Imagini ale paginilor
PDF
ePub

PREPARED STAtement of Jeri LABER, EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR, HELSINKI WATCH

My name is Jeri Laber. I am Executive Director of the U.S. Helsinki Watch Committee, a nongovernmental

organization that monitors compliance with the human rights provisions of the 1975 Helsinki accords. Helsinki Watch is

concerned with human rights compliance in each of the thirty-five Helsinki signatory countries and has devoted special attention to those Helsinki countries in which severe and systematic violations occur countries such as the USSR, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Romania, Yugoslavia and Turkey.

This is the second time that I have been invited to speak before this committee about human rights problems in Turkey. In April 1983, I testified about a number of human rights abuses in Turkey including torture, the subject of today's hearing. I pointed out then that torture was being practiced in Turkey on a wide scale and in forms that are "barbaric, primitive and horrendous."

[ocr errors]
[ocr errors]

the father

-

In

Since last April's hearing, I have had the opportunity to investigate allegations of torture in Turkey first-hand. September 1983, I was a member of a Helsinki Watch fact-finding mission that spent a week in Turkey and interviewed some 60 individuals representing a cross-section of Turkish society. In the course of that mission, I also interviewed some victims of torture and spent several heartbreaking hours with members of two families whose children had virtually disappeared within the prison system. The father of a boy who had been arrested in 1980, at the age of seventeen, and is still in prison awaiting trial told me that when he went to the prison to inquire about the condition of his son, he was taken into custody for ten days and tortured with electric shocks. I was told of a young man who complained of torture in a courtroom and was beaten by guards in front of the judge. I was told of beatings that led to permanent injuries, such as paralysis and deafness, of solitary confinement, of the use of electric shocks, of humiliating strip-searches of prisoners. I learned of hunger strikes that had taken place in a number of Turkish prisons in the early summer of 1983, conducted by prisoners who were protesting unbearable prison conditions. I was also given copies of official testimony from a court session in Diyarbakir, in which prisoners described the use of anal rape with police truncheons to threaten and inhibit them from testifying in the

courtroom about torture.

The information gathered during the Helsinki Watch

fact-finding mission of last September is contained in a report

[ocr errors][merged small]

published by Helsinki Watch on November 3, 1983.

Copies of

sections of that report that deal with torture are appended to this testimony.

In November 1983, parliamentary elections were held in Turkey. Although the election campaign was marred by the banning of numerous political parties that wished to participate, the election results were a surprise to many. The candidate backed by the military government came in last, while the most independent of the three candidates, Mr. Turgut Ozal, was elected Prime Minister. Mr. Ozal's legitimacy was further confirmed by his party's success in the March 1984 municipal elections in Turkey; the fact that two mainstream parties that had previously been banned were allowed to participate did not take away from his party's majority. It remains to be seen, however, whether the new government will have a modifying effect on the human rights repression that continues in Turkey.

Strikes in Turkish prisons began again in April 1984 and are still in progress. The prisoners are protesting inhumane treatment, as before. It is important to note, however, that this time the strikes were reported in the Turkish press, which was certainly not the case during last summer's strikes which the government surrounded with an official veil of secrecy.

Also of interest is the recent appointment by the Turkish government of a special nine-person commission, including civilians, to investigate allegations of torture and deaths in Turkish prisons. On April 2, 1984, the office of the Turkish

37-536 0-84--6

Chief of Staff confirmed the commission's finding that 53 people had died in prison since 1978, including seven in a recent hunger strike in Diyarbakir Prison and two of torture. The official government statement asserted, on the one hand, that "there is no evidence of systematic maltreatment or torture in Turkish jails," and, on the other, that "80 security personnel had been jailed for up to several years for conducting torture and maltreatment since 1978." The commission's figures of two deaths attributable to torture appear to contradict a 1982 report by the military leadership acknowledging that 15 prisoners had died from torture since the 1980 coup. Moreover, a Reuters report cites relatives of prisoners as saying that up to twelve prisoners fasted to death in recent hunger strikes which were held to protest the use of torture and beatings in prisons.

Evidence gathered by our Committee and by Amnesty International also contradicts official denials of torture and indicates that torture continues unabated in Turkish detention centers and prisons. As recently as May 8, 1984, Amnesty International issued a Bulletin on torture in Turkey, which reports that the pattern of torture in Turkey has "shown no significant change during 1984." The Bulletin states that "thousands of women and men detained in Turkey under martial law have been tortured systematically, suffering savage beatings and electric shocks to their genitals and other parts of their bodies" and that "detainees were also burned with cigarettes, tied to hot radiator pipes, suspended from the ceiling by their hands or feet for prolonged periods until they screamed with

pain, and routinely subjected to falaka (brutal beatings on the soles of their feet)."

The Bulletin quotes testimony from Mrs. Sema Ogur, who was arrested and tortured in Turkey:

"They wet the inside of my crotch and began applying
shocks," she said in her statement. One of the

torturers threatened to apply electricity to her ovaries
and sterilize her.

On the second day of detention, she thought she heard her husband screaming. She was then taken to the torture room opposite her cell and saw him. "He was lying naked against a black tiled wall. His hands were tied behind his back and they were administering electricity to his genitals.

Sema Ogur said one man of about 50 had been forced to
watch his children being tortured and vice-versa.

"The torture never let up," she said. "After a while
I was able to pick out which torture was being applied
from the screams.

[ocr errors]
[ocr errors]

Amnesty International quotes another prisoners, Nizamettin Kaya, who had been tortured for 50 straight days. He was blindfolded, beaten, kicked, given the falaka treatment and electric shocks, and hung from ceiling pipes:

Once, after a prolonged torture session, and although
his feet were swollen and cracked, his torturers "forced
my feet into shoes. Afterwards they told me to jump on
each foot 100 times. I could not, so they kept beating
me with the truncheon on my head... They kicked me on
the legs and stepped with their heels on my toes,
squashing them," he said.

In addition to the Amnesty International material I have just quoted, reports of torture continue to come directly to Helsinki Watch. Several weeks ago I received a letter that was smuggled out of Sagmalcilar Civilian Prison. The writer, whose name I cannot reveal, describes, among other things, the treatment of Mr. Orhan Taylan, an artist who was recently

« ÎnapoiContinuă »