Turkish prisoners' hunger strike exposes inhuman repression THE REAPPLICATION of the "August 1 circular", recently provoked a new wave of hunger strikes in Turkish prisons. Two of the participants, Mehmet Yalçinkaya and Hüseyin Hüsnü, died on the 35th day of their protest, in suspicious circumstances. General Evren, the main leader of the coup d'état of September 12, 1980, is supposed to go into retirement after the presidential elections scheduled for November. But these actions in the prisons show that nine years after the coup, democracy Is still an issue in Turkey.
In August, an International Viewpoint correspondent in Ankara met Nevzat Helvaci, chair of the Human Rights League, which has been in the forefront of solidarity with the hunger strikers and which Is one of the few associations where left militants can meet and work together.
under inhuman conditions. Two strikers, Mehmet Yalçinkaya and Hüseyin Hüsnü, die, officially because of "dehydration." The autopsy shows traces of blows on their bodies. Several other prisoners have broken ribs. The resistance in the prisons widens.
• August 6. The minister of justice announces that "the August 1 circular will be modified."
• August 7. After a meeting with SHP deputies, the minister announces that 58 out of the prisoners' 61 demands will be accepted.
• August 11. Four hunger strikers are in a coma; about 50 are hospitalized.
• Mid-August. The new warden of Aydin prison takes office. The city is practically in a state of siege. Parents of prisoners (including an 86-year-old woman) and IHD members are beaten up and arrested.
• August 16. After 50 days, 156 prisoners are still continuing the strike. Seventy-six of them are paralyzed.
• August 17. The deputy general secretary of the SHP talks to the prisoners and convinces them to stop their action. The government declares that it made no conces24 sions to the strikers. *
A T A TIME when the Özal government is taking more and more Initiatives to bulld up a democratic façade, what is the human rights' situation nine years after the coup d'etat of September 12, 1980?
We have a proverb that says, "You don't need a guide to reach a village that you can see from far away." I don't think that anyone is fooled about the real situation in Turkey today.
The problems can be grouped under two headings. First of all, there are all the undemocratic restrictions included in the constitution fabricated by the military and the laws that go along with it. Secondly, there are the standard practices that violate even the existing legislation. For example, torture is still commonly used as a method of interrogation, which the constitution strictly forbids; moreover, Turkey has signed the international conventions banning torture. Another example is the conditions of life in the prisons. They are in total contradiction with basic international norms, and have been made even worse by the adoption of the August 1 circular.
The government and the prison administration are directly responsible for the deaths of two hunger strikers in Aydin. When the protest was in its 35th day, they decided to transfer 259 inmates to another prison. The prisoners were packed into two closed prison vehicles without ventilation, at 34 degrees centigrade in the shade and handcuffed. They had to travel for 17 hours in those conditions! They were not even given water.
As if this were not enough, according to eye-witnesses, on arrival the prisoners were beaten with rifle butts and clubs. This led to the deaths of two hunger strikers. At present, two other prisoners are on the verge of death, 34 are in the infirmary, and three have been hospitalized. There can be no legal justification for this.
The government's reaction has been totally political and inhumane. It calls the prisoners "murders and terrorists," implicitly justifying the treatment reserved for them. The actions in the prison have succeeded in exposing the regime's mentality. It is this mentality that we have to condemn. • The Özal government, although it is politically very much weakened, has chosen once again to alienate public opinion, as on May 1.2 To what do you attribute this stubbornness?
I think that partly what is involved is an attempt to justify a continuation of the 1. The August 1, 1988, circular from Minister of Justice Topaç reintroduced the ultra-repressive methods of the military period into the prisons. Its application touched off a wave of hunger strikes in November 1988, forcing the govemment to retreat. See /V153, December 12, 1988. 2. On May 1, 1989, in the midst of social agitation and at the time of a strike wave in the public sector, the Özal govemment dug its heels in and refused to authorize celebration of May Day by the workers' movement, although public opinion and even some sections of the bourgeoisie and the right opposition were favorable. An 18-year-old worker was killed by the police during an illegal demonstration that took place despite the goverment's ban. See /V 166.
International Viewpoint #170 • October 2, 1989
repressive measures dating from the military period by constantly rattling the bones of the "terrorist threat." Also involved is a tactic to divert attention from the economic and social problems. In fact, Ozal is pursuing the same tactic by constantly feeding speculation and rumor that he may run for the presidency of the republic. • What do you think the reason is for the weak reaction to the deaths in the prisons?
We cannot say by any means that the population was indifferent. But their means of expressing themselves are limited by legal restrictions. For example, a small left party tried to organize a protest rally.4 The prefecture did not authorize it. Several persons have been arrested in Izmir and Ankara in the course of various actions.
However, the problem is not just repression. There is also a political dimension. The main opposition parties are not putting these questions forward in their daily propaganda, and are doing nothing to open up a space for popular protest. Mass actions can only be held today with the support and active involvement of these parties. But they are not doing anything. • Erdal Inönü, chair of the SHP, has even condemned the hunger strikes, calling them "acts of violence"!
That's his view. He could also consider them as political acts and not approve of them. But whatever the subjective motivations of the hunger strikers, the state cannot have the right to let people die in the prisons, and still less to kill them! We have a right to expect a reaction at least on that level. • The press, even the progressive press, gives little space to the hunger strikes. Why?
Indeed. Two persons had to die for the big dailies to publish articles on the situation in the prisons or on a hunger strike that lasted more than a month! Even after two deaths, some organs of the press persist in not finding the news worthy of interest. This is also an indication of the hold over the press of the government and some trusts. • Can you explain the context in which the IHD was founded?
