BY KATHY LOWE
The first political prisoner to perish in the long-running hunger strike in Turkey's jails met his death on March 25. He was Cengiz Soydas, who died in an isolation cell in Turkey's Sincan prison after fasting for 133 days.
Despite his death and a massive escalation of repression against political prisoners, lawyers, journalists, human rights leaders and trade unionists, the Turkish government has failed to break the rolling program of hunger strikes which began on October 20. An estimated 800 prisoners are still refusing food in protest at the imposition of the notorious "F-type" isolation cells, with a further 259 on a fast to the death.
Like the Irish Republican prisoners of the "H Blocks" in 1981, jailed opponents of the Turkish regime are on hunger strike to defend their political status. Formerly held in communal areas largely under their own control, they are fighting removal to the new isolation cells which rob them of the right of association — the right to organise.
The authorities are building 11 of these F-type prisons, three of which have already been completed and which hold between one and three people in each cell.
On December 19, in an attempt to smash the hunger strike and break political opposition in the jails, security forces stormed 20 prisons, leaving 30 prisoners dead and hundreds more severely injured. Condemned by international human rights organisations and by the European parliament, this bloody attack prompted a visit by a four-person labour movement delegation from Britain and Ireland, of which I was a member.
The delegation spoke to survivors who described how troops broke into the jails armed with guns, incendiary bombs and nerve gas.
Firdes Kirblyik, a 30-year-old leader of the health trade union, was in the women's wing of Gebze prison. She said, "The soldiers dragged us out of our cells at gunpoint, demanding to know which of us were on the death fast. When we refused to answer the prison guards indicated the room where the hunger strikers were lying. The soldiers then threw in nerve gas and closed the door."
The raid ended with a number of political prisoners suffering rape by truncheons and other forms of brutal treatment, as 1096 of them were moved to the new isolation prisons.
"They didn't take us there, they beat us there", said Oursun Armutlu, recently released from prison and interviewed in Istanbul's Okmeydaivi hospital. He described how in their F-type cells, still on hunger strike, he and others were routinely tortured, kept in the cold and dark wrapped only in blankets.
Lawyers confirmed the prisoners' version of events. At a meeting with the delegation in Istanbul the leader of the Progressive Lawyers' Association, which represents 40,000 lawyers across the country, said he and his colleagues had been refused access to their clients after the December prison raid.
They subsequently managed to see them but were still being intimidated and strip-searched and their files taken from them on every visit. Their time with their clients was restricted to 10 minutes. They could interview them only by telephone, separated by a glass panel, and with the prison guards listening in.
The lawyers are playing a key role in publicising the demands of the hunger strikers: for closure of the F-type cells, for an end to torture, for the killers of the prisoners on December 19 to be brought to trial and for the prisoners' families and lawyers to have the right to see them without intimidation.
Members of the labour movement delegation met distraught relatives of hunger strikers who had been assaulted by guards when they tried to visit the prisons.
Alhami Soner, whose son and nephew were both on the death fast in an Ankara prison, described his anguish at seeing them struggling to walk and beginning to lose their memories. "As parents", he said, "we want to tell them to stop the fast but we can't. We respect and support their political stand."
The Turkish regime is being forced to step up and extend the repression in a bid to keep the lid on the prison turmoil. The delegation interviewed trade unionists who had been arrested during protests and prominent intellectuals threatened with arrest for founding the organisation Writers and Artists Against the F-types.
Five branches of the Turkish Human Rights Association had been closed down. Its leaders, who in January briefed visiting representatives of the Council of Europe's European Committee for the Prevention of Torture, said it was now impossible for them to hold news conferences without these being broken up by police.
According to the chairperson of the Human Rights Association, very few of Turkey's 10,000 political prisoners had been convicted of acts of violence. Most had been sentenced to ten years or more for "belonging to a banned organisation". In a number of cases, they had never been brought to trial.
Youths of 13 and 14 were among those who have been given heavy sentences under anti-terrorist laws for simply handing out leaflets, fly posting or joining demonstrations.
Many journalists and writers were also in jail and attempts to silence the media have been central to the government's strategy. On December 16, the state security court in Istanbul banned any broadcasts or newspaper reports about the isolation cells and hunger strike.
Leaders of all the main trade unions have defied the ban, appearing together on TV after the prison raid to condemn the massacre by the security forces. Journalists, especially those from the smaller papers of the far left, continue to play a cat and mouse game with the authorities, determined to get the news of the hunger strikes out to the rest of the world whatever the personal cost.
Every organisation the labour movement delegation met in Istanbul and Ankara maintained that the hunger strike in the prisons, coordinated jointly by 11 far left organisations, had caught the Turkish government on the defensive at a time when it was presenting itself as a leading member of NATO and a "respectable" candidate member of the European Union.
In addition, the general strike on December 1 against a US$11 billion loan package from the International Monetary Fund had come as a sharp reminder that the trade unions were in no mood to accept IMF-driven austerity measures.
If the death of Cengiz Soydas is not to be the first of many there is a tremendous urgency for far greater international pressure on Turkey, for a ban on arms sales to the country, for an 8 million euro grant awarded by the EU to Turkey to be rescinded and for the US$11 billion IMF package to be cancelled.
[Kathy Lowe represented the National Union of Journalists on the labour movement delegation to Turkey. This article first appeared in the April 2001 edition of Red Shift, the journal of the Socialist Solidarity Network, UK.]