“The Other Children” (Öteki Çocuklar), a new documentary shining a light on the suffering of Turkish children whose parents were impacted by a government crackdown on the faith-based Gülen movement following a coup attempt in 2016, premiered on YouTube on Sunday.
The documentary highlights the hardships faced by the children whose parents were imprisoned or forced into hiding to avoid persecution after a coup attempt on July 15, 2016. It recounts the lives of three children who died during this period and includes accounts from 10 others, illustrating the trauma caused by their parents’ imprisonment, financial hardship, social exclusion and long-term psychological distress.
President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has been targeting followers of the Gülen movement, inspired by the late Muslim cleric Fethullah Gülen, since corruption investigations in December 2013 implicated him as well as some members of his family 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 the abortive putsch in July of the same year that he accused Gülen of masterminding.
Produced by the US-based human rights group Advocates of Silenced Turkey (AST), the documentary reports that 86 children, including 21 infants, died during the crackdown, in some cases during attempts to flee Turkey with their parents or due to illness. It also notes that more than 3,000 have spent part of their childhood behind bars with their mothers, while thousands of others have fled the country with their families due to the crackdown.
“My father had to hide for three years,” one child recounts. “In the last year of his ordeal, my mother was imprisoned for five months.”
“I heard that my mother would stay in prison for 10 years. I was 9 at the time, and I kept wondering what life would be like when I was 19 and she was finally released,” another recalls.
The documentary also tells the stories of children who risked their lives crossing the Evros River into Greece with their families after their passports were revoked during the post-coup state of emergency.
“If we had stayed in Turkey, my father could have been caught,” one child recalls. “If he had been caught, they could have tortured him and after that he might have spent 10 years in prison. We ran away because we didn’t want such a thing to happen.”
Following the failed coup in 2016, the Turkish government declared a state of emergency that remained in effect until July 19, 2018. During the state of emergency, the Justice and Development Party (AKP) carried out a purge of state institutions under the pretext of an anti-coup fight by issuing a number of government decrees. Over 130,000 public servants, including 4,156 judges and prosecutors, as well as more than 24,000 members of the armed forces were summarily removed from their jobs for alleged membership in or relationships with “terrorist organizations” by emergency decree-laws subject to neither judicial nor parliamentary scrutiny.
Former public servants were not only fired from their jobs but were also prohibited from working again in the public sector or getting a passport to seek employment abroad.
According to the latest figures from the Justice Ministry, more than 126,000 people have been convicted for alleged links to the movement since 2016, with 11,085 still in prison. Legal proceedings are ongoing for over 24,000 individuals, while another 58,000 remain under active investigation nearly a decade later.
The documentary also features the stories of Betül Civelek, who died in a traffic accident while returning from a prison visit to see her father; Ahmet Burhan Ataç, who died of bone cancer at the age of 8; and Furkan Dizdar, who died of brain cancer at age 12. Neither Ataç nor Dizdar was able to receive treatment abroad because of government-imposed travel bans on their families.
The aftermath of Turkey’s post-coup purge has taken a considerable toll on children. The Stockholm Center for Freedom (SCF) previously documented these issues in its report, “The Forgotten Victims: Children of Turkey’s Post-Coup Purge,” which examines the persecution, social exclusion and psychological trauma endured by the children from families targeted in Turkey’s unprecedented post-coup purge.
