An 11‑year‑old in Turkey has begun saying he wants to kill himself since his mother’s recent detention over alleged links to the faith-based Gülen movement, the second time he has been separated from a parent, after his father spent six years behind bars on similar charges, illustrating the serious impact of Gülen‑linked cases on children.
According to the TR724 news website, the child’s father, Emrah Aslan, spoke during an online program organized by the Vicdan (Conscience) Foundation, an initiative founded by Ömer Faruk Gergerlioğlu, a human rights defender and opposition lawmaker with the pro‑Kurdish Peoples’ Equality and Democracy Party (DEM Party). Arslan said his son’s mental health has sharply deteriorated since the September arrest of his mother, biology teacher Şeyma Aslan, who is behind bars with the couple’s 14-month-old daughter.
Aslan described the boy as having asked if starving himself might kill him and telling his father in the kitchen that he had considered stabbing himself.
“This is not the first time he has lost a parent to prison,” Aslan said. “I served six years, but this second separation [from his mother] has broken him more deeply.”
“He was recovering slowly over years. Now everything has come crashing down.”
Şeyma Aslan and her then-12-month-old daughter were on their way to Greece to seek asylum in Europe when she was arrested by Turkish police on September 26.
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has been targeting followers of the Gülen movement, inspired by the late Muslim cleric Fethullah Gülen, since corruption investigations revealed in 2013 implicated then-prime minister Erdoğan as well as some of his family members and inner circle.
Dismissing the investigations as a Gülenist coup and a conspiracy against his government, Erdoğan began to target the movement’s members. He designated the movement as a terrorist organization in May 2016 and intensified the crackdown on it following an abortive putsch in July of the same year that he accused Gülen of masterminding. The movement strongly denies involvement in the coup attempt or any terrorist activity.
Şeyma Aslan was previously arrested in 2019 during Turkey’s post-coup state of emergency, spending eight months in pretrial detention with her then-3-year-old son. Her husband, a former doctoral student in nanotechnology, was also convicted in 2017 of alleged Gülen ties and served six years in prison before being released.
The teacher’s case is under review by Turkey’s Supreme Court of Appeals. Fearing that her conviction would be upheld, Şeyma Aslan tried to leave Turkey with her daughter.
Her conviction was based on her employment at a now-shuttered private school linked to the Gülen movement and the use of ByLock, an encrypted messaging application that was widely available on Apple’s App Store and Google Play.
Turkish authorities have considered ByLock to be a secret tool of communication among supporters of the Gülen movement since the coup attempt on July 15, 2016, despite a lack of evidence that ByLock messages were related to the abortive putsch.
Although the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) has in many cases made clear that use of the ByLock messaging app does not constitute a criminal offense, detentions and arrests of individuals continue in Turkey for their alleged use of the ByLock application.
Şeyma Aslan is currently jailed in Antalya. Her infant daughter remains with her in custody, in accordance with Turkish regulations.
