Kurds fleeing war say they find tor

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Subject: Kurds fleeing war say they find torture instead (fwd)

Kurds fleeing war say they find torture instead

By Aliza Marcus

    ADANA, Turkey, Feb 26 (Reuter) - The 14-year-old Kurdish
boy's voice was flat and unemotional as he recounted how Turkish
police strung him up by the arms, hosed him with ice-cold water
and jolted him with electric shocks.
    ``For four days, it was the same things, night, day...,''
said the boy, sitting in a concrete house in one of the muddy
Kurdish neighbourhoods on the outskirts of this pleasant
southern city near the Mediterranean.
    ``First they started torturing me, then they started asking
me questions, saying I was a terrorist,'' he said, wrapped up in
dirty white sweater and baggy trousers.
    ``But the real thing they were charging me with was being a
Kurd,'' he added defiantly. ``And I will never change.''
    Not so long ago, the decade-old fight between the Turkish
state and Kurdish insurgents seemed far off, confined to rugged
mountainous areas in Turkey's wild east.
    But in the past few years it has spilled over into Adana,
370 km (225 miles) southeast of the capital Ankara.
    Kurdish refugees fleeing dire poverty and bitter fighting
further east have poured into the city and its environs. Their
numbers are now swelling by 20,000 a month and Kurds now make up
30 percent of the province's 1.2 million population.
    And in these Kurdish backstreets, with ankle-deep mud and
bleak houses overflowing with children, tales of torture are
common, human rights activists and pro-Kurdish politicians say.
    Government officials say torture in Turkey is neither
widespread nor systematic.
    State minister for human rights Azimet Koyluoglu told
Reuters: ``I am not saying there is no torture in Turkey, but
problems happen all over the world and certainly there is no
systematic torture here.''
    But in a series of interviews arranged through the Adana
office of the pro-Kurdish People's Democracy Party (HADEP) --
whose officials say they are followed and threatened by security
forces -- more than a dozen Kurds told stories of abuse.
    Some say they were tortured in the southeast, where most of
the estimated 14,000 deaths in the conflict have occurred.
    But others were picked up in and around Adana. The refugee
influx has turned this fertile cotton-growing region into a
hotbed of Kurdish resentment and radicalism, residents said.
    One 30-year-old woman, interviewed at HADEP's headquarters,
said she was in bed for 10 days after police in January raided
her house, arrested her husband and beat her with the butt of
their rifles.
    ``I told them, our guilt is that we are Kurdish, but even if
you beat us we are still Kurdish. History will show they are
sending people on the road (to the guerrillas),'' she said.
    Last month, a man was killed when unknown gunmen raked a
cafe with machinegun fire. The month before, 16 people were
wounded by a bomb at the town's racecourse.
    Security forces have made at least three round-ups of
suspected Kurdish guerrillas in the area since December.
    Charges of torture in Turkey are not new. Human rights
experts say it has been a common interrogation method for years.
But as the war heats up in the southeast, torture appears to be
used more commonly, they say.
    To combat torture against Kurds in the southeast, the
independent Human Rights Foundation of Turkey this month opened
a rehabilitation centre -- its fourth in Turkey -- in Adana.
    The plans originally called for the centre to be in
Diyarbakir, the main city in the southeast, but doctors there
refused, saying they were afraid the police would retaliate
against them and their patients.
    ``Even here the risk of retaliation is high. Things here are
more anti-democratic because we are close to the southeast and
there are so many Kurdish migrants,'' said Tufan Kose, a doctor
affiliated with the Adana centre.
    Four members of HADEP have been killed by unknown gunmen in
the area in recent months.
    Human rights officials stress the rehabilitation centres are
no solution to the problem of torture in Turkey, but they say
they have not seen any sign that government officials are taking
the issue seriously.
    But for the Kurdish residents of Adana, torture is a very
real experience.
    ``They put me in the room with the landlord and then they
made him take off all his clothes and they started to hit him,''
said a nine-year-old Kurdish girl.
    ``I could hear my mother screaming in another room and I was
scared and started to cry,'' said the girl, suddenly running to
her father's side.
    Her father said: ``Every night she wakes up screaming now
and won't sleep alone. We tell her the police won't come again,
but really, they could come any time.''

Reuter N:Copyright 1995, Reuters News Service