JINHA

NEWS CENTER - Women protested the torture and display of the dead body of YJA STAR guerrilla Kevser Eltürk (nom de guerre Ekin Wan) yesterday across Turkey and Kurdistan. Police attacked a march in Adana with tear gas and water cannons.

Ekin Wan was a member of the YJA STAR guerrilla (affiliated with the Kurdistan Workers' Party or PKK), killed in a clash near the town of Varto on August 10. Turkish police stripped her body naked, dragged it through the streets and took pictures of her dead body to share on social media.

In the southern province of Adana, women were attempting to hold a march for Ekin Wan They found hundreds of police deployed with armored vehicles to stop them. Police attacked with tear gas and water cannons. When local youth came out in support of the marchers, a clash broke out. Police threw tear gas into homes in the neighborhood, affecting local children.

In the main Kurdish city of Diyarbakır, Congress of Free Women (KJA) members gathered bearing photographs of Ekin Wan. The women announced that they would be going to the Diyarbakır courthouse at 2:00 p.m. to file charges related to the treatment. After Berivan Şahin of the Ekin Ceren Women's Information Center spoke, the women began to march to protest both the treatment of Ekin Wan and the ongoing military attacks on cities in Kurdistan. Police tried to cut off the march, leading to tension with the crowd.

The KJA also held a press announcement in the city of Dersim to protest the treatment of Ekin Wan. Nurhayat Altun spoke, saying that although women had worked for the last three years to secure peace in Kurdistan, the Turkish state was now pushing the country into war. She called the treatment of Ekin's body a "naked display of the state's fear of the women's liberation movement."

The KJA also gathered in the cities of Adıyaman and Hakkari to condemn the treatment of the body. "The ruling AKP thinks that they can make Kurdish women bow down with sexual torture," said Fadime Acar, among the activists at the Hakkari gathering. "But it's been a long time since Kurdish women showed that they don't see their honor as located in their bodies, but in their struggle and their freedom."

Women working in the municipal government of Halfeti, in the largely Kurdish province of Urfa, protested for Ekin Wan yesterday. Esen Günay, speaking on behalf of the women, noted that in the 1990s, soldiers had also taken pictures with the naked body of 18-year-old PKK guerrilla Zilan. "20 years have passed since Zilan's naked body was displayed in that immoral way, and we can see that the rapist mindset has never changed," said Esen.

(ekip/gc/bc-şa/mg/fz/cm)