İSTANBUL - The leader of the 1980 military coup in Turkey, Kenan Evren, died in hospital in Ankara yesterday. Women survivors of the coup say it is deeply wrong that the general died without being tried by the people.

Kenan Evren, the leader and last surviving general of the six leaders of Turkey'sSeptember 12, 1980 coup, died yesterday. Evren was eventually put on trial for his role in the military coup, but never served time in prison. His case, started in 2010, was still at the High Court of Appeals when news of his death emerged. KenanEvren never expressed regret for having led the coup, claiming the intervention was necessary.Much of Turkey's legal code and constitution survives from the 1980 coup.

Gültan Kışanak was one of the women who survived the torture of which Kenan Evren was the architect. Gültan, held without charges in the notorious torture center Diyarbakır Prison in the wake of the coup, is now co-mayor of the city of Diyarbakır. She called the Diyarbakır Prison a "laboratory" for the changes that would take place throughout Turkey, noting that not one of the generals responsible ever saw justice for their crimes against the Turkish and Kurdish peoples.

"This death really reminds us once again how important truth commissions are," said Gültan. "Before there is any confronting the past, before the truth emerges, before they account for what they have done, they're leaving."

Nimet Tanrıkulu takes part in the research and activism projects '78ers Initiative (led by the revolutionary pre-coup generation in Turkey) and Women's Initiative for Peace, which pushes for a just peace and truth process in Turkey. She, like Gültan Kışanak, survived the coup repression.

"If we look at all other countries in the world, the trials of coup leaders have been very different," she said. Nimet noted that in Turkey, the state was even discussing giving a state funeral for the general, in a country where the constitution instituted by the coup junta is still almost entirely intact.

"The 10% election threshold is a product of the September 12 [1980] coup. The secularism issue is a product of the September 12 coup," said Nimet."If five women in Turkey are killed every day, we can look at how the September 12 coup created militarism and tied it to patriarchal violence. If the Kurdish problem still hasn’t been solved today, the relationship to the coup constitution there is very strong."

Hundreds of thousands of people were arrested and tortured in the immediate aftermath of the coup, and thousands spent long years in prison, with 50 being hanged. Evren famously defended the hangings in a speech in 1984, saying: "Should we feed them in prison for years rather than hanging them?"

Mukaddes Erdoğdu Çelik is a writer and a member of the Socialist Women's Assemblies. Mukaddes woke up on September 14, 1980 to find her husband dead. His corpse was in the Davutpaş aBarracks military installation in Istanbul. She called the trial of KenanEvren a "show trial" by the AKP. The general was never summoned to court.

"Before he even went before a court, he died in Gata [Military Hospital] like it was a hotel room. We would have wanted his end to be more like Pinochet's. We would have wanted to see him tried by the people," she said. "The deaths of people like Kenan Evren are bad and worthless deaths. These are people who humanity will memorialize with curses."

Women's Initiative for Peace activist Gülsen Ülker says the truth commissions that women are pushing for in the peace process will begin with the 1980 coup, because "many of the problems we have today are obviously related to the decisions taken that day and the Turkey founded that day."

"If there's going to be peace in this country, it won't happen without reckoning with September 12," she said. She noted that it was not one person alone who founded the current system, and that many institutions and people today continue to support it.

"Our struggle goes on, with those people," she said.

(ekip/nt/zd/cm)