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| 2003-11-10 00:10 |
| Diyarbakır Military Prison Number 5: A Turkification Experience |
| MEHMET SANRI |
| doz@tnn.net |
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[ISTANBUL, 10/11 2003] — With the military coup of 1980, Diyarbakır has gained a new “residential area.” Later on, more than half of the minibuses leaving from two different points of the city, from Da€kapı and Balıkçılarbaflı, were now carrying passengers to this new residential area. The main destination to which the swarthy errand-youngsters started to direct the passengers was now “Prison! Prison! Prison!” Because most of their daily passenger capacity was on the way to this newly established residential area; in other words, to Diyarbakır Military Prison Number 5. The people inhabiting across the “surrounding provinces” mostly came to Diyarbakır to visit their relative inmates in the prison. Following to Diyarbakır State Hospital, Diyarbakır Military Prison Number 5 had become the second most crowded place in front of which crowds of the people gathered in long queues. Diyarbakır had now turned to a prison tourism resort.
Apart from the horrific things going on in the “hell” at this new residential area, it was of course the mothers who suffered most; whatever wildness the inmates were facing inside the hell, after all they all were unique human beings who had been given birth and brought up by a mother, before falling down to this hell. Therefore, it was mainly the “tongueless” mothers who, in order to learn about their children, kept “visiting” the hell. Surely the mothers’ tongue had not been cut off with a knife; but any word that they spoke to their children in their own language could cause disasters both to their children and to themselves, disasters much greater than physically cutting of their tongue. The “tongueless” mothers, therefore, never spoke; they even swallowed their tears in order to maintain their good sight. “The tongue can not describe what eye sees” proverb could well explain the situation in Diyarbakır Prison. The Kurds have a similar adage which reads: “The world is seized by eyes.” So the “tongueless mothers” too, believing the might of the eyes, reduced themselves down to two simple eyes and gazed their children during the “visitor sessions” which sometimes were as short as the winking of eyes. The mothers kept coming to the new residential area every week, venturing troubles of every kind. But the actual question was still unanswered; What was going on inside?
So, to provide an answer for the above question, we have interviewed more than 30 people who have been to Diyarbakır Military Prison Number 5 and we also asked many more people to write articles about their experience. All these people belong to various segments of the society; they are teachers, doctors, lawyers, authors including businessmen and politicians and so on. Most of them, however, agree on the concern that the words remain much insufficient when describing what actually happened in the Diyarbakır Prison; they point out to the fact that when one talks about “Diyarbakır Military Prison Number 5”, all kinds of expressional methods remain quite insignificant. On the other hand, it is perhaps possible to enumerate the common points on which the people whom we interviewed have agreed as follows:
First; Nowhere in the world have human dignity and self-respect been so much degraded as they have been in Diyarbakır Prison. It is therefore that even the term “hell” is not sufficient, because the hell is described as the worst place that the human imagination created. Whereas Diyarbakır Prison is far beyond a phenomenon for which even the human comprehension remains insufficient. And one should bear in mind the fact that in the imagination of a hell, it is only the given sentence that is being executed...
Second; Nowhere in the world has it been witnessed that human beings have been kept under violence for 24 hours and that any human reflex and feeling, any human will have been turned to a pretext for torture, a torture which continued for so many years; the methods and amount of the violence imposed on the inmates had reached to such a level that no human reason and logic, no “scientific criteria” could define it.
Third; Nowhere in the world have people been forced to give up their nationality and religion, by thrusting truncheons into their anuses, by making them to eat crap; so in this sense too, the program applied in Diyarbakır Prison is much more violent than all other racist programs applied in the world.
Fourth; The aim of the program was to first waylay and then completely put away the Kurdish national democratic opposition; therefore, the program has been pursued on the basis of bringing in as much as possible people from different segments of Kurdish society and passing them through the “depersonification” and “nullification” machine set up in Diyarbakır Military Prison Number 5, and by doing so, to remove both these people’s self-confidence and their esteem in the society. On the other hand, as an integral and high level part of the same program, the Diyarbakır Martial-rule Court has functioned in such a way that it made sure that all those people who came before the judge go into Diyarbakır Military Prison Number 5; whether these people committed any guilt or not did not matter at all. The detainees were obliged to call the members of court delegation as “my commander”; during the trial, the detainees were obliged to gaze at a fixed point across the wall and had to sit in a “regular” way; they were very often beaten with truncheons by the soldiers during the trial; and the defense lawyers were threatened by the court delegation members: Perhaps all these practices should give the reader a sufficient idea about the characteristics of the court. The evaluations of the defense lawyers too confirm the similar functioning of the court...
