Özgecan is a form of resistance!

It was 2008. I was preparing a series of articles for Aktüel magazine, touring the Çay and Çilek neighborhoods where Kurds, who had been forced to migrate from Mardin, Van, and Hakkari to Mersin after their villages were emptied due to forced displacement practices, were living.

In one of the Çay and Çilek neighborhoods, a polyphonic choir had been established through the initiative of Nevit Kodallı, a composer and orchestra conductor from Mersin who contributed countless works to the Turkish opera. The choir, consisting mostly of talented children and young people from Kurdish families, had achieved great success in a short time despite having limited resources. The choir's conductor, the idealistic musician Engin Aktuğ, was bringing young people from poor neighborhoods—who had beautiful vocal timbres and could sing by ear without knowing musical notation—into the world of music. He was training altos, basses, sopranos, and tenors. I was very impressed.

I met a father and his two daughters who sang in that choir.

One of the daughters was 13, the other 17.

The younger girl was not considered for the choir because she had a "child's voice." The father and the older daughter's vocal timbres were liked, and they were accepted into the choir. However, every week, the younger girl would also come to watch her father and sister at rehearsals.

The older daughter had only one dream: to become a successful soprano! Indeed, a year later, she won a scholarship to the Adana Çukurova University State Conservatory.

As for the younger girl, she never missed a single concert of the choir where her sister and father sang. The father and his daughters, who lived in a modest house on the "Bahçe Neighborhood" side of the Kiremithane neighborhood, were loved by everyone. The father always told his two daughters this sentence:

"A person must have a goal in the outside world and a magnificent dream in their inner world."

The younger girl, like her sister, kept her father's word. She was very successful at school. Her biggest dream was to become Turkey's most famous psychologist.

That little girl's name was Özgecan Aslan!

**

Unfortunately, Özgecan Aslan's life was not long enough to become Turkey's best psychologist, but she became a hero who managed to make hundreds of thousands of people beat as one heart and moved women to act with courage to fight together...

Özgecan Aslan is a milestone.

It is the place where words end and action begins.

Özgecan Aslan is the complete erasure of the definitions of provocation and mitigating factors from dictionaries. It is the determination of judges to apply aggravated life sentences, not sentence reductions, to those who kill women!

Özgecan Aslan is the necessity for mothers to raise their daughters as equals to their sons, without bestowing titles like "my prince, my pasha" upon their sons.

It is the realization for fathers to show their love to their sons.

It is for the elected officials to stop the nonsense that "Women are God's trust to men."

Everything starts with loving equally. You will love your daughter and your son equally. You will look after them equally...

Today is the time to be a person like Özgecan's father, Mehmet Aslan—wise, dignified, someone who puts effort into their children and can say "I love you" to them every day.

***

Since Özgecan, despite all kinds of pressure and violence, women have been in the squares. We were in the squares yesterday, and we will be in the squares tomorrow. Because taking to the squares to defend women's right to life is not a crime.

Since the first day of 2023, men in Turkey have killed 288 women. The deaths of at least 228 women were reported as suspicious in the news. Those who withdrew overnight from the Istanbul Convention—an international treaty binding on the state that defines violence against women as a human rights violation and a form of discrimination—published a circular yesterday: "Circular on Combating Violence Against Women!". It supposedly envisions taking measures with a zero-tolerance approach to violence.

If you acknowledge the existence of violence, why did you withdraw from the Istanbul Convention?

Özgecan said goodbye to life by resisting. She sowed the seeds of that resistance in the heart of every person with a conscience before she left.

We will not get used to this order.

We will not be silent until there is not a single woman left who is subjected to violence.

And we will definitely win.

Because Özgecan is a form of resistance!