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Urgent Call From The “Saturday Mothers”

Enforced disappearance happens when state officials take someone into custody, but later deny having done so. The person taken into custody is taken out of the protection of the Law a nd assumed to be nonexistent within the legal system.

Enforced disappearance happens when state officials take someone into custody, but later deny having done so. The person taken into custody is taken out of the protection of the Law a nd assumed to be nonexistent within the legal system.

The aim of this is to repress opposition, and to intimidate and eliminate opponents.
 
Enforced disappearance is a kind of extrajudicial execution, a violation of the right to life and illegal torture.
 
Enforced disappearance has all the characteristics of torture and is a cruel and non-human act for the person’s family and friends.
 
In Turkey, hundreds of people have been subject to enforced disappearance, which is a crime against humanity that first appeared after the military coup of 1980 and that later became systematic during the 90’s as part of the State’s way of waging war.
 
During 1995, when enforced disappearances were happening quite frequently, families and friends of t he disappeared and their supporters took up the tradition of the Plaza de Mayo Mothers, by staging sit-in acts in Istanbul at the Galatasaray Square, where they would hold the photos of the disappeared ones. This protest, which is Turkey’s longest lasting protest, has been organised and championed by the Human Rights Association.
 
This struggle placed an obstacle in the way of the systematic application of the policy of enforced disappearance. Today’s struggle is continuing with demands for the disclosure of the fates of the disappeared and for the bringing to justice of those responsible for the disappearances.
 
As a result of pressure by the Human Rights Association and by the Saturday Mothers, a sub-committee was formed within the Human Rights Commission of the Grand National Assembly of Turkey in order to investigate the fate of college student Tolga Baykal Ceylan, who was subjected to enforced disappearance on 10th August 2004 in Igneada where he had gone for a vacation, and later this sub-committee disclosed its report. According to the claims in this report, Tolga Baykal Ceylan was not taken into custody, and so could not have been subjected to enforced disappearance. These claims were based on the lack of records of Tolga’s detention within the files of the gendarmerie, which was not very surprising considering the fact that the detention was illegal in the first place.
 
The sub-committee repeated the stories full of inconsistencies that the State has been telling to Tolga’s mother Kadriye Ceylan for the last seven (7) years. We are expected to believe that the intelligence services, police forces, cosmic top secret rooms and the Grand National Assembly of Turkey have all been unable to discover Tolga’s fate.
 
In order to voice our protest of the State’s policy of enforced disappearances and of its subsequent untruthfulness and denial, we are going to Igneada, where Tolga Baykal Ceylan was subject to forced disappearance, on t he occasion of the 7th anniversary of his disappearance.
 
We will put our wishes into bottles and throw them into the sea in order to protest against the people who insist on not disclosing Tolga’s fate.

Our wish is that you should accompany us in this journey.
 
Mother Kadriye Ceylan
Human Rights Association Istanbul Branch, Commission against Forced Disappearances 
 
For communication please call Başak Can through number: 0541 357 55 03
 
Bus departure
 Place :            In front of Ataturk Cultural Centre, Taksim
Date    :           13th August 2011 Saturday
Time   :            8 am.

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