Van - Gün 2

I sat across from a 20 year old Kurdish woman who had been raped when she was 17. Her parents forced her to marry her rapist. Her first child had been stillborn, and she hoped this second one survived, so maybe her husband would treat her better.


The mothers satying at the Anne Oteli (by Lisa Holliday)
The Anne Oteli (Mother Hotel) of Yüzüncü Yıl University Hospital was a bit eye-opening. It was a group of about 13 mothers who had sick babies in the neonatology division. Maybe 4 of them had husbands who were employed. All but one was Kurdish. Most of them were married to a relative. All of them have legal, civil marriages. Most of them were abused (physically, verbally) by both their husband and their in-laws.

Sharon asked [the above] background questions, about their hopes for their daughters and other topics. It's really sad to see Islam perverted like it is in the "traditional" areas. It's even sadder to see these women accepting it. They don't know anything else. The whole traditional family-structure ensures the perpetuation of this.


Photo by Lisa Holliday

Anne Oteli nurses by Lisa Holliday
Kurdish background: Wikipedia says that the Kurdish people are the largest ethnic group without their own country. The Kurds in Turkey are located mainly in the southeast. For awhile, the Turkish government forced many Kurdish families to migrate to cities, forbid the teaching of the Kurdish language, and various other civil rights abuses. On the other hand, there is a Kurdish military organization called the PKK (Kurdish Worker's Party), that have been known to commit various terrorist acts- bombings of tourist areas and bombings in southeast Turkish cities (Diyarbakır comes to mind). Things have quieted down recently, or at least since July.


Photo by Lisa Holliday
Then, a sad walk through the sick-children's section of the hopsital, but the mothers weren't shy of the camera.

Photo by Lisa Holliday

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Next was the "Hand-in-hand Women's Association" run through a woman lawyer's office. This was a new organization, and we met with 6 Turkish women from the group. They didn't really seem to have a focus yet- they "supported" some children in orphanages, they helped 25 local women make jam, etc. But what really got riled up was the mention of "headscarves." They assured us it was not their main focus, but every question we asked seemed to end up back at the headscarf issue.

Headscarf Issue Background: When the new Republic of Turkey was formed (somewhere around the 1930s), Muslim religious attire became banned in order to ensure the "secular image" of the country. Nowadays the problem arises mainly with women who wear headscarves. Women can't wear headscarves to university; women who wear headscarves aren't allowed to work for the government (or many other occupations); headscarved women married to professors can't live on campus; school entrance exams can't be taken while wearing a headscarf.

Recently, the EU Human Rights court recently ruled in favor of Turkey's headscarf ban. The ban is more or less a backhanded way to oppress women.

All the women of this group we talked to were headscarved, and all of them educated at university. Many of them had to remove their headscarf to get their education (like I see girls here at ODTÜ do). Once they graduated, they either couldn't find jobs, or were fired once they had one. A young lawyer could wear her headscarf most of the time, but had to remove it when she was in the courtroom.

When we asked them what they were doing to change this, they just asked, "What can we do?", citing the EU Human Rights court ruling. They look toward Turkey's EU accession as a means of fixing all of Turkey's problems, but it won't fix this one. And protesting would only have them thrown into jail for an undeterminable amount of time.

A sidenote on Turkish law: The 'lawyer' occupation is not anywhere near as respected in Turkey as it is in the United States. It doesn't pay well. Additionally, I think most of law school involves memorizing Turkish law, rather than arguing Turkish law.

After several hours of talking with the group, Sharon's video camera ran out of battery power, and we arranged to have dinner at one of the women's homes.

By the end of our discussion, I had drank 6 çay. The caffeine was running through my system so quickly, I couldn't keep my hands still.