A question remains unanswered...

Ayse Karabat
A question remains unanswered…
Communicating with these two mothers was difficult because they spoke broken Turkish and I knew no Kurdish. I had the opportunity to meet them last weekend while in Diyarbakır to cover a 48-hour sit-in accompanied by dancing and organized by the Democratic Society Party (DTP) as a protest of the government. I stood at the entrance to a tent and began to remove my shoes before entering. The tent was the scene of the sit-in, but since protesting by sitting sounded weird to everyone here, most used the opportunity as a social occasion at which they could see their friends and talk about politics. Now and then those present would shout out slogans and dance.
While trying to untie my shoes, the long shoelaces proved to be a problem and one of the women in the tent helped me out before I could even ask for help. She then took my shoes, put them together and very neatly placed them at the end of the carpet laid out in the tent. She held my arm and helped me get into the tent, all the while smiling with her cloudy eyes. All these gestures told me one thing: She is an experienced and compassionate mother.
We started chatting, and one of her friends joined us. Whenever we had trouble understanding one another, those around us helped out. In Turkey, if you start a conversation with someone you do not know, before asking for their name, we usually ask where they are from. I did the same. She told me the name of a village I had never heard of before. She then told me the village's Turkish name, but seeing that I was still clueless, she said, "It's better that you know its Kurdish name, anyway."
When our conversation became more serious, I learned more about who she was and why she had come to the tent that day. Her village was evacuated and her family moved to Diyarbakır. One of her daughters studied accounting and worked somewhere, but was then arrested and jailed for a year. While in jail, she was tortured, her mother said. When she got out, she told her mother that she would go to Europe. Although her mother opposed this, she promised that upon establishing a new life for herself, she would bring her mother to Europe, too. To help, her mother gave her a gold bracelet to defray the costs of the passport. A week later the bracelet returned to her; her daughter did not go to Europe. Instead, she joined the outlawed Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK).
This was eight years ago. Her daughter sometimes called her, but she hasn't heard from her in six years -- at least this is what she told me. "But I feel my daughter is alive and safe," she said.
Her friend's story is similar. One of her son's high school teachers was a brutal "national security" teacher, an army officer. According to this mother, the teacher regularly humiliated the Kurds and one day her son spoke up. That same night, the police took him into custody and beat him up. When he was released, he came home and could not move for a couple of days. He then asked his mom to wash his head and prepare some clean clothes. "Right then and there I knew what he was going to do. I begged him not to go, but he didn't listen," she said.
Since then she has only been able to see her son twice. It has been eight years since she heard from him last. "I watch Roj TV [a Denmark-based TV station affiliated with the PKK] every day when they show the PKK fighters and hope I might catch a glimpse of him," she said.
When our conversation turned even more serious, I realized that these two women go everywhere together -- including to the place where dead PKK members are brought for identification after clashes. They tried to explain to me how difficult it is to do so, but could not find the words to define how they feel when they look at the faces of those young people. They are sad to see the young die, but relieved to see that they are not their children.
One of the women turned to me and said: "I, too, watch the funerals of the soldiers. Their mothers say they will not cry so that the enemies will not be happy. My daughter is not a monster and I am no monster. I feel the soldiers' pain, too. But why do those mothers say this?"
While trying to find a proper answer, another woman approached us. She said something in Kurdish to the women I was speaking with. Then the women started telling me they wanted a "democratic republic." I asked them what they meant by this. They paused for a second and then began mumble about peace and cultural rights. The third lady intervened once more and began repeating memorized lines of propaganda, an endless speech I hear every day from the parties involved in the conflict. The content may be different, but the aim is the same: to turn the pain of mothers into political nonsense.
The time came for me to leave, and the woman I first spoke with put my shoes in front of me and gave me a very big hug, as she would have done for her own daughter.
As I walked away, a question lingered in the air: What would the real feelings of all the mothers who lost children to this conflict be if they were free of propaganda? What would they tell each other? Surely it would not be tainted with hatred…

Source: Sunday's Zaman
09.11.2008