Fresh protests in Turkey over violence against women

Supporters of pro-Kurdish Peoples’ Equality and Democracy Party (DEM Party) take part in a demonstration after the party’s candidate in Sunday’s municipal elections was ruled ineligible at the last minute in the eastern city of Van, in Istanbul on April 2, 2024. FILE PHOTO/Agence France-Presse

ISTANBUL — Hundreds of women protested in Turkey Saturday against a wave of murders of women, the latest rallies in response to a recent double slaying in Istanbul.

A crowd of hundreds in Istanbul chanted slogans denouncing Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and his Islamic-rooted AKP party, an AFP correspondent reported.

“You are a government that lets young girls get killed,” one of the rally’s organizers, Gunes Fadime Aksahin, told the crowd.

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Gulizar Sezer, the mother of a young woman who was murdered, also addressed the rally. Her daughter’s body was found in June after being thrown into the sea wrapped in a carpet.

Other protests took place in the capital Ankara and Izmir, another major city, according to photos posted by a women’s rights federation.

There have been similar such protests every day for a week across the country, notably on university campuses.

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A man arrested on suspicion of having killed two young women on the same night took his own life last week, sparking the protests.

The suspect and the two women were all aged 19, said Istanbul officials. The women had been killed within 30 minutes of each other, they added.

It was not known if they knew their attacker.

Erdogan, having initially blamed alcohol and social media, on Wednesday promised to toughen the justice system and crack down harder on crime.

Turkey has struggled to contain a wave of killings of women.

One monitoring group says there have been 299 murders of women this year in the country of 85 million people, with more than 160 “suspect” killings officially classed as suicides or accidents.

In 2021, Turkey withdrew from the Council of Europe convention on preventing violence against women, known as the Istanbul convention.

It obliges national authorities to investigate and punish violence against women.