand of peace that we’ve offered despite all our pain,” Ramazan said at the time.

(gc/cm)