White Toros (2020)
A Renault brand white car, known as “White Toros”, was used by JİTEM (Gendarmerie Intelligence and Counter-Terrorism) to kidnap and kill the people, has become the symbol of the '90s in the Kurdish collective memory.
Back in the 1990s, "Renault 12 Toros" was a model specifically designed for Turkish drivers by French Renault’s local representative. Millions of low-income people from Turkey’s Anatolia region were moved by its economic lure and functional features adept for the vast bare lands and farms of its geographical landscape. Since the 1990s, Toros remains a favourite car of the people.
For Turkey’s Kurds, Toros, during long 1990s, symbolized the embodiment of state fear, the sudden disappearance of thousands of people by members of dreadful gendarmerie intelligence, or JITEM, and a sea of lawlessness that dogged the Kurdish region amid a vicious war between separatist militants and the state. Whenever a white Toros appeared on the horizon in a remote corner of rural Southeast, a village or a town, it forebore a disaster for the targeted. A political figure, a village head, or a simple activist, accused by authorities of abetting the Kurdish insurgents, was driven by the men descended from White Toros, and drawn to an unknown future, mostly to their death, in an empty field or a mountainous area.
White Toros ingrained in the collective memory of Turkey’s Kurds as the materialization of sudden disappearance and death. It deeply rooted in people’s memory as the carrier of abductions by the very men of the law.