The IHD was founded in July 1986. At first, the Ministry of the Interior did not want to register us as a legal association, and did everything to drag out the formalities. Today, we are organized in 32 departments [out of 71] and we have nearly 10,000 members.
Our first activity was to draw up a list of persons who have died and were tortured in prison, because this reached grave proportions with the coup. This work led to the publication of a detailed report. According to it, 149 persons died under
TURKEY
HICHISEY SOYLEMITE CECIM AVUMATIME GORUBMEK ISTIYO RURA "I'm not seying ythingentil I
URDAYIA MARDEŞIL
-. -•a cari. "Here I am!" torture. Today, the number has risen to 171. But in fact, this figure is far below the real one, because we only included cases that were fully proved. Many other cases were pointed out to us, for which we did not have enough "proper" evidence.
A second job we did was to carry out an enquiry into the conditions of detention and life in the prisons, comparing them with the norms accepted by the United Nations. In a report that we published subsequently we established irrefutably that the conditions of life in the prisons in Turkey are well below those norms.
In 1987, we organized a campaign against the death penalty and for a general amnesty. In a short time, we gathered about 150,000 signatures, which is a record for Turkey. Also in 1987, we held a congress on human rights, which was also a first.
In 1988, on the fortieth anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, we organized a campaign on three themes — first, the right to a job and an improvement in working conditions; secondly, freedom to think and organize; and inally the problems of political exiles, their rights to citizenship and to return to the country with acceptable assurance of security.
A sub-commission also studied the case of workers (essentially functionaries, university or secondary school teachers) who were fired by the military authorities on the basis of the notorious Article 1,402 of the martial-law code. At the end of the year, we held the second human-rights congress.
This year, while continuing the previous campaigns, we have also devoted ourselves to cultural rights, the problem of censorship, and the issue of repression of cultural and intellectual activities. • Violations of human rights in Turkey did not start under the military regime. Why was there so much delay in founding an organization such as the HD?
Our organization represents the third attempt to found a human-rights league in Turkey. The two preceding ones in 1946 and 1962 lasted only a few months before being banned. For the moment, we are holding up better than our predecessors!
Clearly, undemocratic repression has been almost constant. But the degree it reached in particular periods, as under the military regime, was of quite another dimension. For example, between 1980 and 1986, more than 650,000 persons were arrested, and most of them tortured. In such a country and in such a period, the need for setting up a human-rights league is more than evident. It is true that this should have been done much earlier, but this delay can be explained easily by the repression itself, which blocked the functioning of any sort of association. We had to wait for the lifting of martial law. • One of the bad traditions of the left in Turkey is the extreme sectarianism of the political groups, their inability to act together. How have you overcome this problem in the HD?
In the past the various political currents did not even to talk to each other. Since the coup, some progress has been made. However, we cannot yet say that the lessons of these past errors have been properly drawn. Our philosophy in founding the ID was to say that, while previously we had always stressed our differences, henceforward we would try to base ourselves on what we agreed about, and ask ourselves whether or not there were things we had to do in common.
For the moment, we have not had serious problems in this respect. On the con3. Aside from a permanent vigil in front of the Aydin prison by the ID and the mothers of prisoners, there have only been some symbolic protest actions - an illegal demonstration of 300 persons in Istanbul called by the far left group Dev-Sol (Revolutionary Left), actions by feminist groups and a symbolic hunger strike by well-known left intellectuals. 4. This refers to the Socialist Party (SP), heir of the Turkish Workers'and Farmers' Party (TIKP), of Maoist origin. It is at present the only legal formation that claims to be socialist. 5. The main parliamentary opposition formations are the Social Democratic People's Party (SHP, recently accepted as a member of the Socialist International), which got 28% of the vote in the March 26, 1989, municipal elections; and the Party of the Just Way (DYP, right-wing), which got 26% in those elections. See TV, 166, June 26, 1989. 6. Hundreds of political exiles have been stripped of 25 their Turkish nationality by the govemment.
TURKEY • AROUND THE WORLD trary, currents that have had difficulty in coming together in other circumstances manage to coexist within the ID.
• Has the IHD also considered the question of the repression against
AROUND
THE the Kurdish people, to the extent of course that the Turkish laws permit course that the Turkish laws permit this?
For us, human rights apply to everyone, regardless of their ethnic group, language, religion, convictions, sex and so on. In eastern and southeastern Anatolia, grave infractions of human rights are taking place. Among others, there is the problem of the right to speak your mother language. The Kurdish language has been banned, and people have been imprisoned for speaking it. Kurdish prisoners have found themselves forbidden to speak any other language than Turkish with their visitors.
I think, however, that these problems will soon be overcome. Here, of course, I am only concerned with the humanitarian aspect of the question. Political demands are not our province. We reject any discrimination and mistreatment of anyone, regardless of their views or political demands. • Do you have links with other humanitarian organizations abroad?
We are not affiliated to any international organization. Any affiliation to an international body requires prior authorization from the government. Nonetheless, we are in contact with Amnesty International, the World Human Rights Federation and so on. Clearly, the defense of human rights requires broad international solidarity, and we of course have no intention of confining our activity within national or regional bounds. • The repression in Turkey has had little impact in West Europe, and it would be hard to say that international solidarity is adequate. How do you explain this?
European public opinion is not really aware of the problems in Turkey. It has also to be recognized that the repression in Latin America and South Africa is still worse than in Turkey, and that the people's organizations in those countries have managed to get their message across better. Clearly, in Turkey we have problems of communication.
I also think that the economic and political ties that the European governments have with the Turkish regime play a negative role, in the sense that these governments have no interest in getting involved in quarrels with their NATO ally and economic partner.
It is therefore important that humanitarian, democratic, political and trade-union organizations become more aware of the problems of human rights in Turkey 26 menss.* and start to put pressure on their govern-