January 26, 2002 A Turkish Doctor's Specialty: The Torture Victim ================================== By SOMINI SENGUPTA
[I] STANBUL -- As a physician at the Human Rights Foundation here, Dr. Onder Ozkalipci tends to the handiwork of sadists. He talks of the most popular methods of torturers as another doctor might talk of the perils of cholesterol. There's "falanga," the beating of the soles of the feet, and "submarino," wet or dry, which involves submerging the detainee in water (wet) or wrapping a plastic bag over the head (dry). Rape, electrical shock and mock execution are also used. Among the latest techniques is the sandwiching of a detainee between blocks of ice, a procedure that leaves no physical marks but usually causes a lung infection within days. Dr. Ozcalipci's job, like those of roughly a dozen full-time physicians at the foundation's five clinics across Turkey, is to rehabilitate the men, women and occasionally children who say they have been tortured by police officers and prison guards. He offers vitamins, refers psychiatric help, prescribes physical therapy to treat an injured back. Of his work, the doctor, 43, observes, "Maybe we're masochists." Dr. Ozkalipci is a large, lumbering man with hangdog eyes and a shock of silver hair. He speaks softly, almost in mumbles, and when he laughs, which is often considering his trade, the laughter comes in quiet, wide- grinned chuckles. His patients may be leftists, Kurds, transvestites, criminals and, most recently, Islamists. He has treated street children -- pint-size thieves as young as 5 caught snatching car stereos -- who are punished by beatings and electrical shocks. The children hit him the hardest. He has a daughter, age 7, whom he describes as his chief motivation. "You think they could be your child," he says of his youngest patients. "It's hard to imagine what they will do when they grow up." Born and schooled in Izmir, and raised in a middle-class family, he came to his calling after witnessing what happened to his friends during the 1980 military coup in Turkey. He was in college, a self-described Socialist, and watched as his peers were hauled into jail, beaten, abused. But if the socialism of his youth brought him here, what he has seen has drained his idealism. Although his job is to help people recover from horror, he now describes himself simply as a pessimist. He neither entirely agrees nor disagrees with the political beliefs of most of his patients. Frankly, says Dr. Ozkalipci, who practiced general medicine privately in a small town for four years before joining the foundation in 1991, what matters to him is how his patients were tortured. Not why. "It's none of my business," he says. Sometimes, he says, he makes people better only to see them beaten again. Despite all the expertise he and his colleagues have mustered over a decade of doing this work, the payoff is slim. Few torturers, even when they can be identified, are punished. "There's a lot of pain and few results," Dr. Ozkalipci said. "Our country is one of the countries that has systematic torture. This is our -- I can't find the word -- our moral pain." Turkish government officials dispute his claim. Last month the interior minister, Rustu Kazim Yucelen, told reporters that there had been 67 deaths in police custody over the last six years. But he said they were "isolated incidents" that resulted in the prosecutions of 112 security officials. For years Turkey's human rights record has earned the opprobrium of local and international rights groups, and reports of torture have become central to the debate on the country's request for European Union membership. In a scathing report last month, Human Rights Watch described torture as "rampant" and accused Turkey of "little but superficial and halfway measures" to improve the human rights of its citizens. FEW people are as intimate with the banal, redundant nitty-gritty of torture as Dr. Ozkalipci. People of all political stripes walk into his examination room, a spare chamber with gauzy curtains, a violet weight scale, a kilim rug the color of ocher. The work itself carries political risks. The foundation, whose budget is supported by the United Nations and other international groups, has been charged by the state security courts on several occasions. The foundation's clinic in Diyarbakir, the center of Turkey's Kurdish region, which remains under emergency rule, had its patient files confiscated by the authorities in early September. Among the patients is a pale, twiggy woman of 23, named Yeliz Sayginar. By her own count, Ms. Sayginar, who writes for a socialist publication, has been in police custody roughly 30 times since she was 17 for her writing and political activity. Among the most memorable was an 11- day stay in the city's antiterrorism cell. She sat blindfolded in a chair for two days, she said, subjected to a discordant serenade: military music from one speaker, pop tunes from another. Over the next nine days, as she refused to cooperate with her interrogators, she was hosed down with cold water, pummeled, kicked, stifled by a plastic bag over her head and hung by her wrists from a wooden bar. In one such session, the cuffs slipped up her narrow arms and dug into her skin, leaving scars on her left forearm still. On another occasion, after her arrest at a demonstration protesting prison conditions, officers herded her into the back of a police van, groped her breasts and forced her to stick her head between one officer's legs. The memory of it is shocking in its precision. "I talked about this in great detail with people I love and who love me," Ms. Sayginar said. "It's also not something one forgets very easily." FORGETTING doesn't come easily for most of Dr. Ozkalipci's patients, or for him. One patient, he recalled, suffered from what seemed like severe paranoia. The young man talked constantly about his fear of death. Then he died in police custody. The rewards of the doctor's job are rare. Physical signs of torture -- a perforated eardrum, say -- are like answered prayers, offering a reason to go to court. Lately, in the trials of torture suspects, the courts have begun consulting the foundation's reports to supplement a government doctor's examinations. Does he worry about becoming insensitive to the pain he sees? His answer suggests more a worry for his nation than for himself. "This is a real trauma for us," Dr. Ozcalipci says. "It destroys the moral values of the nation, not just the survivor. When you start to accept torture as something normal, it destroys your sense of humanity. If you keep your silence, after a while it will destroy you." He imagines that some Turks are afraid to speak out. He imagines, too, that many believe that torture cannot happen to them and so are not moved to care. Summing up the dismissive attitude of many people, he recalls a Turkish saying: If a snake doesn't touch me, it can live forever.
