Margaret Owen

Women's Rights in Turkey and Kurdish Cultural Rights

Margaret Owen

Adviser to KHRP on Women’s and Children’s Rights
Member of UK Bar Human Rights Committee
Chair of Widows for Peace through Democracy

Introduction

As I prepare this paper on the Rights of Women in Turkey I am conscious that several EU members regard her as ineligible to start EU membership talks. They reject Turkey for a variety of reasons: the issue of the recognition of Cyprus; the different treatment of Croatia’s application; as well as Turkey’s poor record on upholding human rights to comply with international conventions, the ECHR, the Copenhagen Criteria and the various harmonization packages of law reform.

There is indeed a long road to travel before we see real implementation of recent legal reforms on the ground, and a particularly steep one when we examine the situation of Turkish women and more specifically that of Kurdish women and girls.  But we should welcome the changes that have occurred, however slow and uneven the impact.

The writer Orhan Pamok describes the current problems well. “Laws have been changed, but the thought processes, our culture and our way of seeing things has not changed much”. The fact that he now faces prosecution for “denigrating the state”, and further charges, because he has referred to recent killings of Kurds, demonstrates the difficulties of implementing the right to freedom of speech where the Constitution still contains  articles which criminalise any act or word which is interpreted as “insulting the state”.

Thus it is that lawyer Erin Keskin faces so many indictments for representing women who allege crimes perpetrated by state agents such as police and gendarmes and speaking about such abuses at conferences abroad. And that human rights lawyers like Huseyin Cangir, well-known for his robust work on behalf of Kurdish women alleging sexual torture, are harassed and impeded in their activities through facetious prosecutions, such as the infamous one concerning putting up Posters on Human Rights day in Kurdish .  Furthermore, Kurdish women who dare to protest, who attempt to take cases through the courts, are often subjected to horrifying verbal threats, if not actual physical and sexual torture.

Benefits of Accession Talks to Kurdish women and girls and capacity-building of their NGOs 

However, it is my view that if Turkey is admitted to membership talks on October 3rd, (actual accession is not likely to occur for many years) it is bound to bring immeasurable benefits to all the women of Turkey, and especially those of the Kurdish population. On the other hand if Turkey is blocked out, the Kurdish population might lose even the small improvements to their status that have come about through the harmonization packages.  Women and girls would then suffer even more indignities, injustices and abuses of their human rights just when they are beginning to be given signs of hope.

With the EU spotlight sharply focused on progress on human rights, the role of the Kurdish Women’s NGOs in monitoring implementation and identifying gaps and breaches of commitments will be strengthened.

Kurdish Women’s NGOs are presently hugely hampered in their activities , but once Turkey is sitting at the table, these civil society organisations will be recognised as key actors in evaluating progress. They will discover at last the freedom of real legality to operate, and will no longer be subject to harassment and closure. Their confidence and capacity to participate politically and campaign for their rights will be greatly improved. They will be free to use all the tools  available within the international human rights framework without fear of arrest, prosecution and detention. They will join the international feminist network promoting the equality of men and women, irrespective of their ethnicity, religion, or location.  Hopefully they will be eligible for EU project funds to support their work.

Double Discrimination

Discrimination against women occurs in many countries. But it is all the more damaging when compounded with ethnic, religious or other forms of discrimination.

Every day women across Turkey experience sexual and other physical violence. At least one-third, if not half, of the women in rural areas have been subject to physical abuse by their families.  But although all women are at risk of violence due to specific patterns of discrimination operating in Turkey, Kurdish women, especially those living in the south-east, and women who hold political beliefs unacceptable to the government, the military or the police, are at increased risk at the hands of agents of the state.

Kurdish women are doubly disadvantaged and vulnerable to abuse: first because they are women living in a traditionally patriarchal society; secondly, because they are Kurds.

Abuse perpetrated: by their own relatives arises through such traditional practices as child and forced marriage, bride price, the tradition of “berdel” , polygamy, “honour killings”, and domestic violence. Negative attitudes to female education and training for formal employment confine women to a low status. Such repellent routines such as virginity testing are still allowed under certain circumstances by the Penal Code which caused the CEDAW (committee) to express its concern and require actions to make this intervention, without formal consent, unlawful . The banning of the wearing of headscarves in places of education, schools and colleges, while within the right of a secular sovereign state, has caused further setbacks to efforts made to improve the literacy rate of Kurdish girls, since both girls and their female teachers have been refused admission to the classrooms.

