---------- From: Press Agency Ozgurluk <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Date: Sat, 19 May 2001 01:46:19 +0200 To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: [Ozgurluk] PI: Turkey's new prisons drawing a new outcry Philadephia Inquirer Wednesday, May 16, 2001 Turkey's new prisons drawing a new outcry Inmates are dying in hunger strikes. Rights groups are calling for foreign action. By Jeffrey Fleishman INQUIRER STAFF WRITER ANKARA, Turkey - Past the army guards and curled-up patients handcuffed to beds, Aysel Oktay sits in a hospital room every day with her shriveled son. It is a strange death watch. Levent Oktay is one of more than 700 political prisoners staging hunger strikes to protest the harsh conditions in Turkey's prisons. The prison protest has brought renewed complaints from rights groups about Turkey's human-rights record, as well as calls for international lenders to deny Turkey billions of dollars it is seeking to solve its financial woes. To the government, Levent Oktay is a terrorist. To human-rights groups, his crusade is the stuff of martyrdom. To his mother, he is a once-healthy son now turned to bone and wasted muscle. "Levent has been on this death fast for 139 days," Aysel Oktay said under a light rain outside the Numune Hospital. "He takes only water mixed with salt and sugar. He has lost 66 pounds. "I sit and massage my son. He is too weak to move. I wash him. I clean his soiled sheets. He is a man. He knows what he is doing: He is protesting the inhumaneness of this country. But I am a mother. And I cry." Since the hunger strikes began six months ago, 24 people - including 21 inmates and three relatives and activists who fasted in sympathy - have died. The protests are aimed at Turkey's new prisons, which keep political dissidents locked in isolation. The system was imposed last year when inmates were transferred from the old dormitory-style prisons - where 50 convicts often shared one large room - to jails with cells that hold just one to three people. Human-rights groups say the new prisons breed torture and are an attempt by the authorities to "rehabilitate" political prisoners. The Turkish government contends that the new prisons meet European and U.S. standards. The government also says the old dormitory-style jails had become training and recruiting grounds for political extremists, criminal clans and at least 20 terrorist groups. Smaller cells, it argues, give the state control over a prison network that was often run by left-wing radical gangs that would refuse guards access to the crowded dormitories. The macabre atmosphere conjured by the hunger strikes comes as Turkey, long criticized by the West for human-rights violations, is applying for $10 billion in international loans to solve its massive financial woes. So far, the government has shown no signs of reversing its prison policy. The head of Parliament's human-rights committee said in an interview that the hunger strikes were unfortunate but that the "demands of the prisoners were utopian." "No one should expect me to sit down with these terrorist organizations and negotiate or bargain," Justice Minister Hikmet Sami Turk told the Turkish press this month. Two hundred political prisoners are on so-called death fasts and 500 on hunger strikes, according to the government. Human-rights groups believe the real numbers to be much higher. Human Rights Watch, an independent organization based in New York, estimated recently that 60 prisoners who have been subsisting only on sugar water faced certain death. Turkish activists say the state is force-feeding some inmates to keep the number of deaths low and to limit the embarrassment. "I don't want to think about how many people will die if this is not stopped," said Metin Bakkalci, a member of Ankara's Association of Physicians. "It's a very tragic death. The body deteriorates step-by-step. The neurological system goes, then the urinary and the circulatory, and then the muscles - and, finally, death." The hunger strikes began in October. Events turned bloody in December, when paramilitary police stormed 20 prisons across the nation. Thirty inmates and two police officers died as 900 prisoners were moved to the new jails. The hunger strikes widened as prisoers demanded that Turkey destroy the new prisons and abolish an antiterrorism law that mandates the isolation of political prisoners. In ments with Turkey. The Turkish government has since made slight amendments to its penal regulations but has refused to cancel its policing political prisoners. Such inmates are allowed access to libraries and small outside yards, but are not permitted to gather in large g Those restrictions, according to human-rights groups, violate Turkey's cultural mores, which have always revered a person's need for human i The hunger strikes have yet to result in wides She was arrested in 1997 and sentenced to 15 years for belonging to the DHKPC," a leftist group. Aysel Oktay stepped out of the hospital. Rain fell on her coarse, gray hair and speckled her jacket. Her son is still conscious, she said, "thank God." But Levent Oktay's wife, Serap, is quite sick in another hospital. Both are charged with political terrorism for having joined a radical group. As Aysel Oktay spoke, other mothers gathered around. Some wore scarves.Some were wrapped in blankets pulled from the plastic bags they have been living out of for weeks. "I don't want my son to die," Oktay said as an army guard stood under a tree in the drizzle just beyond the window to Levent's ward. "But I'm proud of all of them. They are dying to protest the undemocracy of Turkey." -- Press Agency Ozgurluk In Support of the Revolutionary Peoples Liberation Struggle in Turkey http://www.ozgurluk.org _________________________________________________ KOMINFORM P.O. Box 66 00841 Helsinki Phone +358-40-7177941 Fax +358-9-7591081 http://www.kominf.pp.fi General class struggle news: [EMAIL PROTECTED] subscribe mails to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Geopolitical news: [EMAIL PROTECTED] subscribe: [EMAIL PROTECTED] __________________________________________________
