New York Times, 01.11.2000

Turkish Women Who See Death as a Way Out
By DOUGLAS FRANTZ

A 20-year-old woman who felt trapped in an arranged marriage and isolated from her family and village hanged herself, leaving behind a 5-month-old baby and mystified neighbors and relatives.

A mother of five, worn down by the age of 30 from caring for her husband and his first wife and cut off from the outside world, hanged herself in the family barn. Her 65-year- old husband later shrugged and told a psychologist, "It was her time to go to God."
These women were casualties of a cultural conflict in a region in transition and turmoil. Against the backdrop of 15 years of bloody civil war between the Turkish Army and the separatist Kurds, they were uprooted from their rural villages and brought to a city where even new buildings look tired and tattered.

Instead of a new start, thousands of women are finding despair, loneliness and, for a startling number, death, medical experts and sociologists said in interviews this week.

The suicide rate among women in southeastern Turkey is twice as high as the rest of the country and, in a reversal of what happens elsewhere in the world, women are twice as likely to kill themselves as men.

In two decades, Turkey has gone from a rural nation to an urban one. Millions of people packed their belongings onto trucks and buses in search of a better life in Istanbul and Izmit and Ankara.
For many the transition has been smooth, but others have lacked the skills and education to adapt to city life. To help them, the government started a program this year to lure people back to the villages, with little success so far.

Nowhere was the flight more pronounced than here in southeastern Turkey, the nation's breadbasket and its most conservative region. As villages were burned and towns were evacuated, hundreds of thousands of people sought refuge in cities like Batman, Diyarbakir and Sanliurfa. But jobs were scarce, decent housing unavailable and the old social rules
no longer applied.

"We speak very little about it in my region, but this forced migration created traumatic stresses," said Aytekin Sir, a psychiatrist at Dicle University in Diyarbakir, about 50 miles away. "The traditional social structure was broken, and there was nothing in its place."

The story of the 22-year-old woman who jumped to her death in July is all too common. She was still living at home, forbidden to find a job or go to school and trapped within unbending boundaries set by her father. The night before her death, her parents and another relative beat her for wearing a tight skirt, which her father took from her and burned.

"It was as if I were in a nightmare," she wrote in the last entry in her diary. "Three people were attacking me. I was screaming and crying - my face was swollen and my nose was bleeding. I was so angry, I was willing to kill myself."

A few hours later, she climbed to the roof of the seven-story building across from her family's apartment, walked to the edge and stepped off. The young woman's dream of an education and
choosing her own clothes would have been unheard of in her village. Nearly half the women in southeastern Turkey are illiterate,
largely because their families refused to send girls to school.

She also would have been unlikely to challenge her father because men rule with the authority of a feudal lord. The women raise the children and live in the shadows, usually behind a veil, and the female children work at home until they are married.

Confronted by alien cities, villagers tried to recreate those enclaves. They built cheap houses of mud and concrete along unpaved roads on land nobody wanted at the edges of the cities and continued to have large families.

Batman's population doubled to 250,000 in the last two decades and the growth was concentrated in small neighborhoods of 'gecekondu', a Turkish phrase for houses slapped together quickly on vacant land.

Though minutes from the city center, the neighborhoods feel like rural villages. Chickens strut across courtyards enclosed by sticks, and cows wander beside the road. Men squat in clusters of four or five, smoking and chatting solemnly at midday. Women and children gather separately outside the modest homes or in front of a makeshift storefront. Few of the children go to school, and every woman under 30 seems to be either pregnant or carrying an infant or both.

Insular as they are, these neighborhoods cannot keep out the world. Men who had always provided enough for their families as farmers or herdsmen cannot find work, and they bristle with humiliation. Women and children see a different life, one in which women work outside the home, and young people wear stylish clothes and hang out on street corners.

"They are bombarded with shiny lives," said Rahime Hacioglu, a psychologist who works with troubled women. "But there is a huge gap between their lives and those dreams."

Ms. Hacioglu discovered how wide that gap could be last week when she visited the family of the 30-year-old mother of five who hanged herself in the barn. No one wanted to talk about the suicide, since it was considered a stain on the husband's honor, but gradually the psychologist pulled some details from them.

The victim was 18 when she married a much older man who already had one wife, not an uncommon practice in the rural areas. She had had five children of her own, but cared for the entire family.
When the family was uprooted from their village and wound up in Batman, the woman seemed to lose any will to live. She was listless and quiet, and one day this summer, she went into the makeshift barn and hanged herself from a rafter.

The question the experts are struggling to answer is why so many women turn to suicide.

Dr. Sir first noticed a decade ago that many of his female patients had attempted suicide. Most were migrants, and research is clear that internal migration can cause an increase in suicide because it breaks important bonds between the individual and the social system.

Government officials are trying to respond. A team from Ankara issued a report last month citing low education levels for girls and the feudal family structure, as well as widespread polygamy and girls killing themselves to hide that they were not virgins.

Isa Parlak, the governor of Batman Province, said the overall suicide rate remains below that of Western countries, including the United States. But he also said the government was developing programs to assist women, including a crisis-intervention hot line and reading and writing classes in the gecekondu neighborhoods. "We want to integrate women into society," he said.

With poverty widespread, and unemployment often surpassing 50 percent, women are relegated to the bottom of the socio-economic ladder. Even the scarce resources that poor families can muster are invariably used to help the sons, leaving girls to watch brothers go off to school or jobs, while they stay home. Girls who go to school or have jobs face rigid rules and harsh punishment at home.

Aysegul Baykan, a sociologist at Koc University in Istanbul, said men are often better at dealing with the upheaval of forced migration. She said they have job opportunities, however slim, and enough contact with the society to help with the transition and retain the chance of a better future.

Gulcan Fidan came to Batman from a village near Adana at age 15 in an arranged marriage with a man she had never met. She was 20 when she hanged herself this summer.

Sitting on the steps of the house where Mrs. Fidan lived, her sister-in- law, Turkan Fidan, and other neighbors seemed mystified at what happened.

"She loved her 5-month-old baby so much," said Mrs. Fidan. "Her husband could not find a job, and they had very little money. She missed her home and her parents very much, but she loved her baby so much."

Little by little, a different picture emerged. Gulcan's parents had to send one of her brothers from the village to support their daughter's family by picking pistachio nuts and cotton in the fields. Gulcan was humiliated by her family's help and by her husband's failure to find a job.

Women in Turkey have more freedom than their counterparts in other Muslim countries, but in the southeast the culture remains more conservative and women are passive observers. Too often, experts say, they cannot control their lives, only their deaths.

DOUGLAS FRANTZ