Torture in Turkey

[kurd-l at burn.ucsd.edu]

From: Arm The Spirit <ats at locust.cic.net>

Turkey Reels Amid Abuse Allegations

Adana, Turkey (Boston Globe - August 5, 1996) Her left arm
hanging painfully, the scar above her right eye still fresh, she
says she was tortured by the Turkish police.
     It is a terrifying story of being stripped, blindfolded and
beaten, hanged by her arms, singed with electrical wires,
threatened with rape by unseen tormentors. After three days, she
says, she was thrown into the street without being charged.
     Asking to be called by the pseudonym Dilan, this 23-year-old
reporter for a Kurdish rights magazine says doctors believe it
will be six months before her arm returns to normal. But while
she has sought therapy and is on medication, the antitorture
center that treated her is under attack by the state.
     The story of Dilan and the center that helped her provides a
window into the state of human rights in Turkey, a country that
not only straddles East and West but is caught in an uncertain
political transition from strict secularism to a greater role for
Islam in public affairs.
     As troubling as Turkey's human rights record is - the U.S.
State Department's most recent report cites "very serious
problems" - it is a far cry from that of its neighbors, Iran,
Iraq and Syria, where a torture treatment center like the one
here, if it ever found its way into existence, would be shut down
and everyone associated with it incarcerated.
     A Western diplomat in Ankara, the country's capital, said:
"Torture is something that can be stopped here. There are people
at the top of the government who want it to stop. But they have
got to get control of the apparatus." Dilan's circumstances tell
much about Turkey today - she is a Kurd in a state where Kurdish
identity is denied official status, and a reporter in a country
where 20 journalists have been killed by security forces in the
past eight years. While condemning the system, she feels
confident enough in it to talk to a foreign reporter.
     Yet it is the Treatment and Rehabilitation Center in this
southern port city that has drawn the attention of international
human rights organizations.
     An unassuming downtown office of gray-green carpeting and
comfortable furniture, the 18-month-old center, an oasis for
Turkey's victims of state torture, is snared in a legal Catch-22
by a government unhappy with its penchant for publicizing details
of abuse.
     The dispute has become a minor cause celebre, with the
American Medical Association and Amnesty International, among
others, coming to the center's defense.
     In legal terms, the charges against the center, one of four
operated by the Human Rights Foundation of Turkey, are that it
has no Health Ministry license and that its directors are guilty
of failing to report a crime - torture.
     In reality, human rights activists here and abroad say, the
case, which returns to court in early September, is a form of
harassment since the center can hardly be expected to provide
details of its clients to the police when it is the police who
have allegedly victimized those same clients.
     "There is something Kafkaesque about the whole case", said
Dr. Charles Clements, president of the Boston-based Physicians
for Human Rights, who was recently here.
     "People who have been tortured and tell doctors so are often
taken back and retortured", Clements said. "Physicians
interviewed fear for their own safety. And the provincial
governor we talked to said torture doesn't exist, so how can they
treat it? In other words, officials deny torture exists and then
charge people for not reporting it."
     A new report on torture of detainees in Turkey by Physicians
for Human Rights is scheduled to be released tomorrow.
     The AMA wrote in a letter to Turkish authorities that to
hand over names and files "would be in violation of medical
confidentiality and the duty of health professionals to protect
the well-being of their patients."
     "They are trying to oblige us to give the names of the
victims to the police", said Yavuz Onen, president of the Human
Rights Foundation, sitting in his Ankara office. "This is a
crucial point for us. Victims are often afraid to come to us at
first. We have to create conditions where they feel secure."
     That is no easy task. Adana is on the edge of a region under
emergency military rule where a virtual civil war between the
Workers Party of Kurdistan and the Turkish military has rendered
large sections of the country's southeast unliveable.
     In recent years 3,000 villages where the Workers Party of
Kurdistan guerrillas either has been active or could take refuge
have been burned to the ground by the military, creating huge
waves of internal refugees. Adana, whose population is officially
900,000, is said to have grown to 2.5 million inhabitants today
as a result.
     These include families such as that of Suleiman Tan, 60,
whose village of Tiri in Sirit province was burned down several
years ago after he and many of the other residents declined the
army's demand that they become "village guards", a paramilitary
force aimed at keeping out the Workers Party of Kurdistan, known
by its initials here as PKK.
     It may seem strange that Tan would refuse to play a role in
stopping the PKK, a group that has never hesitated to engage in
brutal terrorist acts even against its own people if they are
thought to be collaborators with the Turkish military.
     But significant portions of Turkey's 12 million Kurds - 20
percent of the population - resent that their language, culture
and identity have been squelched so fiercely by Turkey since the
state was founded on the remains of the Ottoman empire 73 years
ago by Mustafa Kemal Ataturk.
     And with few other possibilities for ethnic expression -
broadcasts in Kurdish are forbidden and pro-Kurdish political
groups are constantly harassed - there is widespread sympathy for
the Kurdish party among the impoverished southeastern population.
     "In my family there are at least 20 people who are in the
PKK. That is the reality of the Kurdish people today", said
Behcet Aslan, a 38-year-old produce wholesaler who was also
tortured by the police, forced to sign a confession but then
acquitted of activism by a court.
     Ataturk's view was that nationalism, supported by outside
powers, ate away at the Ottoman empire, and that if a country
were to survive here, it had to ban any identity other than a
Turkish one. That is essentially how most Turks still feel.
     The United States is unhappy about the lack of Kurdish
rights and gently says so to the country's leaders, but the
United States has more strategic concerns in Turkey.
     For years, Turkey, the second-largest army in NATO and
third-largest recipient of U.S. military aid, was a bulwark
against the neighboring Soviet Union. When the Soviet Union
collapsed at the start of this decade, Turkey still was seen as
having a key role in competing with Iran for the hearts and minds
of Central Asia, home to a variety of Turkish peoples.
     In addition, Turkey is more democratic than nearly all its
neighbors. And it permits the U.S.-led allies to run Operation
Provide Comfort from an air base next to Adana, which keeps Iraqi
President Saddam Hussein and his air force out of northern Iraq
and away from the Iraqi Kurds.
     Finally, Turkey has longstanding disputes with Syria, Iraq
and Iran, none of them great friends of Washington, and it has
recently upgraded its relations with Israel and Jordan, two key
U.S. allies in the region.
     But the political future has been thrown into question by
the rise of the Islamic-oriented Refah, or Welfare Party. Its
leader, Necmettin Erbakan, campaigned against Provide Comfort and
the pact with Israel and promised more attention to Kurds.
     Having squeaked into power through an alliance with the
pro-Western conservative Tansu Ciller, Erbakan is in no position
to carry out many of his campaign promises and he has begun to
back away from them.
     But no one knows if Refah peaked with its 21 percent of the
vote or has simply begun its climb. And since its arrival in
power marks such a radical departure from Ataturk's secular,
nationalist philosophy, it is unclear what other taboos, such as
an emphasis on ethnic identities, will be broken.

