Rights Abuses
Stain Turkeyıs Democratic Image

  
   Turkey -- Every Saturday at noon, as they have done for more than two
   years, about 100 Turks converge on a bustling plaza in downtown
   Istanbul and quietly sit on the pavement.
   
   There are usually no speeches and no placards. The protesters, mostly
   women, make their point by silently displaying photographs of their
   missing loved ones, although their emotion sometimes boils over into a
   chant, like 'Mothers' anger will strangle the murderers.' After half
   an hour they rise and go their separate ways.
   
   'Three men in civilian clothes grabbed my husband as he left the
   house one night in 1995,' one of the protesters, Hanim Tosun, 32, said
   on a recent Saturday. 'They were carrying pistols and walkie-talkies.
   We checked the license number of their car and found it was registered
   to the police. That was almost two years ago. We have tried everything
   to find him, but the police tell us nothing.'
   
   Mrs. Tosun's husband was a street vendor who had served three years
   in prison on charges of collaborating with Kurdish guerrillas in
   southeastern Turkey and had come to Istanbul to start a new life. He
   is now a statistic, one of an unknown number of Turks believed to have
   disappeared while in police custody.
   
   As Mrs. Tosun and the other 'Saturday mothers' carried out their
   weekly protest, people around them went about their business. At
   nearby kiosks, newspapers carried bold headlines accusing politicians
   of various abuses. Organizers of rightist and leftist parties huddled
   in downtown offices, making plans for the coming election campaign.
   
   'This is in many ways a very free country, so free that people can go
   to the polls and change their government whenever they want,' Orhan
   Pamuk, Turkey's most prominent young novelist, said in an interview.
   'But it is also a country with a horrible human rights record.
   Probably there is no country in the world where this contradiction is
   so sharp and clear.'
   
   Turkey's human rights record is the subject of endless debate, not
   only here but also in the Western world. Turkish officials say the
   problem is exaggerated, but it is one of the main reasons why the
   European Union insists on holding Turkey at arm's length and why some
   Westerners consider Turkey to be a difficult partner.
   
   Many strategists in Washington and in European capitals agree that
   because of Turkey's membership in NATO, its geographical position, its
   history and its role as a defender of secularist democracy in the
   Muslim world, Turkey could become even more important than it has
   been.
   
   But they also say that before Turkey can become a full partner of the
   West or a desirable model for the new nations of the Caucasus and
   Central Asia, it must resolve nagging questions about the way it
   treats prisoners and dissenters.
   
   'Human rights and freedom of expression are very important issues for
   the image of Turkey, and they condition many people's reflex reaction
   to questions about Turkey's role in Europe,' said Michael Lake, the
   European Union's envoy in Ankara.
   
   'This reflex is so strong that it outweighs important perceptions of
   Turkey, such as its strategic importance, its place in the foreign and
   security architecture of Europe, and even its growing importance as an
   economic partner.'
   
   Hanging over the human rights debate is the war being waged by
   Kurdish nationalists in the Southeast. Most charges of human rights
   abuses in Turkey stem from incidents in that region. As many as 80
   percent of the charges arising in other parts of the country,
   according to several human rights advocates, are somehow related to
   the Kurdish conflict.
   
   Tens of thousands of people have been killed out there," said Sabri
   Ergul, a member of the human rights committee in Parliament. The
   remains of Turkish soldiers and civilians slain in the fighting 'have
   come back to nearly every town and village in Turkey,' he added.
   'Naturally people are very angry about this. They develop the feeling
   that whatever has to be done to stop terrorism is justified.'
   
   'Terrorism is the problem of our age, but our age is also the age of
   human rights,' Ergul said. 'The great mistake that is made here is the
   belief that when you combat terrorism, you don't have to respect
   democracy and law.'
   
   Ergul is involved in one of Turkey's most important torture-related
   cases. He is a lawyer for the families of 16 teenagers who were
   arrested last year for scrawling leftist graffiti on walls and who are
   accused of belonging to subversive organizations in the western town
   of Manisa.
   
   Although police have admitted that the teenagers confessed to their
   crimes under torture, they were found guilty and sentenced to terms of
   up to 12 years in prison.
   
   A public prosecutor in Manisa has filed suit against 10 police
   officers accused of having carried out the torture, but the government
   is drawing out the case and seems to hope that it will somehow fade
   away. It is doing the same in another important case, the
   investigation of officers charged in the 1996 beating death of
   journalist Metin Goktepe.
   
   'The government, especially the Interior Ministry, protects the
   police who torture,' Ergul said. 'They encourage it. They are the ones
   telling the police forces to behave this way, so naturally they are
   not in a position to prosecute officers who follow their
   instructions.'
   
   Human rights advocates say that besides torture in detention centers
   and the 'mystery killings' of perceived Kurdish nationalists, the
   other principal human rights problem in Turkey is the ban on
   statements deemed to threaten national unity. Laws that forbid these
   statements are applied most often against those who question
   government policy in the Kurdish region.
   
   It is generally considered criminal to suggest that the army shares
   responsibility for the carnage there, to advocate peace talks or to
   assert that the government should treat the Kurds as a distinct ethnic
   group that deserves autonomy.
   
   These laws are often used in cases that devastate Turkey's image.
   Last year, for example, one of the country's most beloved cultural
   figures, the novelist Yasar Kemal, was sentenced to a 20-month prison
   term for making pro-Kurdish statements that were interpreted as
   separatist propaganda.
   
   Kemal's sentence was suspended, as often happens in such cases.
   Nonetheless, human rights advocates say that more than 70 journalists
   and writers are in jail for statements they have made.
   
   Turkish officials concede that torture is sometimes used in detention
   centers, but they insist that it is not systematic and not sanctioned
   by the authorities. They also assert that laws against separatist
   propaganda must be judged in the context of a civil conflict in which
   terrorism has been used as a principal weapon.
   
   At a news conference in London last year, Foreign Minister Tansu
   Ciller said that Turkey 'has decided to take a series of measures in
   order to totally eliminate in practice the crime of torture, which as
   a matter of fact is forbidden by our laws.' After she spoke,
   Parliament passed a law cutting the maximum time defendants may be
   held incommunicado to 10 days from 30.
   
   Perhaps the most illuminating human rights case in Turkey is the
   complex scandal that emerged after a spectacular car crash near the
   western town of Susurluk in November that killed a top police official
   and an escaped heroin smuggler. A pro-government Kurdish clan leader,
   who is also a member of Parliament, survived.
   
   Questions about what the three men were doing in a car together led
   to accusations of government involvement in smuggling, death squads,
   illegal repression in the Southeast and other crimes.
   
   But a parliamentary investigation of the scandal fizzled out after
   senior military and civilian leaders signaled that they would not
   cooperate. Many Turks believe responsibility for the crimes reaches so
   high that a full investigation is impossible.
   
   'I'm glad we had Susurluk,' said Taciser Belge, coordinator of the
   Istanbul-based human rights group Helsinki Citizens Assembly. 'Now
   when we speak about these things, people realize that we're not making
   up stories. Since Susurluk, people understand that when things like
   mystery killings happen, the army and the state are involved. This is
   very new in Turkey.'