July 30: Berivan Sayaca, a vivacious 15-year-old Kurdish girl, dreamed of escaping her life as a seamstress and studying law. Instead, she was convicted of supporting terrorism by attending a protest rally and sentenced to nearly eight years behind bars.
This week, Berivan was released from prison about 10 months into her sentence. The move came after the Turkish Parliament, in an attempt to alleviate rising tensions with the Kurdish minority here in the southeast, passed a bill in July reducing the sentences of hundreds of youth, 18 and younger, who had been put on trial and nicknamed the “stone-throwing kids.”
An estimated 40,000 people have died during the decades of conflict over national identity and land between Turkey and the separatist rebel group known as the Kurdistan Workers Party, or PKK. In recent years, many young Kurds have been accused of being terrorists, yet in some cases their only crime was to have attended a demonstration, chanted a slogan or thrown a stone. After Berivan returned home this week to this poor, predominantly Kurdish city in Turkey’s southeast, her emotional reunion captured by television stations across Turkey, she said her imprisonment had emboldened her resolve.
“It was very hard to be in jail at my age,” she said. “But now I have my life back, and I still want to be a lawyer.” The Turkish government is particularly edgy about the Kurdish issue now. In June, the PKK ended a 14-month ceasefire, prompting a surge of attacks on the Turkish armed forces and undermining a recent attempt at outreach to the Kurds. More than 80 Turkish soldiers have been killed in 2010 by the PKK, which in the past has committed hundreds of attacks on civilians, including Kurds. Turkey, the US and the EU classify the PKK as a terrorist organisation. Some fear a return to the 1990s, when thousands of Kurdish villagers were driven from their homes.
The intensification of the violence coincided with the deadly clash between Israel and an aid flotilla to Gaza led by a Turkish organisation, an event deeply resented by many of Turkey’s estimated 12 million ethnic Kurds.