Mizgin Adım/JINHA

ŞIRNEX - In Turkey, the state has long issued weapons to village paramilitaries to fight the PKK (Kurdistan Workers' Party). Now, women's rights activists say, those same weapons are killing women.

During the 1990s, the Turkish state armed thousands of Kurdish villages to serve as paramilitaries to fight PKK guerrillas. The "village guard" system led to a strong concentration of weapons in areas like the Uludere district of Şırnak province, population 38,000. Just in the last two months, two teenage girls have been found dead in Uludere. Weapons used in both incidents had been issued as part of the village guard system in the 1990s.

The families of the two girls--14-year-old Zehra Arga and 17-year-old Çimen Kaya--have both claimed that they committed suicide. According to women's advocates in the region, it is common for relatives or loved ones to kill women and girls and report the killing as a suicide.

Soon before Zehra Arga's alleged suicide, Zehra had shared a photograph on social media. Her older brother objected. Zehra was found dead soon after the argument with her brother. Her family claims it was because she was not doing well in school.

Eda Bazıncır, who works at the Zahide Women's Information Center in the province's central city of Şırnak, went to the hospital to speak with the family. Zehra's younger sister was about to say something about the weapon when the mother told her to be quiet, saying "be quiet for your brother."

Eda says that the women's center has had difficult investigating or filing charges in these kinds of cases, owing to a lack of concrete evidence. Despite the fact that there has been a steady increase in the rate of women's suicides in Uludere, most of them executed with "village guard" guns, authorities have taken no action on the problem.

"When we look at these kinds of things, we see the patriarchal mindset and the state behind it all," said Eda.

(dk/mg/cm)