Secondly, many Kurdish women continue to face physical, mental, verbal and sexual abuse and ill treatment by agents of the State, such as security forces, police, and village guards. Sexual torture of women, which includes threats of rape, is, as in all countries, hugely underreported due to the stigma attached to victims of such abuse. It is culturally problematic for a Kurdish woman to seek protection from or inform the Turkish police that a male relative has committed an act of violence against her. There is evidence that this targeting of Kurdish women may have increased since the use of torture was made unlawful under the recent reforms. The gendarmerie appear to have discovered that, although they can no longer use torture against Kurdish men in places of formal detention, they can threaten Kurdish men and their communities by targeting their women. Because of the deep dishonour attached to any victim of sexual abuse, the perpetrators act with impunity, believing they are likely to escape accusation and prosecution.

Abducting and sexually abusing Kurdish women is a means of demoralising not only the family but a whole community, as well as destroying the life of the woman victim, mentally as well as physically. Kurdish women also risk becoming victims of “honour killings” by their relatives if it is made public what occurred. No wonder that only a few women dare to speak out about such atrocities.

Main Areas of Concern

Poverty, Homelessness and Dispersal
The long conflict has left millions of Kurdish women widowed, orphaned, dispersed, homeless and in extreme poverty. Many have fathers, sons and husbands in prison, in hiding, or overseas in asylum. Others do not know what happened to their menfolk – they have simply disappeared. Uprooted from their mountain villages and rural homes, these women, from traditional farming communities, lack the appropriate skills to obtain employment in the Diaspora of western Turkey or in the towns of Mesopotamia and Anatolia where they struggle to survive in overcrowded and insalubrious dwellings.

There has been no adequate situational analysis of the lives of Kurdish women and girls in the slum areas of the Western cities – Istanbul and Ankara, nor of how they cope to survive in the “concentrated village settlements” and towns in the south-east. There is a dearth of statistics and huge gaps in our knowledge of the day-to-day lives of these women. In the concentrated village settlements, rural people, especially women, are without livelihoods. Moreover, these settlements contain features more like open prisons than normal towns .  The ultimate coping strategy for all impoverished women, the world over, desperate to feed and bring up their children is begging and prostitution. In addition, poor Kurdish women, who have no male bread-winner to support them, risk becoming victims of the traffickers, enticing them with accounts of how they will earn money as domestic and factory workers, when in fact they are destined for the brothels of Europe or for economic and sexual exploitation in the Gulf.

Rights of Return
An estimated 3 million Kurds were forced to flee their homes and 3,500 villages were destroyed in campaigns of displacement that peaked during the mid-1990s.

Many women, like their menfolk, yearn to return to their original homes and be restored to their traditional life-styles as farmers and cultivators. The rural life is the only one they know. The right to return to their villages, to be compensated and given assistance with repairs and rebuilding, with agricultural extensions services is enshrined in the Harmonization Packages.  But in spite of the formal commitments to support the return of Kurdish families, very few have been assisted to go back.  Permission is required from the governates and these are rarely forthcoming. Complex cumbersome bureaucratic and financial obstacles exist and the hurdles to be surmounted are particular onerous for illiterate women, without a male relative to mediate for them, and who cannot speak Turkish. In 2003 a KHRP mission found that of over 20,000 applications to return to the villages had been received by the Governor of Diyabakir, only a handful of applicants had been given a reply or an appointment.

Women who have returned to their homes have been forced to leave again because of the threats or abuse from the village guards, which occupy their former homes and appear to be beyond the control of the authorities. KHRP, IHD and Goc-Der have documented numerous cases of murders, rapes, beatings and disappearances of returning villagers. Nobody has been arrested or prosecuted for these crimes. The victims and their families have a right to compensation.

The State has failed to install essential services such as water and electricity in the villages, and mine-clearance has been inadequate to ensure safety of returnees. Besides, widows and wives of the “disappeared” and orphaned daughters are often unable to produce the requisite documentation, such as title deeds, that will prove their right to a particular house or land.  Furthermore, most Kurdish women are quite unaware of what their rights are in relation to inheritance or joint ownership of the homesteads and surrounding fields and have little access to legal advice and representation.

