Italian pacifist Pippa Bacca, who wanted to travel by hitchhiking from Italy dressed as a bride together with her friend Silvia Moro to go to Tel Aviv passing the Balkans and Turkey, was found murdered and raped on April 11 near Tavsanli village of Gebze province, Kocaeli, Turkey.
The murder of Pippa Bacca was only one of the sexual assaults and rapes happening every day in Turkey and Northern Kurdistan. In a country, where rape is used by the state against revolutionary, communist and Kurdish patriot women as a means of torture, where dozens of torture cases finish with light penalties, that do not deter at all and with the claim that the woman incited the man, or even with acquittal, or where, if the rapist agrees on marrying the woman he raped, is no longer charged, the case of Pippa Bacca is neither an exemption nor the product of the tank driver's personal perversity, such as claimed by the Turkish bourgeois media. The case of Pippa Bacca is only one of those offences committed by the Turkish bourgeois state against women. The Turkish bourgeois press, that showed the rape of Pippa Bacca as an individual case and therefore, tried to relieve the state, did apparently not care at all about the case of the woman A.G.C. from Gebze, who was raped by the police that raided her house with the claim that she was wanted.
The case of Pippa Bacca has become the subject of the rage of the women organisations struggling against sexual assault and rape of the last 15 years. The Association of Labourer Women ( EKD ) of Ankara organised an action on April 14 blocking the traffic. The women marched silently wearing bloody wedding dresses. The reason for the police threatening the women of EKD during their action at Kartal, Istanbul, with the words "If you shout slogans calling the police rapist, then we will attack you" is a result of the fear that the communist women created in their struggle against torture under arrest. In Izmir, women of the union Emekli-Sen organised a press statement to protest against the case of Pippa Bacca. Women in Istanbul, Gebze and Bursa went on the streets. Once more the women demanded the abolition of the laws that defend sexual assault and rape.