TURKEY: THE MARCH OF DEMOCRACY CONTINUES

"I wish all eight of my sons had gone to fight in the mountains."
~ Xaje Artuget, somewhere in North Kurdistan.

There was a funny article Friday on TDN:

The Canadian Jeanette Tulluy, who was arrested Aug. 31 on charges of prostitution, has described her stay in prison while awaiting deportation as "horrifying."

[ . . . ]

She said she and the other detainees were packed into one room, which included a disturbing number of children. She said the room lacked chairs or desks, so people were forced to either sit on the floor or on the beds. Tulluy said although many people were forced to share beds, she had her own.

Tulluy said she could not sleep because the lights were kept on until early hours of the morning and because of the constant arguments and noise in the holding facility.

"Everyone is so stressed, there is no hope," she said. "We were fed very little. Sometimes they would give us a tiny piece of bread and say "Here's your meal' but that's not a meal. It's as if they're leaving people to starve to death. You're allowed to buy food but you get very little for how much you pay. Everything is dirty here. They treat you like dogs. The police even tell you that you'll be treated like a dog or an animal."

Tulluy said she was not afraid of the women she was detained with, but rather she feared the police.

"When I was first arrested, a female police officer slapped me. And it wasn't just that," she said. "Other stuff happened as well. After I was brought here, they called me up at 4 a.m. What's there to do at four in the morning? They just stared at my face then sent me back to my room. But why? It's scary. You have no idea what they're going to do to you. One night a woman became ill. They sent a male doctor who started yelling at her. This really scared the woman and so she said "Don't help me.' All the women in here are sick, like me. We're all coughing. And that's not the end of it but this is all I can tell you. What happened to me is a crime but the stuff that's going on in this facility, that's an even bigger crime."

Cry me a river.

This is nothing, particularly when we consider the fact that this spoiled woman has an embassy to help her. What about political prisoners in Turkey who have no embassy to help them? Like Engin Çeber:

Twenty-nine year old Engin Ceber died in the hospital where he was moved to after being tortured in the prison he was serving his sentence. The doctors were expecting him to die anytime.

Ceber’s lawyer Oya Aslan said they were going to have an autopsy to determine the details of the torture.

And, the results:

X-rays of torture victim Engin Çeber show he was beaten on the head and back, causing fatal internal bleeding, said the head of the Turkish Doctors' Union, or TTB, on Thursday.

The 29-year-old Çeber, a leftist activist who was arrested at a protest rally held for another activist who was paralyzed by a police bullet, died in hospital from injuries sustained by alleged torture in a police station in Istanbul's İstinye district and the Metris Prison. Çeber was detained with three other demonstrators.

[ . . . ]

TTB President Gençay Gürsoy, in a press conference, showed reporters Çeber's X-rays and said the activist's death was not caused because of a few bad apples but showed a systemic problem.

"Torture is not a personal matter. Torturers are not psychopaths. They are just like you and me, who play at home with their children. Pathological torturers are very rare," he said.

He said the cause of death was injuries sustained from a blunt object. Gürsoy commended the justice minister for apologizing because it was a first in such matters but argued it was not enough.

He also said some doctors were involved in the death of Çeber, noting that a doctor ignoring or tolerating the torture of a human being should be penalized in the harshest possible way.

So, this really isn't news; it's been going on forever in Turkey and the AKP is just continuing a long tradition.

Or maybe the Canadian prostitute would like things better on Imralı, like Abdullah Öcalan:

For the first time since his abduction to Turkey in 1999 Abdullah Ocalan, founder of PKK held in strict solitary confinement, has been physically tortured and openly threatened with death. As his lawyers told the press yesterday in Istanbul, Ocalan has been dragged by prison personnel to an adjoining room, forced to the ground by three persons while his cell was ravaged. When he protested against these brutal measures, he was explicitly threatened with death.

Ocalan has been held under isolation conditions that is defined as torture. He is the only prisoner on Imrali Island, guarded by 1000 soldiers. Council of Europe's Anti-torture committee (CPT) has denounced his imprisonment conditions harshly in its four previous reports and up to the present day.

Oh, we don't even want to think about what will happen if something happens to Apo. I mean, if the Ankara regime thinks things are bad now . . .

After almost six years of AKP governance, Turkey is heading straight back to the 1990s and that fact most likely figures into the reasons why support for AKP has fallen to 35%. Kurds have also been withdrawing support for Fethullah Gülen's party:

. . . Steps to ease bans on Kurdish broadcasting and education followed, and vast sums were poured into Kurdish regions. The handouts included education subsidies for the poor, especially for girls. These helped the AKP to clobber the pro-Kurdish Democratic Society Party (DTP) in much of the south-east in the July 2007 election. Yet to many the measures smell of vote-buying. “I haven’t received a penny for my girls’ schooling since April,” complains Sabiha Celik in Sason. “I will never vote for the AKP again.”

Indeed, Kurdish support for the AKP has been fading ever since the government yielded to army pressure to resume cross-border operations against the PKK in northern Iraq.

Maybe AKP's Injustice Minister will apologize to the Canadian prostitute. It's the only democratic thing to do, right?