KEBABBLE The mystery of the dying girls By Fazile Zahir
FETHIYE, Turkey - On May 14, the day after participating in the excellent
conference "Writing Turkey" at Middlesex University's scenic Trent Park Campus,
London, I found myself at my parents' home reading the Sunday Times Magazine
and wondering if anything had changed in England in the past 200 years.
Although I had given a talk on contemporary Turkey, addressing the possible
European identities of Turks, it was David Barchard's talk on the 19th-century
"Roots of Turcophobia" that was the more relevant. Barchard had talked about
the infamous Bulgarian massacre of 1876, one of many atrocities committed by
both sides, that had irrevocably hardened British opinion against the
Turk and led to much of the immortalization, deification and identification of
the Turks as the Gods of Barbarism and Depravity.
The Sunday Times Magazine article transposed a picture of bikinied bathing
beauties lounging somewhere on a warm Mediterranean beach with a screaming
banner, stark white capitals on a dead black strip, "WHERE BEAST MEETS WEST".
The only thing missing was an exclamation mark, but perhaps the venerable
Sunday Times will only go so far into the realms of bad taste and exploitative
headlines in its pursuit of tabloid popularity.
The article heralded by the banner was promoted as being about Turkey's "deadly
east-west social divide" and how just "miles further inland a mere glance", one
presumes by the picturesque bathing lovely, at a man would "mean death" for the
woman. The article then turns out to be not about honor killings, as one might
predict from the heavy promo, but about high levels of female suicide in
southeastern Turkey.
While the introductory paragraph is a gross misrepresentation, the article
compounds insult with injury and goes on to assume that the relatively high
level of female suicide in the Turkish city of Batman is the result of "forced
suicides" by young women. Since the Turkish government began to crack down on
honor killings, the number of young women being murdered has fallen. But rather
than focus on the positive human-rights changes taking place in Turkish
society, The Times takes the attitude that death sells - if it bleeds, it
leads.
It reports instead that for the sake of Turkey's human-rights records, Kurdish
families, particularly those in the Batman area, who feel shamed by their
daughters have encouraged them to do the right thing for the family and the
nation as a whole, to do themselves a big favor by committing suicide and
sparing everybody else from blame or censure.
The Turkish media carried a report on May 26 that the European Union is sending
a special representative into the southeast of the country to investigate the
high level of female suicides. Professor Yakin Erturk from the
domestic-violence section of the Human Rights Committee of the EU will
investigate the sudden peak in female suicides over the past five months in
Batman and trying to assess whether the rise has anything to do with the
increased punishments for honor killings laid down under recent changes in
Turkey's legal system.
One can only hope that the effect of a new law to protect women has not
inadvertently resulted in more deaths. Erturk will meet with the families and
friends of recent suicides to try to find out why they took their own lives and
what preventive measures can be established to safeguard women against suicide.
Although there was a sudden upswing in suicide numbers in Batman in early 2006,
there has always been a high background level year-on-year. Prior to their new
assignation as "forced suicides", they were explained as the result of despair
caused by poverty, cramped living conditions, cruel husbands and unemployment -
the Four Horsemen of Rural-to-Urban Migration.
The World Health Organization did research in the shantytowns around Ankara for
four years from 1998 to 2003 to discover why a rise in female suicides was
taking place. It found that women were more than twice as likely as men to try
to take their own lives, with female teenagers between 15 and 19 years old at
highest risk. The WHO report also stated: "The results showed that attempted
suicide was common among women, as was the case in other European centers and
in North America."
The researchers found that the true link between lifestyle and suicide was
likely to be age and level of economic dependency: "Young people and women are
more prone to encounter life crises and are more economically dependent ... 57%
of women attempting suicide were economically inactive; this group is under
heavy economic stress. Further, close family ties and lack of autonomy in
Turkey may render life more difficult for women and teenagers." The report
concluded that suicide rates in Turkey overall were low, but that the increase
in attempted suicides for both men and women was striking.
The researchers' explanation for the rise in female suicides was the existence
of intense economic difficulties, increasing unemployment and the rapid social
change. The Sunday Times Magazine failed to mention any of these possible
causes for suicide, instead leading with a story of a family who watched their
daughter slit her wrists and then closed her bedroom door.
Without a doubt there is a problem in Batman and in other communities like it,
but what is clear from the WHO report, and many others like it (but not in the
Sunday Times Magazine), is that Turkey has a problem with poverty, and that the
burden of dealing with the problem falls on the shoulders of women, some of
whom can't cope. Perhaps the real clue to the blip of unexpected attempted
suicides in Batman since January is in the Sunday Times story itself. The
writer alludes to an atmosphere of unusual interest and paranoia verging on
hysteria that now surrounds every suicide and quoted Nebahat Akkoc, director of
women's support organization Ka-Mer in Diyarbakir, as saying: "Every suicide of
a girl or woman should be looked at with suspicious eyes."
As well as the EU investigator, Erturk, a commission from Dicle University in
Diyarbakir has been asked by the Turkish government to look at the problem of
high female suicide rates. The Center for Suicide Prevention reports that
"whole communities may experience a pervasive sense of fear and confusion".
The Sunday Times also point out media interest in these stories, which were
certainly heavily reported in the local Batman press and commented on regularly
in the national press. Even Abdullah Ocalan, jailed PKK (Kurdish Workers'
Party) rebel leader, weighed in to embrace the dying girls: "These are our
people," he said. "They are affected by the conflict." The glamour of death and
the stream of virtuous qualities attributed to the dead girls, often described
in the press post mortem as "beautiful ... strong ... fearless", are perhaps
creating a cult of martyrdom among innocent young Kurdish women.
The Center for Suicide Prevention states that suicide spreads via a process of
contagion, that is to say that one person's suicidal behavior influences
another person to attempt suicide. It says clusters of suicides happen "when
there is glorification of the suicide victim and a sensationalization of their
death", combined with "a highly charged emotional atmosphere".
The center states that it is not necessary for the decedents in a cluster to
have direct contact with one another - knowledge of the first suicide could be
obtained through the news media. Many of these Kurdish girls will have been
home all day (economically inactive since they left the village) with the
television presenting yet another spectacular suicide case. These girls may not
have known one another personally but they watched one another die. Perhaps
some girls now see their suicides as their 15 minutes of fame.
Fazile Zahir is of Turkish descent, born and brought up in London. She
moved to live in Turkey in 2005 and has been writing full-time since then.
