GUESTS: Dr. SAJIA ADVAN, Psychiatrist, Torture Clinic;Dr. VINCENT IACOPPINO, Sopkesman, Physicians for Human Rights;PALENE ERDA, Lawyer;SABRE ERGUL, Member of Turkish Parliament;JALE KIRT, Police Torture Victim;MEHMET ARD, Minister of Justice;"Dr. SIRTAN," Government Physician
BYLINE: DANIEL ZWERDLING
HIGHLIGHT: Daniel Zwerdling travels to Turkey where he talks with a young police torture victim and others who are trying to bring attention to increasing police torture to the international community.
BODY: Growing Police Torture Alarms Human Rights Groups
DANIEL ZWERDLING, Host: If a woman gets raped in the United States, she can go to a rape crisis clinic for counseling. Or if she gets beat up by her spouse, she can go to a battered women's shelter. But in the fast-changing nation of Turkey, there is another kind of health service that's increasingly in demand by women and by men. If you get tortured by the police, you can turn to your local torture clinic for help. Staff physician Sajia Advan [sp] takes on a tour.
Dr. SAJIA ADVAN, Psychiatrist, Torture Clinic: Our psychiatrist's room.
DANIEL ZWERDLING: [interviewing] Your psychiatrist's office.
Dr. SAJIA ADVAN: A psychotherapy room. Examination room. This is the documentation room.
DANIEL ZWERDLING: Since 1991, a group called the Human Rights Foundation has set up four medical clinics to treat torture victims in cities around the country, including this center near downtown Istanbul. The group is funded by an impressive list of donors, including the United Nations, the European Union, the Swedish Red Cross, and Amnesty International, who all charge that the Turkish police routinely use torture. This clinic looks like a typical doctor's office. There's a coffee table in the waiting room piled with newspapers and magazines. The receptionist offers coffee or tea with non-dairy creamer, and the filing cabinet is crammed with folders, every one representing a client who came to this clinic recently and told a similar story. The police accuse them of stealing somebody's wallet or belonging to a dissident political group, drag them off to jail, and then torture them for hours or days to try to make them confess. Advan pulls some files at random.
Dr. SAJIA ADVAN: OK. Here's a male, 24 years old. He works in Turkish airlines, and he had been tortured in Istanbul.
DANIEL ZWERDLING: According to the file, the police blindfolded him in a room and shouted "Run!" And when he began to run, he plunged down a stairway. They had positioned him at the top of the stairs. She pulls another case file on a young woman who said the police treated her with a common technique - they tie your hands behind your back with a rope, then hoist the rope until you're dangling off the ground, tie a cement weight to your feet and leave you dangling from your hands for hours. According to the medical exam, the patient has severe nerve damage in her arms and shoulders. As we're leafing through the files, Advan says she hopes we'll excuse her, she's going to light up a cigarette, and she points sheepishly to a sign on the wall.
Dr. SAJIA ADVAN: It's written "Thank you for not smoking" but we smoke.
DANIEL ZWERDLING: [interviewing] You smoke, too? You're a physician.
Dr. SAJIA ADVAN: Yeah.
DANIEL ZWERDLING: But it's terrible for your health.
Dr. SAJIA ADVAN: Terrible for my health? There are lots of terrible things for my health in this country. Oh, it's not only the cigarettes.
DANIEL ZWERDLING: Turkey's leaders are trying to convince the rest of the world that Turkey is a modern democratic country, but the stories being told at the torture clinics and the medical evidence these clinics are collecting are hampering Turkey's efforts. In recent years, the U.S. has given Turkey more foreign aid and loans than all but a handful of other countries. But human rights groups are pressuring Congress to cut way back on that aid, partly because they charge that Turkish officials condone torture. Meanwhile, Turkey's leaders have been asking the nations of Western Europe to accept it as a full member of the European Union, along with Britain and Germany and France. But European leaders keep refusing partly, they say, because of the "torture problem," as they call it. Just last month, the same medical group that's digging up mass graves in Bosnia released the results of its human rights investigation in Turkey, and according to spokesman Vincent Iacoppino [sp] of Physicians for Human Rights, virtually everybody who gets detained by the Turkish police has a decent chance of getting tortured.
Dr. VINCENT IACOPPINO, Spokesman, Physicians for Human Rights: Certainly, we've spoken to many survivors of torture who- whose crimes were nothing more than selling food on the street, or someone who is parked in the wrong place as a taxi driver, or a young girl who is hanging a poster.
DANIEL ZWERDLING: [interviewing] You and your colleagues have studied torture in many countries, right?
