Molded By A Clenched Fist
Hande Sever

Every Saturday for the last 699 weeks, a group of mothers have been gathering in front of Istanbul’s Galatasaray High School precisely at noon to remember the victims of enforced disappearance in Turkey. Every week they hold red carnations and portraits of their missing loved ones as they exchange their memories of the disappeared. By half noon their gathering concludes — one of them declares: “We will be here again next week”.

The Saturday Mothers movement is one of the longest running civil disobedience campaigns in the country, their weekly sit-ins keeping the disappeared within the collective memory of the peoples of Turkey. Some of the mothers have been searching for their children for over thirty years, since the 1980 military takeover. Others joined the struggle in the mid-1990s, when the number of disappearances surged, particularly in the southeast. To this day their children remain unaccounted for, except on the rare occasion when remains are found in an unmarked pit, trash bag, or mass grave.

Disappearances in Turkey, a crime whose scale is rarely acknowledged, resemble strongly the disappearances that have occurred in South America, in relation to which the term disappeared, desaparecido, was initially coined. Enforced disappearance as a political strategy has been systematically implemented in Turkey to create a climate of intimidation and fear so as to ensure the submission of the population at large — using the disappeared as a tactical resource to threaten the living. Most of those who are subjected to this were politically active individuals — dissidents, lawyers, journalists, writers and community leaders. The Truth Justice Memory Center in Istanbul cites at least 1,353 cases of enforced disappearance that have occurred in the last three decades of Turkey’s turbulent history.

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