Why prisoners hunger strike and arms....We took this disgusting mess back to the cells with our hands. While I was struggling to do this, the lieutenant was sitting on my back and beating me incessantly with his truncheon. The dogs were also at the scene, pulling and biting our ears, arms and legs, with every blow of the lieutenant. We were very vulnerto death able to the attacks of these trained dogs."
At Diyarbakir, a special effort has been put into humiliating the national feelings of the Kurdish prisoners, forcing
With the hunger strike in Istanbul's Metris and Sagmalcilar prisons nearing the end of its third month, after acknowledging that four prisoners, one after the other, had starved themselves to death, the Turkish dictatorship cut all contacts between the protesters and the outside world.
Since the last week in June, the authorities have been refusing to let either relatives or lawyers see the hunger strikers confined in the Haydarpasa military hospital in Istanbul. Gerry FOLEY
On June 24, Turkish officials announced the death of a fifth hunger striker, Hasan Telci. The communique was only ten lines long. It was carried in the censored press without comment or additional information.
"Hasan, the revolutionist, died under a cloak of silence, " Corinne Taor wrote from Ankara in the June 28 issue of the Paris daily Liberation. "The same is true of Abdullah Meral, Haydar Basbag and Fatih Oktulmus before him.
"As for Sermet Parken, whose death was announced by his lawyers, no further news has come out about his fate. This young militant is said to have attempted suicide after having broken his pledge to continue the hunger strike to death. Whatever the facts about this, his death has not been denied by the authories.
"Four or five deaths, may be it's six or ten, who knows?
"At any rate, the families and lawyers fear that there may be more dead, since a curtain of silence has descended over Haydarpasa hospital, where another ten hunger strikers are confined. It is more than a week since their parents announced that they had passed a 'point of no return."
"There is concern in particular for the young woman, Aysel Zehir, twenty years old. Her lawyer said that he had seen her reduced 'to the mental state of a threeyear-old child.' "
On July 3, one of the prisoners announced in court that the hunger strike had been ended on June 30. But the authorities have not confirmed this, although they reported the beginning of the protest and the deaths of four of the protesters.
It is, therefore, possible that the prisoner who reported the end of the hunger strike was tortured to make this statement in order to isolate the protesters.
The hunger strike to the death in the two Istanbul prisons is the third undertaken since the start of the year by political prisoners in Turkey. The first, in Diyarbakir prison in Turkish Kurdistan, was started on January 5 after Ismet Karak was beaten to death in front of his cell and in the sight of a number of his
Before the protest ended in midMarch, 11 prisoners died. Their bodies were turned over to their relatives in leadsealed coffins that could not be opened, under pain of prosecution, without an order from the military prosecutor.
The testimony of a prisoner at Diyarbakir released February 9 by Amnesty International in London indicates what impelled the eleven to make the ultimate protest. Amnesty noted that the details in this account were "consistent with other information received by the organisation, including those gained in personal interviews and medical examinations of former prisoners."
"We were taken to Diyarbakir Military Prison number 5....
"After completing some brief registration formalities, we were taken to the hall where the cells were situated. After a good beating up operation, they confiscated all our personal documents and burnt them. They also tore some of our suitcases and smashed the rest, hitting our heads with them until our heads went through them so that the suitcases were left hanging around our necks! All of the cells and half of the hall were filled with sewage waste. In some cells it was deeper than knee-high. The weather was quite cold. They dragged all of us into cells and ordered us to wait there. It was impossible to sit in the cells because of the faeces and urine on the floor....
"In the morning a group of soldiers led by a Second Lieutenant came to the cells for the roll call and then they led us out. We were stripped naked. They allowed us five minutes to tear our clothes to pieces....Those who could not finish this task in a few minutes were beaten up with a wooden cane. They put the torn clothes into the sewage water and trampled on them. Then they gave us those pieces back and ordered us to put them on again. We tried to put on whatever was left of our clothes and we lined up in rows of four. With the command of a lieutenant we lay down in the sewage water. The same lieutenant demanded that we should carry the sewage waste that had been carted from the cells to the yard back to the cells with our hands them to learn ultranationalistic Turkish marches and pronouncements by heart. It has been made into a veritable center for genocide. (The testimony of another Kurdish prisoner held at another prison reported a guard threatening: "If Ataturk [the founder of modern Turkey] were alive, he would slaughter you as he did the Armenians! And we'd get rid of you lot!")
"There was a sewage pipe passing through the yard. During each outdoor period, many of the prisoners were forced to eat and drink from this sewage waste. Many of us were forced to plunge our heads into it and stay in this position for long periods....Hundreds of prisoners had their bones broken and their fingernails pulled off. At present in Diyarbakir...it is a luxury to be beaten with a truncheon...Instead they use handles of shovels and pickaxes, especially made thick wooden sticks and chains for daily routine beatings. By the time I was released the number of military songs and marches to be memorized had been brought up to 52. All of them were full of hatred, vengeance, hostility and racism against other nations and people."
Thes are only vignettes of the daily routine in Diyarbakir. This prisoner also testified to atrocious systematic tortures. Like the H-Blocks
The Turkish military authorities tried to crush the most elementary human dignity of the Kurdish prisoners, as their British counterparts sought to do with the Irish prisoners in the H-Blocks of
"In the court buildings, the prisoners were put into cells, and the beatings continued until one was taken out to the Court. Those who had stomach or kidney illnesses felt the need to go to the toilet soon, but whatever their condition, prisoners were never taken to the toilet. The ones who could not control their bladder and wet their pants were first to be beaten up, and then were made to lick the urine on the floor."
The prisoner went on to say, "The very words Kurd and Kurdistan made them [the guards] mad. If anyone tried to speak in the Court about the prac tices in prisons...his life was in serious danger. Many of such prisoners were killed, and then presented as having committed suicide, and many had no alternative but to go on hunger strike. Of these hunger strikers, a few were 'con-
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