Education
Thousands of Kurdish girl children do not attend school or leave after only a few years. Not being conversant in Turkish, facing humiliation because they have Kurdish names (unlawful before the law reforms), Kurdish children generally do not prosper or progress in the school environment as they should; and girls’ education is not seen, in the communities, as useful or productive, since they are destined for early marriage and motherhood.  The Lady Mayor of Derik reported that Kurdish children, if they do attend primary school, are usually two years or more behind Turkish children of the same age due to language and cultural factors. Yet Turkey has ratified the Children’s Convention and is obliged to ensure that all children enjoy the right to attend school and are given every opportunity to realise their potential.

Many young Kurdish children are exposed to exploitation in child labour. We heard, in Batman, of a 10 year old boy who was the only bread-winner for his large family, his father being in prison and his mother burdened with smaller children to care for.  In south-east Turkey, girls have a lower literacy rate than in Algeria and the percentage of girls in school is lower than anywhere else in the country.  The Mayor of Batman revealed that for some six months of the year 50% of families migrate to the farms of western Turkey as seasonal agricultural workers. Those children who have started school rarely return to class having missed so much. These are areas of discrimination breaching articles in European and International Law which must be addressed and rectified in the Accession negotiations. Growing up without education or skills-training, it is easy to understand why so many drift on to the streets and become involved in crime and prostitution.

No Language Schools for Women and Children
Following the lifting of restrictions on education in “non-Turkish dialects” (i.e. Kurdish) five Kurdish language schools were opened in 2003 after considerable bureaucratic obstacles had been tackled. But these schools are private and are restricted to adults and older adolescents, providing they can pay the fees. However, Kurdish is still banned in public schools nor can it, despite the legislation, be taught even as an elective subject at the universities. Children are banned from attending Kurdish classes during the state school terms. Thus only an “elite” can afford to take advantage of these institutions. Women, who are the principle transmitters of the Kurdish culture to their children, are unlikely, for economic and cultural reasons, to benefit from this change in the law, and become literate in their mother tongue.  If the reforms properly reflected the harmonization package, Kurdish language education would be available to all and offered in the State education system. 

Health
Lack of ability to communicate in Turkish also affects the quality of health care, including family planning advice available to Kurdish women. In spite of or due to their poverty and lack of education, Kurdish women are married young and give birth to many children.  Domestic violence cases are not reported, and the suicide rate of young women – often in the context of honour killings - is one of the highest in the world.  Harmful traditional practices such as FGM  may persist unaddressed in some communities causing irrevocable damage, even death, to young girls.   And with so many children not in school there is little assessment possible of children’s developmental physical and mental health.

Lack of Statistics on Kurdish Female Heads of Household
Yet the impact of the long internal war on Kurdish women and children has been, for the most part, scandalously neglected. Security Council Resolution 1325  requires all actors in peace negotiations to consider the impact of war on women and girls and ensure that they are consulted and participate in peace negotiations. This Resolution should, of course, be applied to the peace processes in Turkey, ensuring that the issues facing Kurdish women are not ignored in peace-building.  There are barely any statistics for the numbers of Kurdish widows, wives of the “missing”, the imprisoned, the asylum seekers overseas, who struggle to survive as female “heads of households”, turning to begging, and prostitution as a last resort to survive. No one knows the numbers of Kurdish women and girls who have fallen victim to the traffickers, or have committed suicide after having been raped, in fear of an “honour killing”. And there has been little or no situational analysis of the lives of Kurdish women and girls expelled from their villages and forced to live in the concentrated village settlements or in the slum districts of the cities in the West, Ankara and Istanbul, without employment or protection from violence.

These women face a difficult and hazardous uphill struggle as they try to tackle gender injustices on so many fronts, mostly without access to political representation or adequate legal remedies, including access to an independent judiciary and justice system.  Turkey has a long way to go before it can demonstrate that real political commitment to the principles of universal and inalienable human rights of women and girls.

