I would have been arrested if I stayed in Turkey – so I fled to the UK

Excerpt

When I arrived in the UK in 2017, I hoped to return to Turkey sooner or later.

But I was in trouble with the Turkish Government for reporting and sharing news on social media.

As a journalist, flying to the UK was a desperate decision to avoid arrest, prosecution, war and all the nightmares temporarily.

Shortly after arriving here, I woke up one day to the news in the media that my flat in Istanbul was raided by the police.

It was a hard day for me to accept that I had no choice but to claim asylum.

Growing up in Turkey as a Kurdish girl was very difficult.

Girls in my village did not have a proper childhood. Instead, they had to struggle for their rights. You have to fight for everything, and it becomes your default strategy to survive.

Being the curious child that I was, I used to sit in the garden and think about life – the ongoing conflicts we witnessed (including schools being shut down and curfews enforced), gender inequality, chaos – and tried to imagine a normal life beyond the borders of my village.

In my head, I was trying to make sense of why these things happened to us. Why every day we were surrounded with sad news – such as people going missing, conflicts, and tensions everywhere.

Then I began to see the differences and understood the rules that discriminated against me. When I turned seven, I was excited to go to school like other children. It broke my heart to learn that I could not go because of the conflict.

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Sources

• https://twitter.com/zozanyasar