The parliamentary commission established to address the Kurdish question held its fifth meeting with representatives of the Peace Mothers and the Saturday Mothers/People. Among the participants were Besna Tosun, Maside Ocak, and Ikbal Eren, one of the Saturday Mothers, who have been seeking justice for the disappeared since 1995.
Ikbal Eren, sister of the disappeared Hayrettin Eren, answered ANF questions regarding yesterday’s commission meeting. She emphasized that they always maintain hope in order to continue their struggle. However, she noted that they had not obtained any concrete results from either the Truth and Justice Commissions or from the Prime Minister in the past, which is why they could not say they had reached a definitive solution: “As a family for five years, and together with the Saturday Mothers and People for 35 years, we have been saying very clearly what we want. We state our demands; we want the fate of our disappeared loved ones to be revealed. We repeat this every week. We want the perpetrators to be brought to justice.
Therefore, in this commission that accepted or invited us, we gave examples of how our loved ones disappeared, because all of them were taken in similar ways. We also presented the names and details of the 584 disappearances, and once again voiced our demands.”
Eren added: “What we did was only a change of place, because we do this every week, but this time we expressed it within the commission. Perhaps there were even people in the commission who were close to the perpetrators. Therefore, once again we voiced these things while looking directly into their faces.
Hope always exists. Without hope, continuing this struggle would make no sense. We had previously made statements in the Truth and Justice Commission and expressed our demands, but we saw that nothing came out of it.”
Eren continued: “Therefore, I cannot say that we are at a point where I can call this a definitive solution. However, I believe that what we shared has drawn enough attention from both the members of the commission and the chairperson. I believe we have affected them. From this point on, it is up to their conscience, because this is a matter of conscience.”
Source: ANF News
