I was taken, blindfolded, in a lift to what felt like the top of a very high building. I was made to walk round and round in circles for what seemed like a very long time, while someone kept pinching me from behind to make me keep moving. They stopped me. Then they made me start walking again, round and round, on and on, until I was confused and dizzy. They pushed me forwards, and I felt wind around me on my face. They stopped me again, and now I felt that I was standing on the very edge of a huge drop, with the wind all about me. It was very, very frightening. I stood there alone, swaying, terrified.
After what again seemed like a very long time, I was pulled back, and taken down in the lift again and back into prison and the torture started again. Later, my friends said that it was probably all pretend, that I wasnt really on the edge of a great fall, but I think they said that to comfort me. I am haunted by that moment. It is always there, whatever I am doing. Whenever I close my eyes I can feel that wind again and I am scared that I am going to fall. I cant forget.
H.O. is eighteen. He is a very thin, tall boy, with curly black hair cut fashionably and very glossy, and a nice green jacket. To look at you would take him for any Western teenager. Except, that is, for his expression: H.s rather long thin face is very pale and under his eyes are great reddish circles, almost like bruises. His eyes, when he looks up, are desperate, though he seldom looks anywhere but at the floor or into the distance, and his voice is so quiet as to be barely audible. He is a Kurd, the third son in a prosperous land owning family. He comes from Istanbul, where, a year ago, he was expelled from his private school because his activities, with other students on behalf of Kurdish education and a Kurdish identity, caused too much disruption to the school routine.
H. has been detained by the police somewhere between twenty and twenty-five times; he cannot remember precisely. Each detention lasted at least three days, and sometimes as much as six weeks. During the last one, he was raped. Profoundly humiliated by this assault, he has not been able to talk about it, not even in his Home Office interview requesting asylum. He says that he feels too dirty.
Torture is routine
Torture in Turkish police and gendarme stations is a routine occurrence. It is used, but more sporadically, in Turkish prisons. Kurds, whether active in their campaign for cultural and educational recognition, or simply as Kurds, are among the Turks most constant victims. The number of Kurds killed by the Turkish army and police in the last decade runs to many thousands. How many, both men and women, have been assaulted, brutalised and tortured, to extract confessions, to elicit information about illegal organisations, or as punishment for presumed support of Kurdish causes, no one can say, just as there are no figures for those who have died under torture. The Human Rights Association of Turkey gives the figure of eight hundred and thirty-two for the number of those tortured in 2001 alone.
What happened to H.O. is absolutely familiar. In 1998, having completed secondary school, he entered the third stage of the Turkish school system. He was then fourteen. Because his father was loosely involved with a Kurdish political grouping, HADEP, he and Kurdish friends in school decided to start a youth group of the same organisation. They were angered both by the hostility towards them of many of the Turkish pupils, and by the fact that some of the young Kurds preferred to lie about their origins, fearful of being singled out and persecuted. There were confrontations between the boys, fights; H. and his friends were followed and beaten up. The police came to the school. The teachers protested. The Kurdish boys took to holding their meetings at a nearby community centre and in each others houses.
By 1999 the Kurdish youth group was well organised, active, full of plans. The police became more interested. The day came when H., now fifteen, was taken with eight of his friends into the Public Order Directorate at Yeldegirmeni. They were blindfolded and put into separate rooms. For four days, they were kicked, punched and beaten on the soles of their feet with police truncheons. They were given no food and no water; it was only when they were taken into the filthy toilets to clean them that they were able to drink.
All during 1999 I kept being picked up by the police, blindfolded, questioned and tortured. H. cannot bring himself to say what they did to him. I ask him if he would prefer me to give him a list and he can say yes or no. He nods. Was he suspended? He nods and says, almost under his breath, while they gave me electric shocks. Suffocated? Yes. Submerged in water? He hesitates, again speaks very quietly. They used hoses, with great pressure, with ice-cold water. Kept naked? He nods. Assaulted? This time there is a very long silence. I say that I am sorry, these are things I have to ask. At last, barely audibly, on the edge of tears, leaning low, he whispers that a long thin rod was inserted into his penis and a police baton pushed up his anus. I go on. Burnt? Yes. He takes off his shirt and there is a raised scar, about four inches long running long his right shoulder bone. Electric shocks? Yes. Nails drawn? Again he hesitates, then takes off his shoes and shows how the toes on both feet were broken. Beaten and kicked? Of course. Lost consciousness? A lot. Kept in solitary confinement? Often. These tortures carried out on detainees in Turkish hands have been reliably documented by Amnesty International.
Turkey in Europe?
In April 2001 H.s school decided that his absences were too frequent and the disturbance he caused too great. They expelled him. But the police did not stop arresting and torturing him. By the end of the year, his family decided that he would not survive very much more torture. They found and paid an agent to get him away.
H. is very young. Physically, he is already well on the way to recovery. He has no appetite, which is why he is so very thin, he gets severe headaches and he has difficulty, sometimes, breathing. But, he says, these are things he can cope with. What he can no longer bear is the fear. He cannot sleep, because of his nightmares, and keeps himself awake until an uncle, who has asylum in the UK and with whom he lives, soothes him to sleep. Worse, perhaps, are the days, when he is haunted always of falling into the windy void and dying, though now he says that he thinks constantly of suicide.
H. does not want to be a refugee. He wants his parents, his two brothers and his sister. Turkey is a state party to the European Convention on Human Rights, of which Article 3 says: No one shall be subjected to torture or to inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment. Should the European Union even consider Turkey as a member while it continues routinely to create a stream of unwilling exiles (many of them to become asylum seekers in other EU countries), people so badly tortured, so systematically brutalised, that they are haunted into longing for death?
