Two of Turkey’s largest e-commerce platforms have removed T-shirts referencing the “White Toros,” a Renault car model that became a symbol of enforced disappearances and extrajudicial killings of Kurds in the 1990s, after protests from human rights groups and victims’ families, the Bianet news website reported.
The shirts, sold on Trendyol and Hepsiburada by a seller called Ötüken Online, featured images of a white Renault Toros and slogans such as “How do 17,000 people fit into one White Toros?” — a reference to thousands abducted, tortured or killed in extrajudicial operations in Turkey’s predominantly Kurdish southeast in the 1990s.
The sales sparked outrage from the Saturday Mothers, a group of activists seeking to learn the fate of loved ones who disappeared in police custody in the 1980s and ’90s, a period that saw a military coup and state of emergency in Turkey, as well as from the Ankara-based Human Rights Association (İHD). Both said the sale of the T-shirts simplified the crimes committed against the victims and demanded their immediate removal from the platforms.
The sales also attracted criticism from the users of these platforms. When a Trendyol user asked the seller how they could dare to sell such T-shirts, the vendor gave a nationalist response, saying that they found the courage to sell those T-shirts in their “Turkishness.”
By Monday the T-shirts had been pulled from the sites.
Meanwhile, the Van Bar Association in eastern Turkey filed a criminal complaint against Trendyol and the seller, claiming that the sale of the T-shirts amounted to “praising crime and criminals,” incitement to hatred and discrimination and provoking enmity among the public.
In its complaint the bar said marketing the “White Toros” symbol with slogans such as “For Toros lovers” amounted to praising crimes against humanity.
The bar said the sales were not only unethical but also were against the law as it called for an end to what it described as a culture of impunity surrounding actions that “wound the public conscience and re-traumatize victims.”
The Renault Toros was an ordinary family sedan produced in Turkey until 2000, but during the 1990s it became a grim symbol of state-linked abductions in the country’s mainly Kurdish southeast. Witnesses frequently reported victims of enforced disappearances being forced into white Toros cars, which were associated with the Gendarmerie Intelligence and Anti-Terrorist Units (JİTEM).
According to witness reports, many Kurdish businessmen, some drug dealers and Kurdish political opponents were abducted in these vehicles. The corpses of some of the disappeared people were later found, but most of them remain missing.
Human rights groups say more than 17,000 people were victims of such extrajudicial killings, most of which remain unresolved.
Trendyol, with Chinese Alibaba holding a controlling stake, is widely regarded as Turkey’s largest e-commerce platform. Hepsiburada, often called Turkey’s answer to Amazon, became the first Turkish company ever listed on the Nasdaq in 2021. Together, the two platforms control substantial share of the country’s rapidly expanding digital marketplace.