This very meaningful and poetic sentence was reportedly said by Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan to Ahmet Türk, the leader of the Democratic Society Party (DTP). Türk was recently talking to reporters on another subject, and the meeting with Erdoğan came up. At the beginning of the “democratization initiative,” Erdoğan met with DTP officials not as a prime minister but as the leader of the ruling Justice and Development Party (AK Party), or to put it more correctly, the AK Party tried to present the meeting that way. But regardless of the presentation of the meeting, to say and to be aware of the fact that “The color of the tears of Kurdish and Turkish mothers is the same” is something that inspires much hope for the future, if the prime minister really feels this in his heart, and my impression is he does.
From the very beginning of the democratization initiative, the prime minister has frequently referred to the theme of the “tears of mothers.” Every time he mentions this subject he talks about mothers. He has said many things about mothers, but my favorite one was in August while he was addressing his parliamentary group.
“Motherhood does not have an ideology. If a mother from Yozgat and a mother from Hakkari, regardless of the cause of death of their sons, recite the same prayer next to the graves of their sons, it is obvious that there is a huge mistake here. It is obvious that here the losers are both Turkey and mothers,” he said.
To talk about the pain of the mothers does, of course, have a unifying effect; the opposition, which was so ready to axe the process before it was even born, cannot oppose the mothers and the idea of stopping the mothers from crying.
However, that does not mean this “discourse on motherhood” does not have any problems.
As Hidayet Şefkatli Tuksal from the Başkent Women's Platform puts it, “It is not good enough to say don't let mothers cry -- the way should be found to achieve that.” And as Halime Güner from Flying Broom underlines, to concentrate on mothers excludes other women who are ready to contribute to the democratization process.
This discourse also isolates motherhood from womanhood. Since it only concentrates on the mothers who have lost their children, it ignores the other pains that cause suffering to the women due to the Kurdish problem.
If there is a conflict somewhere, the heaviest price is always paid by women, and this is true for the Kurdish problem. Women not only worry about their loved ones, as Erdoğan frequently points out, they have other concerns. For example, they are the first and most immediate victims of displacements. They are the ones who have to think about their families' shelter and food; they are the ones who have to cope with the difficulties of establishing a new life in a new place.
(By the way, it is interesting that nobody is underlining the problems of the displaced persons while discussing the Kurdish issue although displacement is a very important problem which has to be addressed immediately.)
This discourse based on motherhood is a little bit hypocritical, too. Maybe no one is opposing the necessity of stopping the mothers from crying, but in the past, when women demanded it, they were not heard. They were even prosecuted. I remember very well when transsexual singer Bülent Ersoy said that if she had a son she would not send him to perform military service, and she was taken to court for these words.
The media is hypocritical, too. In the past, if a mother at the funeral of her son said, “Stop this conflict,” if she complained about the state since it forced her son to be killed in a clash, then the dominant media declared those kinds of mothers to be “crazy,” sometimes even accusing them of treason. But now, they are praising those kinds of mothers, as they must.
The discourse based on mothers' tears also gives a pacifist and oppressed meaning to motherhood, as sociologist Nükhet Sirman points out.
For the time being, this discourse is not getting that much attention -- it is considered really cliché -- but I am sure many mothers all over Turkey are carefully listening to it and taking it very seriously. Here the prime minister has to be very careful; even if he gives up, even if he stops, the mothers might not give up the solution to the Kurdish problem.
Maybe the mothers and women are perceived as pacifist subjects, and to use a cliché about them, might not look dangerous at all, but when mothers decide to unite, when a mother from Yozgat and a mother from Hakkari decide to use their power together, no one can stop them -- something Turkey really needs.