Dr. VINCENT IACOPPINO: Yes.
DANIEL ZWERDLING: Have you studied torture in any country where you believe torture is used in a more sophisticated way and in a more brutal way than in Turkey?
Dr. VINCENT IACOPPINO: Not in my experience.
DANIEL ZWERDLING: Right now, in fact, there's a court trial going on in Turkey concerning allegations of torture that are so shocking, the alleged victims are so young, that even jaded Turkish politicians and journalists are taking notice. On a recent morning, we travel to Turkey's Aegean coast to meet two of the people who have exposed this torture scandal. One is a member of Turkey's parliament, a man named Sabre Ergul [sp]. The other is a lawyer, a woman named Palene Erda [sp]. As we start driving down the highway, Erda glances at the cars following us out of habit. She speaks to our interpreter.
PALENE ERDA, Lawyer: [through translator] When we first started research on this case, we used to go to Manisa very open and we used to get tailed by the police.
DANIEL ZWERDLING: In a case like this one, the antagonists disagree over crucial details, but everybody accepts a few basic points. Late last year somebody tacked up political protest posters and scrawled graffiti around the town of Manisa, at the foot of craggy, granite hills covered with pine trees near the Aegean Sea. The placards and graffiti generally denounced the fact that high school students have to pay to take a university entrance exam. "Education should be free," the posters said. "Ban paid education." As we enter Manisa, we pass concrete apartment buildings with wet laundry flapping from the windows.
SABRE ERGUL, Member of Turkish Parliament: [through translator] This is the police station of Manisa, and the fourth floor, they do the torture there.
DANIEL ZWERDLING: And Sabre Ergul pulls over next to a billboard with huge letters and a devilish-looking cartoon. [interviewing] What does this billboard say? It's...
SABRE ERGUL: It's a traffic billboard saying, "Stop the traffic monster inside you."
DANIEL ZWERDLING: In other words, drive safely.
PALENE ERDA: Yes, drive safely.
DANIEL ZWERDLING: And here is what was graffiti on this traffic billboard. It's now been scrubbed out with some white paint or something. [interviewing] What did this say here?
PALENE ERDA: It's says, you know, "Damn the state," that kind of thing.
DANIEL ZWERDLING: During the last week of December, the Manisa police rounded up 16 young people, as young as 14 years old, whom they suspected of scrawling the slogans and putting up the placards. And one of them was attorney Palene Erda's brother. The way Erda tells the story, four policemen knocked on the door of her family's house one afternoon and asked if they could see her brother. And although she was surprised, she wasn't particularly worried since the police were polite and just asked her brother if he'd please accompany them to the station to answer a couple of questions. But when her brother didn't come home that night or even call, Erda got frightened, and the next day she asked her friend from parliament, Sabre Ergul, if he'd go over to the police station to find out what was going on. At this point, Ergul picks up the story as we stop by his Manisa office to make some phone calls. When he and Erda arrived at the police station, Ergul says, speaking through our interpreter, they learned that her brother was in custody, along with more than a dozen other young suspects, and they asked to see him. But the officer on duty refused.
SABRE ERGUL: I was sitting at the police station and I said, "Tell me why- why you dealt with these kids? What- what did they do?" And they were saying that they believed that they were in a part of the illegal organization and they wrote a lot of horrible things against the state to the walls of the school and this and that. So they explained to me all this, and they said that we are worried that all these kids started so early to this business and we have to punish them. And when we were talking about this a half an hour passed. So I was getting, you know, kind of anxious - where are the kids, I want to see them and Palene wants to see her brother.
DANIEL ZWERDLING: At this point, Ergul says he started feeling irritated and thinking to himself, "Why am I acting so helpless with this low-level policeman? I am a member of parliament." So he started wandering around the station on his own, trying to find somebody to help him and he ended up on the fourth floor.
SABRE ERGUL: The room was totally empty. Nobody was there. And I- when I'm sitting in a room I look through the door and I see that kind of a iron door, iron bars. But it's half open, that is. So I'm looking at there what to do and suddenly I heard a very terribly noisy, you know, music started.
DANIEL ZWERDLING: [interviewing] Music?
SABRE ERGUL: Music. Marches kind of music, military music started suddenly, and I can hear that. And nobody around, nobody in the room, nobody outside, nobody there. Suddenly with- in the music I thought I heard that- all the scream, kind of funny human cat kind of screams. And in the same moment, in the same second, I move towards the door. Then the scream was coming and music was coming from there. And I opened the door, what I was saw was a shocking view - one of the girls, all naked, lying on the floor, another naked girl just sitting, and one of the boy was naked and his knees was towards his abdomen, and he was holding his right buttock with his hand. And he was on the floor, and he was shouting, and another naked boy standing. And they were all blindfolded. And the lying one, lying girl on the floor, there was four policemen around her. Suddenly four policemen rushed to the door and they were trying to close the door; I was trying to open and I don't remember what I did because I was in shock.
