Police Detains Mothers Protesting Turkish Cadets’ Anguish in Jail

In a dramatic turn of events, Turkish law enforcement brutally detained a group of mothers protesting their sons’ — cadets — anguish in prison where they serve a life sentence.

Abdullah Ayasun
3 min readSep 25, 2019
Police detains Melek Cetinkaya in Ankara.

When, several weeks ago, the Turkish government gave a strong endorsement and publicity to a sit-in protest by a group of mothers in front of the regional office of the pro-Kurdish HDP in Diyarbakir to question their sons’ participation on mysterious grounds to PKK, it aimed to arouse a groundswell of public support against the militant organization’s widespread recruitment efforts in the region.

The sit-in protest by Kurdish mothers, who claim that their sons were forcefully kidnapped by the PKK to enlist them for its shrinking mountain manpower, has become a national matter, spurring swelling support for the mothers’ cause across the nation. By choosing the HDP’s office as the venue of protest, the ruling party also sought to discredit and vilify the Kurdish party in the eyes of the public by stressing the uncorroborated charge of direct affiliation between the PKK and the HDP.

But what the government did not anticipate was the unintended consequence that there were other mothers, who are…

--

--

Abdullah Ayasun

Boston-based journalist and writer. Columbia Graduate School of Journalism. On art, culture, politics and everything in between. X: @abyasun