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RECLAIMING THE RECENT HISTORY: THE SATURDAY MOTHERS AND
COVERAGE OF THE LONGEST CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE ACTION IN
ALTERNATIVE MEDIA
Berrin YANIKKAYA *
The Saturday Mothers (Cumartesi Anneleri) is a group of women (and men) who have been
practicing peaceful sit‐ins in İstanbul since May 27, 1995 for their relatives who have ‘disappeared’
under custody or have been ‘missing’ for a long period of time. Saturday Mothers’ civil disobedience
action ‐inspired by the Argentinian Plaza De Mayo Mothers‐ aims to draw attention to their missing
family members. The Saturday Mothers and human rights defenders have been gathering every
weekend to demand information on their loved ones who disappeared, particularly during the 1990s.
The 1990s is one of the darkest periods of Turkish history. Countless of men and women as well as
children have disappeared without a trace during that period of time. It all started after a court
hearing when ‘disappeared’ Hasan Ocak’s mother Emine Ocak and Hasan Gülünay’s wife Birsen
Gülünay shouted during the court “We want our sons!” in April 1995. Both of the women were
arrested and stayed in prison for a month. After they came out of prison, they sat down on the
sidewalk with approximately thirty others. “Emine Ocak held a large photograph of her son and a
placard that said, ‘Hasan Ocak was taken under custody; he was lost like hundreds of others and
found dead. We want the murderers.’” 1 That was the beginning of the longest civil disobedience
action in the history of Turkey. The peaceful sit‐ins started with Hasan Ocak’s family’s silent protest
at the Galatasaray Square in 1995, and soon after other families and human rights activists joined
them. 2 First, there were the mothers of people who disappeared, then they were followed by their
siblings and finally their children with carnations and posters of their loved ones in their hands
keeping on asking for justice through 500 weeks. 500 weeks, 500 calls for justice and for
whereabouts of hundreds of disappeared people...
Although the protests had to be temporarily stopped after the 203rd gathering in March 1999
after months of heavy pressure and police interventions started in 1998 to make the crime of
enforced disappearances invisible once again in the collective memory of Turkish society, they
resumed their action on January 31, 2009. 3 Since then, every week, two or three relatives read a
message or a poem for their loved ones, while anybody who wishes can take part in the
demonstrations by holding a picture of one of the missing.
The protests are powerful in several aspects. First, the Saturday Mothers do not only seek their
relatives and/or justice for their losses or just commemorate them, they also mark the traces of their
faces with the pictures they carry every week as well as reminding their existence by telling their
stories; the stories written/spoken in silence on the streets particularly by women. Second, they
don’t only tell the stories of their lost ones, they also tell their own stories as mothers, as wives, as
siblings; they emerge from their silence as resistance and persistency. Third, against the official
discourse and history, they reclaim the history on behalf of the ones who cannot speak for
themselves anymore. And finally, their determination forces the state and also the public to pay
attention to them, since the square they sit‐in is in the middle of the city; it is almost impossible to
ignore neither them nor the photographs of the ‘missings’.
By holding photographs of the disappeared, the protestors have two main demands. Their
primary demand is to be able to get concrete and reliable information on what had happened to
their children or relatives. And their second demand is to be able to bring the responsible officials for
murders and disappearances in front of the justice. “In this regard, the Saturday Mothers
represented one of the first dynamic memorialization in Turkish political history, as victims of human
*
Yeditepe University, Faculty of Communications, Department of Radio, Television & Cinema.