Much more than a news item, this is a sordid and tragic story that has taken on the scale of a real national affair. Since the disappearance, on August 21, of little Narin Güran, 8 years old, and the discovery nineteen days later of her lifeless body, wrapped in a plastic bag submerged in the river of her village, Turkey seems seized by vertigo. Not a week goes by without a new press release from the investigators, not a day without a development, not a newspaper or a news program without the responsibility of one or more culprits being announced or denounced.
Police launched a search as soon as they received the alert that the little girl had gone missing in her village of Tavsantepe, a 15-minute drive south of Diyarbakir, the regional capital of the Kurdish-majority southeastern Anatolia region. Narin had last been seen in the afternoon on her way home after attending a Koranic studies class.
Very quickly, her smiling face spreads on social networks. Public anger is expressed in the streets of large cities where several demonstrations take place.
The debate over missing children takes a political turn when opposition dailies recall that the village of Tavsantepe has traditionally supported the Hüda Par, the Kurdish Islamic party that traces its roots to Turkey's Hezbollah (named in contrast to Lebanon's Hezbollah, which was founded around the same time in 1984), a religious extremist group implicated in political assassinations in the 1990s and 2000s, when several of its cells were reportedly active in Tavsantepe. An ally of the governing coalition since 2023, Hüda Par is now best known for its violent diatribes against women's rights and gender equality.
New controversies
In the moments following the discovery of Narin's body, two statements have sparked new controversy in quick succession. Speaking at the Diyarbakir Institute of Forensic Medicine after visiting the victim's relatives, Vedat Turgut, a Hüda Par candidate in one of the city's districts in the March municipal elections, made an accusatory statement: “This is not our culture, this is the culture of Europe, America and Israel.”
On Sözcü TV, Galip Ensarioglu, a local MP for the AKP, the ruling party of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, explained that he had “a forty-year friendship with the family” and that, “Sometimes there are things we don't know, and sometimes we know but we shouldn't say it.” These remarks, apart from their intriguing side, raised fears that the authorities were trying to cover up the affair. The elected official later explained that he had not been understood.
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Source: Lemonde
