Our comrade Birsen Hosver was born in 1970 in Istanbul. Her family came from Pazar, in Rize Province (on Turkey’s eastern Black Sea coast). She was a Laz, and Laz was her native language (the Laz are a distinct ethnic group in Turkey’s eastern Black Sea region, and their language is related to Georgian).

She went to elementary and high school in Kartal (Istanbul, on the Anatolian side of the city), then she studied in Ankara University’s faculty of languages, history and geography. She had already taken part in the struggles and organisations of young people. During this struggle she was detained and spent months in jail. After she was released she devoted herself completely to the struggle. She left university in 1995. In the youth organisation she took part in the struggles of the different strata of the people, and in all these areas of the struggle she encountered torture and detention. After she decided to become a people’s liberation fighter, she became a guerrilla in 1997. She joined an armed propaganda unit of the rural guerrillas in Dersim (a Kurdish area officially called Tunceli). She was arrested on February 5, 1999, eighteen months after joining the guerrillas. Her captivity opposing the torturers and mass murderers was a new phase of the struggle. Everything else is explained in the letter she wrote when she volunteered for the Death Fast.:

“On the days around December 19 the days passed differently for me. I saw myself and the situation more clearly. We are part of a mighty and glorious resistance. Nobody would have believed it, but we are achieving it. All that gives me great strength. Above all, our martyrs outside the prisons are beyond powers of description, At this time there is no alternative to resistance. We are dying, one after the other. I am very sad for them. They sacrifice themselves and there are very many of them. When the very young as well as old men and women can be so selfless and die, there is not much more to discuss. I should take part in this resistance. Many of them are so young, they are in the prime of their life. Perhaps in other countries they would be seen as children, but they are so mature that they can take on this responsibility. I can imagine what outstanding people they are and it makes me very unhappy… The resistance had entered a quite different phase, there is great determination. Right up to the last one. That shows very great strength. I have unshakeable faith that we will win. Both in victory and in revolution. In short: human beings should defend their honour and dignity. I am ready, and I ought to do it.”

And like hundreds of comrades, when her turn came, she lay down to die on September 26, 2001 as a resistance fighter in the 7th Death Fast Team. While she was in Malatya Prison she was seized and put in with ordinary (non-political) prisoners in an effort to break her resistance, and finally she was placed in total isolation. But they could not break her. On August 22, in Ankara Numune Hospital, she became immortal as one of the heroines of the great resistance.