JINHA

ISTANBUL – After Hanım Tosun lost her husband Fehmi Tosun to the “unsolved murders” of the dirty war in the 1990s in Turkey, she said that as the state continues to kill the people of Kurdistan, the ruling power has changed, but the state’s mindset has remained the same.

The nature of the state’s violent policies in Kurdistan may have changed over the years, but the repression that meets those who resist has remained as extreme as ever. Summary executions and the abduction of dead bodies continue. And those who entered the struggle to retrieve the bodies of their disappeared loved ones and to try the perpetrators continue to resist against the state’s policies.

Hanım Tosun’s husband Fehmi Tosun was killed in a so-called “unknown perpetrator” murder—a forced disappearance common in Kurdistan in the 1990s.

“However much time has passed, the government may have changed, but the mindset never did,” said Hanım. “Our hearts break; we’re crying blood. I’m so angry…. The state governing this country has always been the reason for this savagery.

“If I knew it would stop this blood, I would go set myself on fire in front of the Parliament or in the square of Diyarbakır,” said Hanım. “As mothers, we don’t have the strength to cry anymore. We’re angry.” She noted that she has organized with the Saturday Mothers for years “so other mothers wouldn’t cry.” They did not give up, she said, despite strong opposition to their organizing.

“We will come, braver and stronger,” said Hanım. She called on the government to give up its policies of cruelty.

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