In a striking and emotionally charged interview published by TR724 staff writer Sevinc Ozarslan on May 26, 2025, educator, human rights advocate and wife of academic Prof. Dr. İbrahim Öztürk, revealed a deeply personal story of trauma, persecution, and endurance. Her testimony paints a haunting portrait of how authoritarian regimes in Turkey have repeatedly crushed individual freedoms and silenced dissent—not just for political activists, but for entire families and generations.
“I have never lived a day without a label on my back,” she states with clarity and sorrow. At 56 years old, Zeynep Öztürk’s life has been defined by state violence, suspicion, and social exclusion—first as the daughter and sister of leftist Kurds during the 1980 military coup, then as a devout Muslim woman during the headscarf bans of the 1990s, and finally as the wife of a prominent critic of the Erdoğan regime during the post-2016 purges.
Her story begins in the early 1980s in Elazığ, where her family became one of thousands swept up in the aftermath of Turkey’s military coup. At just 16 years old, Zeynep experienced her first arrest when Turkish security forces raided her family home. The pretext? Her older brother was wanted for leftist political activities. In retaliation, the state punished the entire household.
“They rounded us all up—my mother, my siblings, even my 13-year-old brother. I remember the fear, the humiliation, the sound of boots on our doorstep,” she recalls. One brother was sent to Diyarbakır Prison, notorious for its brutal torture practices, and was held there for over a month. “Forty days,” she says. “They tortured him for forty days.” Another was arrested and interrogated as a child. Her school diary—filled with adolescent musings—was seized and used as evidence during an interrogation.
But what haunted her most from that period was the image of her mother being dragged across the floor, clutching her son to shield him from the police. “That moment never leaves you,” she said. “That’s when I learned that in this country, entire families can be punished for the ideas of a single person.”
Although the 1980s ended, persecution did not. Zeynep pursued her education and career, eventually becoming an educator herself. Yet again, politics caught up with her. During the aftermath of the February 28, 1997 post-modern coup—a military intervention that targeted religious conservatives and sought to purge public life of Islamic influence—Öztürk was dismissed from her job at a private tutoring center. “We weren’t even safe in civil society,” she notes. “Even private schools became targets.”
By 2016, her husband, Prof. Dr. İbrahim Öztürk—a respected academic and critic of the AKP government—had already drawn the attention of authorities. When the failed coup attempt of July 15, 2016, took place, life changed dramatically for Zeynep and her family once again. Her husband fled the country amid the ensuing crackdown on academics, journalists, and dissenters. Zeynep and their children remained behind and quickly became targets of institutional harassment.
Her home was raided by police. She was denied a passport. Their personal library, including the Qur’an and the Risale-i Nur Collection (a set of Islamic commentaries written by Said Nursi), was considered incriminating. Fearing confiscation or criminal charges, she had to dispose of these books quietly and discreetly. “We threw them away in the dead of night, hidden in trash bags,” she explains. “Even our children’s storybooks—anything that could be linked to religious or Gülen-affiliated communities—had to go. We were being watched.”
For years, Öztürk lived in isolation. Friends disappeared. Relatives grew distant. “I felt abandoned not just by society, but even by those who shared my pain,” she said. Being Kurdish and Alevi, she expected solidarity from others who had also suffered under authoritarian policies. But she was met with silence or, worse, subtle condemnation. “Even those from my own community distanced themselves. They couldn’t understand how I, too, could be both a victim and a devout Muslim. They expected a simple narrative. I didn’t fit into it.”
This, she insists, is a central problem in the way Turkish society processes state violence: there is a hierarchy of victims, and certain traumas are considered more legitimate than others. “I’ve been both ‘too Kurdish’ and ‘too religious’ depending on who was judging me,” she said. “But the pain? It was always the same.”
Her testimony serves as a poignant reminder of how decades of authoritarianism in Turkey have weaponized ideology, ethnicity, and belief to divide citizens and deny them justice. From military juntas to civilian autocrats, regimes have used the machinery of the state to surveil, harass, and destroy lives—especially those who fall outside the accepted molds.
And for women like Öztürk, the suffering is compounded by invisibility. She is not a politician or an activist with a formal platform. Her resistance has taken the shape of survival: raising children under threat, keeping a family together in exile, protecting her faith and dignity despite the state’s attempts to strip them away.
As she closes the interview, Zeynep Öztürk offers a sentence that echoes with pain and pride:
“I just want people to know. I want them to remember. And I want them to never ask again, ‘What did you go through?’ I have lived it.”
