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01-04-2025
KIZILTEPE/ ISTANBUL: Cihan Sincar clings to hope that Turkey’s bid to end a decades-old Kurdish insurgency brings the peace her lawmaker husband sought before his assassination one of hundreds of political killings at the height of the conflict.
Mehmet Sincar, one of Turkey’s first pro-Kurdish party lawmakers, was gunned down in the southeastern city of Batman in 1993 as he himself investigated unsolved killings. His wife has waited in vain for the perpetrators to be brought to justice.
His is one of tens of thousands of deaths during a conflict which jailed militant leader Abdullah Ocalan is calling on his Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) to end. Many Kurds like Cihan are torn between distrust of the government and longing for peace.
“We want to see those days. He really gave his life for peace, for the struggle for peace and democracy,” she said in the city of Kiziltepe, near the Syrian border, where she has served as mayor since her husband’s murder but “I also have doubts. They (the Turkish state) have deceived me many times,” she said before visiting the cemetery where her husband is buried, caressing the gravestone bearing his picture.
Clandestine paramilitary groups are suspected of having carried out extra-judicial killings in the 1990s, mostly related to the PKK conflict, human rights groups say.
The PKK conflict has killed more than 40,000 people since it began in 1984, leaving tens of thousands wounded, including Turkish security force members, militants and civilians alike.
One Turkish military veteran of the conflict, Major Mehmet Bedri Aluclu, lost his eyesight and both forearms when a PKK mine that he was defusing exploded in Siirt province in 2007.
Aluclu, with books that he has since written about the PKK on the table beside him, is sceptical about peace prospects.
“If only the PKK would dissolve itself… The probability of such a thing is zero,” he said at his home in Ankara. “It has a history of 50 years. These things don’t happen in one day.”
In Diyarbakir, main city in Turkey’s predominantly Kurdish southeast, mothers of youths believed to have joined the PKK have protested in recent years against Turkey’s main pro-Kurdish party, accusing it of helping the PKK recruit their children. The party denies this.
Guzide Demir said her son, Aziz, left home in Diyarbakir nine years ago when he was 17.
She said he called six years ago, saying he was in hospital with a wounded leg in Syria, where the Kurdish YPG militia which Turkey says is part of the PKK has fought against both Islamic State militants and Turkey-backed forces.
Since then she has not heard from him again, but said “God willing this peace will happen and all our children will come”.
Rahime Tasci’s son Faruk was 15 when he left home in Kars province 11 years ago to go to the market and did not return.
“Surrender to justice. Do something Faruk. Put down that gun,” she said, clutching a photo of her only child. “These children must be brought home. God willing, with the power of the state, there will be peace.”
Turkey’s crackdown on President Tayyip Erdogan’s main rival and silence on what reforms might follow the end of a 40-year conflict with Kurdish militants are stoking distrust among Kurds anxious to see what a fragile peace process may bring.
At stake is a potential boost to NATO member Turkey’s political and economic stability that may encourage moves to ease tensions elsewhere in the Middle East. Failure could fuel economic and social woes in the country’s less developed southeast and add to a death toll already exceeding 40,000. (Int’l Monitoring Desk)
