Lutfiye Gokkan with her white headscarf is worried: "I want to sit beside my daughter, but they don’t let me. Soldiers on one side and the police on the other have put her under blockade. They don’t even let us have a look. Neither Hitler nor Nazis or Ottomans did this. It is Erdogan who is doing [this] to us."
Her daughter Ayse Gokkan is the mayor of Nusaybin. Since Oct. 30 she has been on a "death fast" all by herself in the minefield along the Syrian-Turkish border, surrounded by rows of barbed wire. She just drinks just a half-liter of water a day. She says she won’t end her hunger strike until the construction of the wall being built by the government between Nusaybin in Turkey and its Syrian twin city, Qamishli, stops. Security forces only allow one visit by a medical team every day. They put up a canvas screen to prevent Rojava Kurds from coming to express support and from seeing Gokkan. There is an ambulance on standby.
'She had enough'
A group of 56 people, including 10 mayors from the Kurdish Peace and Democracy Party [BDP] and members of provincial and municipal councils, also began a hunger strike nearby in support of Gokkan. Salih Tekin, one of the hunger strikers and a member of the Mardin Provincial Council, told Al-Monitor: "For months, Ayse Gokkan tried to learn from the Ministry of Interior and the Mardin governor why the wall was being built. She got no information nor could she stop the construction. Then she had had enough. She started on this death fast saying the only thing she had left to offer to the people who had elected her was her life."
AL-MONITOR All-Access gives you unlimited access to all our journalism, the full Daily Briefing, exclusive interviews, premium newsletters, and live events — for less than $2/week.