Torture and Sexual Abuse by State Agents
A policy of “zero tolerance” on torture was announced on 10 December 2003. However, TOHAV (he Foundation for Social and Legal Research) informed KHRP of a significant increase in the numbers of women coming forward to report torture or ill treatment by the police. Even so, they and the IHD (Human Rights Foundation) believe that only 10% of women abused by the security forces actually dare come forward to complain about their experiences. As everywhere, it requires an extraordinary amount of courage for a woman to describe in detail what was done to her during a rape or sexual torture. As in many cultures, the stigma of being a “rape victim” prevents many women from making a complaint. Countless Kurdish women have been murdered by their families once it was known that they were rape victims. Threat of rape is also “torture”, as is stripping, hooding, blindfolding and verbal sexual abuse.  These actions leave no scar and make a successful prosecution of the torturer unlikely. We need to listen to those NGOs who monitor implementation of these new laws.

Legislative Reforms
While some important legislative reforms have been achieved, in compliance with international conventions and agreements, and with the Copenhagen Criteria and the Harmonization Packages, the impact upon Kurdish women has been minimal.  Furthermore, while the human rights violations experienced by Kurdish women have been incontrovertibly established by the European Court of Human Rights, those individual perpetrators of the tortures have never been punished and in fact to this day continue in their posts.

Traditional values and customs continue to have an impact on the practical implementation of the new laws. Turkey has ratified the CEDAW (UN Convention against All Forms of Discrimination against Women), and was one of the first States Parties to ratify its Optional Protocol . It has withdrawn all the substantive reservations to the Convention, signed up to the Beijing Platform for Action and agreed the Security Council Resolution 1325. These are important landmarks for women generally, but Kurdish women have been excluded from the steady progress made elsewhere in the world where CEDAW is taken seriously. The May 2004 amendment to Article 90 of the Constitution which ensured that all international conventions have supremacy over all national laws and the new Civil Code of 2001 which guarantees equality between men and women in marriage and family relations have not changed the lives of Kurdish women because the State has done little to inform women of their rights or develop public education campaigns to inform the population that those who discriminate or violate women can be prosecuted for breaking the law.

Various trial observation missions, some from KHRP, others on behalf of the International Commission of Jurists, have commented on features of the justice system: the process of recruitment and training of the judiciary; the manner of investigating complaints; the long delays and unnecessary adjournments; and the relationship and role of the Prosecutor. These give cause for concern that trials are not “fair” and that “due process” is lacking and breaches international standards. While many prosecutions of Kurdish individuals end finally in acquittals, the long process curbs human rights defenders’ professional work and brings the justice system into disrepute and causes intense distress to their clients, their family and friends.

We still want to know why one woman, on the executive of an Istanbul-based Kurdish NGO, who was abducted in broad daylight by police in plainclothes, sexually abused and tortured, had her file detailing her complaint, arbitrarily closed by the Prosecutor . And why the Minister of Justice has not incorporated the principles contained in the UN Declaration on Human Rights Defenders into national law, so that people like Huseyin Cangir and Erin Keskin can practice their profession and represent and defend women without fear of indictment.

The Charter for the Rights and Freedoms of Women in the Kurdish Regions and in the Diaspora
This Charter, a collective effort of the Kurdish Women’s Project (KWP) and KHRP, was initiated by Kurdish women in exile and developed in consultation with Kurdish women and their organisations in the regions and the Diaspora. It builds on the principles and articles of the UN Women’s Convention (CEDAW), and it is hoped that it will eventually be incorporated into the domestic law of Turkey and of the neighboring countries where Kurdish women experience discrimination and barriers to their enjoyment of their human rights.

Conclusion
The EU Commission in its Regular Reports on Turkey’s Progress towards Accession has repeatedly stressed the need for an increase in protection of the Kurdish community. But legal reforms have not resulted in the necessary changes or improvements. Kurdish women in the south-east, have, according to several reports, become more, not less, vulnerable to abuse and oppression.  If Turkey is now to become more rigorously evaluated in terms of its implementation of reforms, then there must be a much greater focus on the situation of women and children.  Human rights are universal and inalienable and international laws and standards apply equally to women and children as to men. With Turkey sitting at the negotiation table on October 3rd, hopefully a new dawn of hope and progress will open for the women who have hitherto been so scandalously neglected in past reviews.