A Lasting Memorial to Turkey's Forgotten

A Lasting Memorial to Turkey’s Forgotten

Journalist Clare Busch profiles the Saturday Mothers, relatives of people forcibly disappeared in Turkey in the 1980s and 1990s, most of them Kurds or pro-Kurdish dissidents. For around 25 years they gathered every week in Istanbul to demand that the state reveal what happened to their loved ones, until the authorities banned the vigils in 2018, accused the group of links to the PKK and later brought charges against dozens of participants.

Busch follows how the group moved its vigils online during the pandemic, with families telling their stories while lawyers and rights advocates connect individual cases to wider patterns of state abuse. She tells the stories of several families, recounts the 1996 Güçlükonak massacre, and notes that founding member Zeycan Yedigöl died in 2020 without learning her son’s fate.

Human rights observers quoted in the piece credit the group’s persistence with keeping the state violence of past decades in public memory, and argue that the online format has reached people who never came to the square.

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