The story of A.K.s life is the story of a man whose entire existence has been dictated by the fact that he was born a Kurd in a small village in far south-eastern Turkey, where the Turkish military are powerful and where Kurds are perceived as the enemy. It is a story about torture: long, brutal, repeated torture. And it is about how people, who do not want to leave their wives and their children and their countries, are forced to flee for no other reason than the fact that they have come to the end of their particular road, and that to stay would almost certainly mean death.
A.K. is not much interested in politics. He is a farmer, the father of five young children, the eldest son of two elderly parents, all of whose other children have, over the last ten years, been driven abroad by persecution and torture.
Lawless police
A.K.s troubles began in the mid 1970s, when he was still a schoolboy. Police arrived at the school gates one day and took away a number of the Kurdish children, A.K. among them. He was beaten, slapped, punched. After a night in the police station, he was sent home.
In 1978, by which time I had reached secondary school, a number of the Turkish pupils decided one day to hold a demonstration against the Kurds. We Kurdish children were standing around watching when the police arrived. They left the Turkish boys alone and attacked us, and one of them stabbed me in the leg. My friends carried me home, but my parents decided after that to stop sending me to school. I went to work with my father on the farm.
Two years later A.K. got married. His bride was a Kurdish girl, training to be a nurse, and she came from a politically active family. While they were still engaged, she was picked up by the police and raped. A.K. explains that this would normally have made their marriage impossible, but that he loved her and felt extremely sorry for her and persuaded his parents to let their wedding take place. It was what he calls a revolutionary marriage, one made without religious vows. For many months, his new wife was very disturbed and depressed by what had happened to her.
On 12 September 1980, at the time of the military coup, I was arrested together with many other Kurds in our village. Soldiers came and searched our house and found some books and pamphlets written in Kurdish. They took my wife at the same time, but released her almost immediately. I was taken, with the other men, to an old converted school. They stripped me naked and burnt my stomach with cigarettes.
The round, unmistakable marks of cigarette burns cover A.K.s stomach. Then they used high pressure water hoses on us. I was dragged over a rough concrete floor, and my little finger was badly torn. On his left hand, his little finger has a long, wide, scar. For the next months I was tortured again and again. Some days they forced my face into a pot of faeces and urine. On others they beat the soles of my feet. I was beaten, kicked, punched. I lived always with the smell of blood. One day they stripped the men naked and took them into the womens cell and forced us to lie on top of them.
Enduring hell
After three months, A.K. was released; it took him four months to recover. He had still not recovered when he was picked up again in his village and taken to what the local Kurdish men now called the ring, a room in which the military tortured their captives.
This time he was held for five and a half months. He was beaten with sticks and truncheons, on the soles of his feet and all over his body. He was held by his hair he says that it was long, then, he was a young man, he liked to wear it long and slammed against a wall. His head was submerged in pails of water until he passed out. Bullets were put between his fingers and his hands squeezed hard.
One day, they stopped torturing him and brought him to trial: he was charged with offences against the Turkish state and preaching Kurdish separatism, but the judge threw the case out for lack of evidence and he was released.
A.K. was now twenty-two. He was called up for military service, to a special unit reserved for Kurds and troublemakers. They were given the dirty work to do. When he emerged from the army, he found that his earlier friends had dispersed. He and his wife started their family. He had little time for politics, but bought a truck and supplemented their income by making deliveries. From time to time he heard tell of the P.K.K. (the pro-guerrilla Kurdish Workers Party) but he kept away.
Then, in 1995, after ten relatively happy and peaceful years, he was approached by a Kurd from his village and asked to deliver food and supplies to some guerrillas hiding out in a nearby farmhouse. He did as he was asked. Later, long after he had returned home, the military got to hear about the hidden Kurds and attacked the farmhouse. Someone had seen A.K.s lorry parked outside. The military came for him that night.
For the first forty-five days I was held in a police station. Every day there would be more torture. Sometimes I was blindfolded and told to walk: it would turn out to be above a flight of stairs and I would trip and fall. They beat me again and again on the soles of my feet. They kicked me with their boots and hit me with sticks. They stripped me naked, and one day one of the soldiers punched me as hard as he could on my testicles. I fainted. They transferred me to a prison and there I spent the next six months. Once again I was brought to trial but released from lack of evidence.
A.K. endured two more arrests and two more spells of torture. The second time fell during the May Day celebrations of 2001. This time the torture was, if possible, more violent: more punches in the groin, blows to the ears and mouth which dislocated his jaw and permanently affected his hearing, beatings to his hand so severe and so protracted that he was given ice cubes to put on them afterwards to prevent them from exploding. Again he was set free for lack of evidence.
The only choice
He knew he could not take much more and that he would probably not be allowed to. A close friend, another Kurd, was picked up by the military; later his family was told that he had been shot while trying to escape. Another friend, detained several times with him and released, committed suicide.
The end came at this friends funeral. The mourners were surrounded by soldiers as they left the grave. They would have taken A.K. away then but for the protests and the anger of the villagers; and so the officer told him to report to the police station next day. He knew now that he was next in line. His wife, his children, his parents all begged him to leave. Four brothers were already in the United Kingdom.
He got into his lorry and drove all that night and next day until he reached the border. He sold the truck and with the money looked for an agent to arrange his journey. It was, he says, the only thing that he could do.
In Oakington Reception Centre, where he spent his first weeks in the UK, he was startled to find the police so friendly and polite. He still cannot get over seeing them line up in the canteen for meals, together with asylum seekers. He had never imagined such a thing.
He has thought hard about the past, about Turkey and about his religion and has made a decision: he no longer wishes to be Muslim, for he has seen what Muslims can do. He is now converting to Catholicism. About his own country and his own people he has only fears. The Turks finished off the Armenians, he says. Now they will finish the Kurds too.
There have long been reports of widespread torture throughout Turkish police stations. Amnesty International and other human rights organisations have collected many testimonies of people whose stories are all too like those of A.K. Sound-proofed torture rooms, specially equipped and prepared for torture, have been identified in various police stations.
Despite all protestations to the contrary, and all declarations of intention by the Turkish government in its submissions to the European Union, torture continues to be practised.
