Families of Turkey mining disaster victims in quest for justice

Almost a year after the disaster that killed her husband and 300 other miners at the Soma mine in western Turkey, Gamze Degirmen can finally see the managers of the company that ran the mine on trial.

The widowed mother-of-two has waited a long time for this encounter which she hopes will bring both truth and justice.

"I want to look them in the eyes and I want to see that they are sorry. That would really do me good," she said.

"Given what they have done they need to be punished and they should never be allowed out," she told AFP in the town of Savastepe where many of the miners lived.

Forty-five people, including eight former top managers from the Soma Komur group that ran the mine, go on trial Monday over the disaster in the nearby town of Akhisar in western Turkey.

They are accused of a long series of faults and negligence which led to the tragedy, the worst industrial accident in Turkey's history.

Prosecutors have requested that the eight former managers be given 25 year sentences on murder charges for each of the 301 miners killed.

Gamze Degirmen's life was shattered on May 13, 2014. That morning her husband Ismail descended, as he did almost every day, into the deep shafts of the Soma mine. He never returned alive.

In the early afternoon, a fire raced through the shaft he was working in and then extended to other areas. Within minutes, 301 miners died, burned or suffocated by inhaling fatal amounts of carbon monoxide.

Alerted by phone calls from friends, Gamze Degirmen rushed to the scene and found the body of her husband, 29, on a stretcher.

"He was all cold. To bring him out, they had placed a gas mask on his face to make it look like he was still alive," she said.

"It was horrible."

The 24-year-old has two children and no major source of income. But she refused to give into grief. A few days after the disaster, she was the very first to register a legal complaint against the owners of the mine, Soma Komur.

- 'Someone will die' -

Even before he died, Ismail Degirmen had complained of deplorable working conditions and pressure imposed by the management, for a salary of just 1,000 lira ($380) a month.

"He had said time after time that it was very hot in the mine and he had marks on his arms as if he had been burned with cigarettes," she said.

"He told me: 'We are being told to produce more but someone is going to die'."

Her lawyer, Unal Demirtas, said an accident of this kind was completely incompatible with Turkey's aspirations to be a modern European country.

"This is an accident from another era," said the lawyer. "We are in the age of the Internet and we are making people work like slaves."

"For a country which wants to join the European Union is unacceptable. This should never have been allowed to happen. Never."

After the disaster, Gamze Degirmen had to leave her apartment and return to the small house of her parents. She lives now on meagre handouts from the state.

Savastepe paid a heavy price for the accident. Fifty-three of its residents died at Soma and those who survived have largely not returned to work.

"They just have their unemployment benefit to live on, it is not easy," said Zeki Ozer, president of the miners association set up to help the victims.

"We hope that this trial will encourage employers to improve security for workers and people will find jobs again."

This however is not Gamze Degirmen's primary concern, although she knows she could receive substantial compensation as a result of the trial.

"Our life has been shattered but it not the compensation for the blood that had been spilt that will count.

"The guilty need to be punished for their mistakes. I am doing this trial for my children and we are going to win," she said.