JINHA

AMED – While Turkey celebrates April 23 as Children's Day, the Association Agenda: Child reports that at least 627 children died preventable deaths in Turkey last year.

While some of these deaths took place directly at the hands of security officers, all of them could have been prevented by state intervention, said the association, in its fourth annual report on the right to life of the child.

"While children are trumpeted as 'the future,' as long as there are not measures taken today, accounting for current needs, as long as the demand for freedom and rights is blocked, as long as rights abuses continue to meet with impunity, children will go on dying in Turkey," said the report.

Eight of the children were slain by police during protests. 28 lost their lives due to neglect while under state custody. Northern Kurdistan is a particularly deadly place for state violence against children, as the police slayings of children during protests in the Kurdish city of Cizre demonstrated over the last year. People in the city of Cizre will be honoring the slain children today, with a march starting at the site of the killing of 12-year-old Nihat Kazanhan. The local Human Rights Committee of Bar Association in the province will lead a silent march to the site of the shootings of Sinan Saltıkalp and Ümit Kurt, where they will leave carnations.

25 children died due to domestic abuse and five as a result of child marriage, according to the report. 23 children killed themselves.

Women's groups argue that a state of impunity for violence against women in the Kurdish region has encouraged ongoing rights abuses from both the state and the family. Police officers' abduction and imprisonment of two teenage girls in the Kurdish city of Siirt has been drawing protest over recent weeks from local NGOs, women's groups and lawyers, who say that the state is covering up the abduction and likely sexual assault that took place.

Meanwhile, Kurdish women's movement has been leading a campaign against child marriage, gendered abuse in the home and the femicides and suicides that result from it. Throughout April, the Kurdish women's organization Congress of Free Women (KJA) has been leading a month-long awareness-raising campaign on violence against women in Van province, where four women committed suicide in one week. But girls' suicides continue in the region. Zeyna Tugay, a 16-year-old girl, was found dead with a rope around her neck in her family home in the city of Cizre yesterday, on the eve of Children's Day.

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