Kurdish struggle for peace: Families torn between hope and scepticism

Cihan Sincar is hopeful that Turkey’s efforts to resolve a decades-old Kurdish insurgency would result in the peace her lawmaker husband desired before his death - one of hundreds of political executions throughout the conflict.

Mehmet Sincar, one of Turkey’s earliest pro-Kurdish party MPs, was assassinated in the southern city of Batman in 1993 while investigating unsolved murders. His wife has been waiting in vain for the criminals to be brought to justice.

His is one of tens of thousands of dead in a battle over which imprisoned militant leader Abdullah Ocalan is urging his Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) to halt. Many Kurds, including Cihan, are divided between scepticism of the government and hope for peace.

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“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.

Human rights groups allege that clandestine paramilitary groups committed extrajudicial executions in the 1990s, most of which were tied to the PKK war.

Since 1984, the PKK struggle has killed over 40,000 people and injured tens of thousands more, including Turkish security forces, militants, and civilians.

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Major Mehmet Bedri Aluclu, a Turkish military veteran from the conflict, lost his vision and both forearms when a PKK mine he was defusing exploded in Siirt region in 2007.

Aluclu, with volumes he has subsequently authored about the PKK on the table behind him, is pessimistic about peace chances.

“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.”

Mothers of PKK recruits

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.”