Protest rallies against the femicides in Turkey, the frequency of which has been on the rise in recent times, took place in Istanbul under the protection of a strong police force.
A similar gathering was also held in Ankara, where the Police did not allow the demonstrators to form a march, while incidents occurred at the General Assembly of the Bar Association of the Turkish capital.
In the march held in Chalcedon, on the Asian side of the city of Istanbul, following a call by the Federation of Young Feminists and other women’s organizations, the participation was massive. Central slogans were “End to murderers, rapists, impunity and intimidation”, “Right, Law, Justice” and “Women, life, freedom”.
A smaller gathering also took place in Pera, at the end of the central Great Street (Istiklal), on the European side of Istanbul, where the gathered, mainly students and women, held banners and shouted slogans such as “you never walk alone”, ” women, life, freedom’, ‘we don’t want to die in the streets’, ‘men kill, the state protects’, ‘murderers will be held accountable to students’, etc. Very strong was the presence of the Police, who formed a cordon around the gathered crowd of men from the repression units and bars.
In Ankara, the demonstrators gathered in the Cankaya area, following a call from the Federation of Young Feminists, where similar slogans were heard. The Police initially asked the gathered crowd to disperse, as they had not received permission from the authorities for the gathering, however they did not intervene to disperse it, on the condition that they would not march.
However, the General Assembly of the Ankara Bar Association was episodic, where a group of female lawyers of Kurdish origin raised a banner in the Kurdish language that read “women, life, freedom”. The so-called “Nationalist Turkish Lawyers Group” reacted by shouting “terrorists out of the bar association” and incidents ensued, during which one member of the association was injured.
A spate of gruesome femicides in recent months has shocked and outraged across Turkey, prompting President Recep Tayyip Erdogan to pledge tougher sentences for perpetrators and end early prison terms.
However, women’s organizations and progressive citizens believe that women’s safety is not a political priority of the Islamist ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP).
The government in 2021 withdrew Turkey’s signature from the Istanbul Convention against Violence against Women, on the pretext that some of its clauses are incompatible with the country’s traditional family structures. The convention also aims to protect LGBTI communities. Turkey’s withdrawal from the convention has heightened concerns about impunity and a weakening of the country’s legal framework that protects its women from violence and sexual harassment.
About 300 women have been murdered so far. The We Will Stop Feminicide platform reported that in Turkey 34 women were murdered by men and another 20 died under suspicious circumstances in September alone.
In a case that shocked the entire country, last week Semih Celik – a 19-year-old butcher – killed and beheaded a 19-year-old woman, Iqbal Uzuner, before killing himself. The assassin threw Ouzouner’s head off the Byzantine walls of Constantinople while her mother was present. Earlier on the same day, he killed another 19-year-old woman, Eisenour Khalil, by slitting her throat on the same day. The two young women were his former and current friends.
Those deaths came on the heels of the September killing of a 26-year-old female police officer, who was also killed by a suspect with a heavy criminal record.
Almost every day in the news there is at least one news about the murder of women. Usually the perpetrators are estranged husbands or boyfriends of the female victims. Just today, a man in the southeastern province of Gaziantep killed his wife, their four children, and then committed suicide.
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