The Peace Mothers of Turkey and Kurdistan

Subversion Diaries
Written By The Gender Security Project

Source: ANF (Link)

The Peace Mothers, a women’s civil rights movement in Turkey, works to promote peace among different ethnic groups in Turkey through non-violent means. It was founded by a group of Kurdish women to support women who lost their children in the mountains.

War between the Turkish state and the PKK began in 1984. During the war, Turkish forces targeted Kurdish women with overt violence, including arbitrary detention, torture, and sexual and gender-based violence, as well as forced migration. When clashes intensified in the 1990s, the Turkish army implemented “security measures” in the Kurdish region, and enforced disappearances and extrajudicial killings began to proliferate.  Starting in 1999 during the Kurdish-Turkish war, the women mobilized through a founding assembly, calling for an end to the “dirty war” and for peace between Turks and Kurds (IFOR, 2007). Operating out of Istanbul and Diyarbakir, the women mobilized as ‘mothers, whose children were either in the mountains, in prisons, or had lost their lives in the war’ (IFOR, 2007).

In their words (Kowarsch, 2007):

“As Peace Mothers, weestablished our initiative in1999. At that time the warcame to its climax and we received sad news of deathsevery day. During that period thousands of motherscould not even get the dead bodies of their children.Against this background we came together withKurdish, Turkish and Georgian mothers to begin ourmarch for peace. We started this movement aiming atthe establishment of strong relations between theKurdish and the Turkish communities in order toachieve an end of the war and a life in friendship withina free and common country.…We feel the same pain,so let’s build peace together!”

The term ‘peace mother’ typically refers to a Kurdish mother with a child who has either joined the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) or is a political dissident and considered a sympathizer or promoter of the PKK discourse (Göksel, 2018; Cetinkaya, 2020). They represent the collective grieving of Kurdish precarity and their role during this long, low-intensity war. The Peace Mother call for the end of racially-determined suffering of Kurds by mourning the loss of their children.

In their resistance of the system, the Peace Mothers have relied on hunger strikes, holding vigils, and meeting with leaders in power. The women were often met with oppressive and brutal crackdowns, including sexual harassment and violence (Cetinkaya, 2020). In 2000, a delegation of Peace Mothers went to Iraq to mediate the conflict between Kurdish and Turkish factions, and were tortured and ill-treated in response. Several among them have been prosecuted, jailed, and found guilty of voicing “separatist propaganda” (The Green Left, 2006). The women have been met work bans, dispersals, and arrests by the police. In 2018, they were banned, but in 2023, the Constitutional Court ruled that the group's right to organize demonstrations had been violated, restoring their right to keep vigil (Reuters, 2023).

In mobilizing around motherhood to achieve peace at the national level, they  paved the way for an unexpected form of activism within the Kurdish community, where mothers mediate local family conflicts in the wake of the war – in the process, transforming their social, political, and familial spheres significantly (Göksel, 2018). They constructed a political maternalism that challenges biological maternalism (Göksel, 2018). The peace mothers are a ‘powerful antidote to the state, as voices of the demand for equal rights, as well as resisting the precarity of their existence as Kurds’ (Cetinkaya, 2020).

References

 

The Gender Security Project
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