"Prison
No. 5: Eleven Years in the Turkish Jail"
A
New Publication by Blue Crane Books
Watertown, Massachusetts - Blue
Crane Books has announced the publication of "Prison No. 5: Eleven Years
in the Turkish Jail" by Mehdi Zana, a Kurdish leader and the former mayor
of Diyarbakir, principal Kurdish town in Turkey. Part of Blue Crane Books Human
Rights and Democracy Series, this book is the author's account of the dreadful
terror and brutality of prison life in Turkey, with a preface by the renown
Holocaust scholar, Elie Wiesel, and an extensive postscript by the director of
Institute Kurde de Paris, Kendal Nezan.
An independent candidate, Mehdi
Zana was elected by popular vote as the first Kurdish mayor of a major city
during the 1977 elections in Turkey. Surprised by the election results, the
Turkish government resolved to thwart this experiment, which it judged as
dangerous by its popularity. But it was not until the coup of 1980 that the
opportunity presented itself.
"On September 12, 1980, under
the pretext of restoring law and order," writes Mehdi Zana, "the army
provoked another coup with its customary brutality. Parliament was dissolved,
and the political parties, associations, and unions were banned...The army and
police started arresting, according to a system of concentric circles, members
of Parliament, ministers, heads of political parties, unions, municipal
governments, academics, legal or illegal militant organizations, and
journalists - in brief, all elements that seemed undesirable and harmful to the
ideal Kemalist Republic." On September 24, twelve days after the coup,
Mehdi Zana was arrested and jailed.
"Overwhelming on a political
scale and humanly intolerable, this desperate and appalling testimony of the
Kurdish leader Mehdi Zana is especially so when it discusses the recent history
of the 1970s and the 1980s," writes Elie Wiesel in his preface.
"Solitary confinement, guards' insults, the obligation to salute the
captain's dog, the beatings, the sleep deprivation, the falaka, the fainting,
the trampling, the electrodes attached to genitals, German shepherds trained to
bite the private parts of naked prisoners. How does one understand? How can we
explain the institutionalization of these brutalities, this humiliation, this
dehumanization?"
A prominent figure in the Kurdish
community, Mehdi Zana has always pursued a conciliatory approach to the
resolution of the Kurdish question. In a statement to the European Parliament
in 1992 he said, "Like all the Kurds sentenced for the 'crime of separatism'
I have been stripped of my political rights for life ..I should, perhaps, make
it clear that while I continue to campaign peacefully for the recognition of
the rights of the 15 million Kurds living in Turkey, I am not part of any party
or movement."
Professor Vahakn N. Dadrian, the
leading expert on the subject of the Armenian Genocide and the author of
"German Responsibility In The Armenian Genocide" writes about Prison
No. 5: "In this graphic account of barbarism, one is struck by the
persistence and survival of a culture of torture. In the very inferno of the
lethal elements of that culture, the intellectuals, teachers, clergymen,
political and other leaders of the Armenian community in Ottoman Turkey were
mercilessly done to death by the perpetrators of the World War I Armenian
Genocide...In this gripping details of Kurdish resistance against these
unabating cruelties of the State Security functionaries and prison guards, one
cannot help but discern another macabre similarity. Like many Armenians in
World War I, a number of incarcerated Kurds are described as victims of
unspeakable torture methods as a result of which the subjects are seen
resorting to grisly acts of self-immolation - out of despair, but also heroic
defiance. This book is another link in the chain of countless links documenting
the historically unchanging lesson that the impunity accruing to the past
authors of a crime of mass murder is that crime's own reward. At the same time,
the book is an implicit but abiding indictment of the civilized world
predictably allowing such impunity over a long period of time."
In an extensive postscript, Kendal
Nezan provides historical perspective and political analysis. He concludes with
the following:
"Bogged down in a bloody war
in Kurdistan that it is financing, at least in part, by drug trafficking,
Turkey is going through the greatest economic, social, and political crisis in
its history. Its political system has broken down; its political caste, lacking
in breadth of vision, is disunited and in disarray. Repeating its warnings
about the Islamists, the army is again proclaiming itself the guardian of the
Republic and ultimate master of all power. The army bans any initiative, any
ideas about a settlement of the Kurdish problem. The Turkish regime is locking
itself into a purely military approach.
"Yet the generals know that
there is no military solution to the Kurdish question...Population growth,
geography, and history all argue in favor of the search for a political
solution that would allow Kurds and Turks to live together within a democracy
that would respect the rights and identity of each people...
"With the war raging in
Kurdistan, Turkey has been driven into the most serious economic, social, and
moral crisis of its history. The Turkish regime has entered a new era of
ideological glaciation, confronting its 15 million Kurdish citizens with a
terrible choice: forced assimilation, that is, renouncing their identity;
revolt; prison; or exile. Once again the official voices have been asserting
that there is no Kurdish problem in Turkey but rather one of terrorism,
fomented abroad. Parliamentary representative Coskun Kirca, a self-proclaimed
interpreter of this new atmosphere, declared in plain language, on March 3,
1994, at a House hearing, to applause from his peers: 'The Kurds only have a
single right in this country: that of being quiet.'...The Kurdish land has
lived forty-eight of its last seventy-one years under special regimes, states
of siege, and martial law - a sort of no-law zone left to the goodwill of the
Turkish generals.
"All this is happening in a
state that is a member of NATO and the Council of Europe, a close ally of the
United States, associated with the European Union, a signatory to the European
Convention on Human Rights and to the Charter of Paris, which is supposed to
guarantee freedom of opinion and of association, as well as the right of
minorities to preserve their identity. That state tortures its Kurdish
population with the financial, political, and military aid of Western
democracies, indifferent to public opinion. Mehdi Zana's book is an outcry -
his own outcry and that of his tortured people. Will it break the wall of
silence surrounding the Kurdish tragedy in Turkey and shake our consciousness
on the abominable practices of our 'Turkish friends and allies'?"
After serving eleven years in the
notorious military prison in Diyarbakir, Mehdi Zana was released in 1991
following a conditional amnesty, only to be sentenced again in 1994 to four
more years and in 1997 to ten more months of imprisonment for his testimony to
the European Parliament Human Rights Sub-Committee and for publishing a poetry
book, respectively. Mehdi Zana's wife, Leyla Zana - a Noble Peace Prize
candidate and winner of the Sakharov Prize for Freedom - is one of the six
Kurdish deputies in Turkey who were charged with "separatism",
stripped of their parliamentary immunity, and arrested in March 1994. She is
currently serving a 15-year prison sentence in Ankara Prison.
Prison No. 5 may be purchased at
local bookstores or ordered directly from the publisher:
Blue Crane Books
P.O. Box 291
Cambridge, MA 02238
Tel: (617) 926-8989
Fax: (617) 926-0982
E-mail: bluecrane@arrow1.com