Again hungerstrike in Turkish jail

[ozgurluk at xs4all.nl]

2 November,1998

Hunger strike starts in Erzurum Prison 

IHD warns: 'If no solution is found, hunger strikes may spread to
other prisons' 

Ankara - Turkish Daily News 

Fifty prisoners in a high-security prison in the eastern Turkish
province of Erzurum have gone on a hunger strike demanding better
prison conditions, a human rights official said Sunday.

Osman Baydemir of the Human Rights Association (IHD) told the Turkish
Daily News that if no solution is found, hunger strikes may spread to
other prisons.

"They are demanding that they be allowed to return to their wards,
that their injured friends be treated at proper hospitals, that legal
action be taken against wardens in relation to Thursdays incidents and
that no such attacks take place in the future," Baydemir said.

"We asked the prisoners not to take suicidal actions, such as burning
themselves, and prison authorities thanked us for this," Baydemir
added.  This year three prisoners, convicted of being PKK members,
died after setting themselves on fire.

A senior prison official, meanwhile, said the protest was not
justified and that it was being organized from outside. "The
prisoners' real aim is to stay on the country's agenda," prison
governor Numan Eroglu told the Anatolian news agency.

Twenty-six prisoners and an unspecified number of guards were injured
during fighting which broke out during a protest by inmates against
the Turkish State Security Courts (DGM), rights officials say.

Earlier in the year, Turkish political prisoners started boycotting
their hearings at the DGMs after a European Court of Human Rights
ruling that said the courts were not independent or unbiased.


-- 
Press Agency Ozgurluk
For justice, democracy and human rights in Turkey and Kurdistan!
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