Turkish mother rebels against war

ISTANBUL

After two decades of war with Kurdish separatists, Turks have grown used to military funerals — the coffins wrapped in the flag, the grieving parents, the officers standing stiffly at attention, the huge and highly charged crowds.

The funeral of 2nd Lt. Zeki Burak Okay last week was not expected to differ from the 6,000 others Turkey has witnessed since 1984. But then the mother of the 25-year-old conscript spoke out.

“I will not say ’Long live this country,’” said Neriman Okay, referring to the patriotic phrase used almost without fail by grieving relatives of men killed fighting. “I didn’t bring my son up to be a soldier, and I do not accept his death,” she said, adding: “He died for nothing.”

In many places, what she described as her “rebellion” would hardly raise an eyebrow. In Turkey, where the Kurdish conflict has served to stir angry nationalism, it was unprecedented: For the first time, a victim of separatist violence openly questioned the reason for war and found a public willing to listen.

“Neriman Okay has given a voice to all mothers whose sons have yet to do their military service — even those whose sons are still small children,” wrote Meral Tamer, a columnist for the centrist daily Milliyet.

Not surprisingly, much of the ongoing press coverage of Mrs. Okay’s outburst describes it as a criticism of the elected government.

Killed near the southeastern mountain town of Cukurca, Lt. Okay was one of seven soldiers whose deaths coincided with the unpopular decision to send peacekeeping troops to Lebanon.

The criticisms spiked when Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan told a member of the public demanding an end to the deaths of soldiers, “Military service is not a place where you just lie down and take it easy.” In a country in which 90 percent of the 800,000 military personnel are conscripts, Mr. Erdogan’s comment was deemed tactless. Some analysts see this as the beginning of the end of his government.

But though Mrs. Okay criticized Mr. Erdogan directly, saying he could say nothing to her unless he, too, had a son fighting in Turkey’s conflict-torn southeast, it was clear that her criticisms went beyond him and his party.

“The last time I spoke to my son, he told me he had no idea what he was doing,” Mrs. Okay told a reporter after the funeral. “I’ve only shot a gun once, and in training; all we did was five-kilometer runs,’” she quoted him as saying.

“Sending boys who have never shot a gun to fight terrorists who’ve been in the mountains for 20 years is pure stupidity,” she said. “This should be a job for professionals.”

Unlike Mr. Erdogan, and despite his reputation for hawkishness, Gen. Yasar Buyukanit, Turkey’s new chief of staff, responded positively to Mrs. Okay’s criticisms.

“I will listen with respect to anything the mothers of martyrs have to say,” he said, using the religiously tinged word Turks employ for troops or policemen killed in action. “I kiss the hands of the martyrs’ mothers, and I kiss the cheeks of the martyrs’ fathers.”

But analysts pointed out that one of the first things Gen. Buyukanit said on taking up the post last month was to insist that there would be no change to the system of military service.

There was nothing unusual about his reference to soldiering as a duty. According to a textbook all Turkish secondary school students study, military service is “the most sacred service to the nation.” A person who has not experienced it “cannot be useful to himself, his family or his homeland.”

This point of view is supported by Turkish law, as novelist Perihan Magden discovered to her cost this year when she wrote an article defending conscientious objection. She wound up in court this July on charges of “turning Turks against the military” and faced up to three years in jail but was acquitted.

Political scientist Ayse Kadioglu has little doubt that some Turks would like to see Mrs. Okay put on trial.

“They almost certainly won’t be able to, though,” he said. “These soldiers’ mothers are untouchable, but it seems that this might just be a turning point.”