Turkish Doctors Forced To Deny Torture - U.S. Group

Ankara, Turkey (Reuter - August 6, 1996) Turkish security forces
regularly coerce doctors to conceal physical findings of torture
among detainees, a report released Tuesday by a U.S. medical
group said.
     "The Turkish government permits widespread and systematic
torture of detainees in Turkey and physicians are coerced to
become the unwilling accomplices of the government in this
practice", the Boston-based Physicians for Human Rights (PHR)
said in a report.
     It urged Turkey to prohibit incommunicado detention,
investigate allegations of torture, provide detainees with prompt
medical examinations and train security officials to respect
human rights.
     The two-year study, based on evidence from six independent
sources, included a survey of 60 Turkish doctors, analysis of
more than 150 official medical reports of detainees and
interviews with 39 torture survivors.
     The torture victims detailed beatings, sexual violations,
electric shock to the genitals, burns, deprivation of food and
water, spraying with pressure hoses, mock executions and threats
to friends and family.
     Among the victims were health professionals, lawyers,
journalists, shopkeepers, taxi drivers, teachers and students.
     The report highlighted the coercion of doctors in the mainly
Kurdish southeast of Turkey where the armed forces have been
fighting separatist rebels for the last 12 years.
     One doctor told of his examination of a young female
detainee whose signs of torture he refrained from reporting for
fear of reprisals.
     "I could not write the report. It was terrible. I felt that
if I did, I would either be exiled or be a victim of a mysterious
killing", he said.
     Security officials in the southeast have the power to exile
suspected Kurdish militants to other parts of the country.
     Another doctor said he was threatened for reporting torture.
     "Once, when I reported positive findings, one of the police
officials got very irritated. He threatened me and said the
police would not bring new cases to me", he said.
     A 17-year-old girl, identified as C.M., was arrested and
tortured in 1995 for hanging a poster, the report said. She was
stripped naked, blindfolded and suspended from a bar attached to
her arms.
     "It was extremely painful. A wire was attached to one of my
toes and another wire applied shocks to different parts of my
body: my breasts, feet, abdomen, and vagina", she said in an
interview with the human rights group.
     The doctors' survey revealed that 96 percent of respondents
believe torture is a problem in Turkey and 60 percent believe
that "nearly everyone who is detained is tortured."