Fifth; All the practices were systematic, the results being evaluated by high level expert teams every six months.
Sixth; The practices pursued in Diyarbakır Prison fall into the category of crimes against humanity; it concludes that an action time-limit must not be in question and that all sensitive segments of the society and all the victims should be the claimants and the pursuers of that process.
Seventh; The military coup-doer generals have still not been touched, on the contrary, they continue to be hosted at the “honorary stands” of the official state ceremonies; all these indicate that the regime of September 12th 1980 military coup still goes on...
All the details regarding the above mentioned seven points can be found in the interviews we made for the current issue. While making these interviews, we have tried to keep away from all kinds of scenarios. Because the “life” of the inmates in Diyarbakır Military Prison was of the sort that excluded all scenarios and that challenged the limits of the imagination; when Aziz Nesin, known as the greatest “visionary” of Turkey, heard about the practices in Diyarbakır Prison, he simply considered the Kurds as the greatest dreamers of the world; and he hadn’t believed the practices in Diyarbakır Prison. He claimed that what he heard could be nothing but mere outcomes of imagination (See interview with Nuri Sınır).
Actually while we interviewed with the people, we also asked them whether they ever daydreamed or not. The answer we got was very moving; they either had no spare time from torture to daydream or when they had, they generally daydreamed bread, water and fresh air... During the interviews we tried not to intervene much and let them to tell their story of Diyarbakır “Hell” in their own way. While getting prepared for the interviews, we did not make any particular choices as to whom interview; all of them were reached easily and at the first hand. To us it did not matter for which reason these people were tried; our motive for preparing such a dossier is the torture imposed on these people and the objective which has been tried to be achieved by the imposition of torture. For all the human beings, all living beings are innocent against the torture. The torture is a crime committed against the whole humanity...
With these interviews we aim; to record the first-hand stories of the people who were the victims of practices containing crimes against humanity both during the September 12th military regime and in its “aftermath”; and if we are allowed to use the term, we also would like to use our le droit de memoire (the right not to forget). We, therefore, in this issue of Serbesti, have put on agenda a dossier focusing on Diyarbakır Military Prison Number 5. And we aren’t planning to close this dossier at all; actually nobody should dare to do that. In our forthcoming issues, we will continue to cover the stories of torture victims whom we could not reach for this issue. This is only a beginning. And this beginning might be only 1% of the iceberg. Because after the interview, we asked one last question to each interviewer; “To what extent have you explained us the repression you faced in Diyarbakır Prison?” Some interviewers said “one in a million”, others said “one in a thousand.” Very few of them could say “one percent.”
The origins of the Diyarbakır Military Prison Number 5 can not of course be explained solely with September 12th military coup. These origins are more deeply rooted; and they are as old as the state of Turkish Republic. The bloody suppression of Sheikh Said (1925), Seyit Rıza and ‹hsan Nuri Pasha movements (1930-1927); the 33 Bullet Affair; the Trial of 49s and the deportation following the military coup of 1960; the Commando Operations (1970-1980); the trials and executions following the Military Memorandum of March 12th 1971; the Military Coup of September 12th 1980 and the Extraordinary State Zone declared soon after the coup; the “low-intensity warfare” pursued from 1984 to 1999, the unresolved killings during 1990 to 1999; each of these practices constitute a ring in the long chain of violence, a violence that was introduced in successive waves. These historical periods which witnessed horrendous massacres and violence do represent the Turkification program of Turkish state as well as its attitude towards the Kurdish question...
Nowadays we see Turkey’s plans on EU, USA, Middle East and Caucasus, we see Turkey busy with plans and calculations to send its tropps here and there; whatever might be the outcome of these plans and calculations, the actual problem, however, remains to be the fact that whether or not Turkey will give up its Turkification program against the Kurds and whether or not it will put an end to the violence it imposed on the Kurds. The case is whether or not Turkey will ever respect the Kurds!
The interviewers have kindly accepted us and have shared with us some very unique memories of theirs, memories they might not want to talk about elsewhere. We appreciate their politeness and would like to thank all of them.
Lastly, we of course do not intend to get stuck in the past; but on the other hand, we know it very well that forgetting the past may well mean the losing of the future...
Hope to be with you in the next issue...
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Serebestî- English Summary (September-October 2003, Issue: 14) |
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