ARJÎN DİLEK ÖNCEL

Amed – In 1970, Ece Ayhan wrote his poem “Monument to the Unknown Student” for university students who had been killed. In it, he wrote: “Look here, here, beneath this black marble, lies a child who, had she lived another recess, would have stood at the blackboard to recite from nature, but she was killed in the state lesson.”

The poem was written for Battal Mehetoğlu (December 14, 1969), one of the “children killed in the state lesson.” At his funeral, his Kurdish mother removed her black chador, made a speech, and, speaking in Turkish so that the perpetrators would hear, said: “The murderer will one day, sooner or later, be held accountable.”

Being a child in Kurdistan

Even after many years, new names are added to the list of “children killed in the state lesson.” After every speech beginning with the words “to be a child in Kurdistan,” the names of children torn from life are remembered.

Countless children whose childhoods were stolen, who met torture while still infants: 5-year-old Erdem Aşkan, 12-year-old Uğur Kaymaz, 10-year-old Cemile Çağırga, 3-month-old baby Miray, and 12-year-old Ceylan Önkol… They may have been murdered at different times, but what they had in common was being Kurdish.

September 28 marks the anniversary of the death of 12-year-old Ceylan Önkol, whose mutilated body was gathered in her mother’s skirt after she ran to the pasture.

Everyone remembered her in her yellow sweater and with her wide-open eyes. Her striking gaze seemed to demand accountability. There were only two photographs of Ceylan in the press; she did not live long enough to collect more.

Ceylan was still a primary school student. In 2009, while tending animals in the hamlet of Xanbaz in Kanîsipî (Şenlik), a rural neighborhood of Licê district in Amed (Diyarbakır), she was killed by a mortar shell fired from the military post. Her body lay at the scene for six hours. The public prosecutor refused to come to the site, saying, “I don’t have security,” so Ceylan’s mother gathered the pieces of her daughter’s body into her skirt.

The legal process

In 2010, the Önkol family’s lawyers applied to the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR). In May 2012, they applied again, citing the lack of an effective and impartial investigation, rejection of requests to deepen the investigation, failure to open a case despite the passage of time, and the absence of identified suspects. On January 17, 2017, the ECHR finalized the family’s application and ruled that there was “no violation in terms of the right to life and effective investigation.”

On April 30, 2014, the Lice Chief Public Prosecutor’s Office issued a “permanent search order” in the investigation into Önkol’s death. The decision stated that “the evidence and reports in the file were insufficient to identify the perpetrators.” The family’s lawyers also filed a lawsuit against the Ministry of Interior in the Diyarbakır 2nd Administrative Court, demanding material and moral compensation. The court ruled that 28,208 TL be paid to the family.

The Council of State has still not ruled

The decision was appealed to the Council of State. On May 16, 2019, the Council of State overturned the compensation ruling, stating that the case should be evaluated under the principle of “strict liability” or “service fault.” Subsequently, on March 8, 2021, the Administrative Court ruled that the family be paid a total of 283,000 TL in material and moral damages. The court found Ceylan 10% at fault and the administration 90% at fault. Both the family’s lawyers and the ministry’s lawyers appealed once again to the Council of State. After four years, the Council has still not issued a ruling.

Sixteen years have passed since Ceylan Önkol’s death. While justice has not been achieved for Ceylan, the process initiated for a democratic solution to the Kurdish question has brought new hope for justice, especially for families who lost their children during war and conflict.

The “National Solidarity, Brotherhood and Democracy Commission” established in Parliament has held its 12th meeting. Before each meeting, families who lost their children say once again: “There can be no peace without reckoning, without accountability.”

The Önkol family has sought justice for 16 years

On the 16th anniversary of Ceylan’s death, her sister Selma Önkol says, “They say 16 years have passed, but for us time stopped that day.” Saying that Ceylan’s death, the youngest in their family, plunged them into a never-ending mourning, Selma adds: “What hurts most is this injustice,” stressing that without justice their mourning cannot end.

Selma says: “The file has been sitting on a shelf for years, not even an inch of progress has been made. No perpetrators, no responsible parties. All we wanted was justice. Where there is no justice, the wound keeps bleeding.”

“Peace comes with reckoning and justice”

Pointing to the process initiated for a democratic solution to the Kurdish issue, Selma says: “Peace is of course our greatest longing. We do not want any child, any parent, to experience the pain we have lived. But peace does not just mean the silencing of weapons. Peace comes with reckoning, with justice.” She emphasizes that the family will never give up on their demand for justice.

Selma continues: “If the perpetrators of our Ceylan are still unaccounted for, if responsibility has not been established, how can there be peace? True peace comes through reckoning with what happened in the past. As long as the perpetrators go unpunished and justice is not served, peace will remain incomplete. Our expectation is first justice, then an honorable peace for all.”

“The perpetrators of children’s deaths must be held accountable first”

Metin Arkaş, head of the Diyarbakır Bar Association’s Child Rights Commission, also spoke about families’ demands for “reckoning”: “In crimes committed systematically against a segment of society, the policy of impunity must inevitably give way to the concept of justice in a process where peace is being discussed. It is not possible to speak of peace on solid ground if the suffering is devalued, if the pursuit of justice is ignored, and if the perpetrators of these pains are protected. For this reason, the perpetrators of Ceylan Önkol’s and other murdered children’s deaths must be held accountable, the process must be completed fairly, and at the very least the debt of justice owed to their families must be paid.”

“A summary of the impunity system in Turkey”

Rehşan Bataray Saman, who was an executive at the Human Rights Association (İHD) Amed Branch at the time of Ceylan’s killing, describes her case as “a complete summary of the system of impunity in Turkey.”

She recalls that even the most basic investigative procedures were not carried out, and that decisions were based on documents prepared by the gendarmerie officials who were themselves in the position of suspects. She underlines that there has still been no progress in identifying and prosecuting those responsible.

“Permanent search orders are used to wait out the statute of limitations”

 

Regarding Ceylan’s file, Rehşan Bataray says: “The İHD Amed Branch Legal Commission has followed the case from the very beginning. With the permanent search orders issued, the statute of limitations is being awaited. In most files where security personnel are suspects, one of the most effective methods of impunity is for the prosecutor’s office to wait out the statute of limitations on dusty shelves. In the administrative case, following our objections to the rulings that there was ‘no service fault,’ it was at least accepted as a ‘service fault.’ But the European Court of Human Rights had ruled that Turkey bore no negligence. In recent years, the ECHR’s rulings on Turkey have been highly controversial, and the decision in Ceylan Önkol’s case was one of them.”

“Grave human rights violations left in impunity must be addressed”

Rehşan Bataray states that as human rights defenders they value the process initiated for a democratic solution to the Kurdish question, but what matters most is the permanence of this process.

She says that one of the conditions for permanence is “a healthy reckoning with what happened in the past.” She concludes: “The grave human rights violations of the past that were left in impunity must be discussed in all their aspects, and impunity must be overcome. The only way to prevent recurrence is through this.”