JINHA

NEWS CENTER – JINHA editor Zehra Doğan, who was invited to a yearly festival in Douarnenez, France, made her appearance at the festival via a letter from Mardin E Type Prison.

The film festival held every year in the city of Douarnenez, in the Brittany region of France, was dedicated this year to the peoples of Turkey. The festival started on August 19 and will end August 27. JINHA editor Zehra Doğan, currently imprisoned in Mardin E Type Prison, was among those invited to the Douarnenez festival. Zehra had been covering news in the besieged city of Nusaybin for months. She was imprisoned on July 23, pending trial for “membership in a terrorist organization,” based on her news coverage and art.

In her letter to the festival, Zehra wrote, “Ever since I came to prison, drawing has helped take me far away from the iron bars that surround me.” Zehra wrote that becoming absorbed in art has helped her forget her imprisonment. “Only when the drawing is finished to I realize the reality that I’m behind bars.”

Zehra explained that the drawings she made before being sent to prison were being used as evidence against her in the trial accusing her of “membership in a terrorist organization.” She told the story of the Nazi soldier who, upon seeing Picasso’s Guernica, asked the painter, “Did you do this?” Picasso replied, “No, you did.”

The festival committee expressed their regret that Zehra could not be among them. Zehra was to share her thoughts on women’s rights and freedom of thought at the festival.

The festival exhibited photographs of women taken in the wake of massacres in Kurdistan and Turkey, as well as photographs from a collective exhibition by Nar Photos.

(gc/cm)