DANIEL ZWERDLING: One of the teenagers at the police station was 17-year- old Jale Kirt [sp]. She's turned 18 since then. And we dropped by her family's home in a neighborhood of one-story row houses made of whitewashed cinder blocks.
[sound of Jale Kirt's family talking]
DANIEL ZWERDLING: As we walk up to the front stoop, her extended family greets us, and Jale, who's small, dark haired, almost delicate, makes the introductions.
JALE KIRT, Police Torture Victim: [through translator] My uncle's daughter next to me.
DANIEL ZWERDLING: OK.
JALE KIRT: My father's sister and husband.
DANIEL ZWERDLING: We take off our shoes inside the doorway, a common custom in Turkey, and as Jale's mother and sisters make tea, we plop on pillows on the floor of their tiny sitting room next to a television draped with a doily. Before the police picked her up, Jale says, she was basically just another high school student. She took mostly math and social studies courses, although she wishes now that she'd taken more music courses because that's her first love.
JALE KIRT: You know that we had a group in high school, a music group. We had an orchestra and seven people. I was one of the soloists, vocalists. The other one was a male, and two guitar and one flute.
DANIEL ZWERDLING: [interviewing] Gee, we'd love to hear the sort of songs you were singing.
[Jale Kirt sings in Turkish]
DANIEL ZWERDLING: Jale says the police came for her one day while she was working at her part-time job as a receptionist in a doctor's office. Jale says she never put up any posters around town criticizing the government, but she adds that her folk music group does sing politically oriented songs, the Turkish equivalent of American protest songs of the 1960s. Jale says the police blindfolded her, locked her in a cell, and to tell what happened next she picks up a piece of paper. According to attorney Palene Erda, the kids are too traumatized to talk openly about their torture, so she's asked them to write down their experiences, and Jale reads from her notes.
JALE KIRT: They stripped me with a lot of threatening words and swear words, and then I was all naked. And I was feeling that they're touching certain places in my body. And then they put me on a wet blanket naked, and I start screaming. I know that I screamed because they were doing something in my tip of my toes. And then I fainted because I was very scared. I came to my senses when they were hitting me all over the- on the sides of my body. I tried to talk. I said, "I will do anything you want. I'll do anything you want." And they took me back to my cell. It continued a long time, these kind of things.
DANIEL ZWERDLING: Now Erda says she wants to add some details about the teenager's torture sessions because she says these details, as troubling as they are to hear, help make a crucial point that Turkish police practice sophisticated kinds of torture. They use special torture equipment, and international human rights groups say that proves that the police committing torture aren't just rogue cops out of control beating somebody up in a rage, their brand of torture takes planning and money and training.
PALENE ERDA: Firstly, they do electric shocks. When they are doing that they are using a kind of a blanket, we call it. But it's not a blanket, it's kind of certain fabric. It doesn't pass electric to other people. So the kid's on that wet blanket and they pour a lot of water on them. And them they start from the right toe - they put one cable there - and then with the other cable they go around genitals, belly area, teeth and breasts and lips and armpits. And then volume increases time to time with the, you know, shock volume. You know, that they turn the testicles around. That's one way. And then they do- they put stick from rectum. And then they shout when they are putting the stick in the rectum, they shout, "We made you faggots. That's good. You have a new job now." They shout it like that. And then they hose water, very cold water, at them. And then when they get out of the shower, they hold them in front of the cold air conditioning.
DANIEL ZWERDLING: Incidentally, human rights groups say, the loud marching music that police play during torture sessions is designed to drown out the screams. The police allegedly tortured Jale and the 15 other young people for as many as 10 straight days. But several days into the torture the police allowed Palene Erda to meet with the kids briefly, and Erda says when she walked into the jail holding area and saw the group of them just sitting there silent and broken, she felt helpless. She's a divorce lawyer, Erda says. She'd never been in a situation like this before and wasn't sure what to say.
PALENE ERDA: And I felt horrible in that moment. I felt very bad, sick. So, it- my first purpose was to get their confidence because they don't have confidence for anybody. They didn't trust anybody. And I decided to approach them not as a lawyer, but as a sister. So I decided to tell them a joke.
DANIEL ZWERDLING: And here's the joke that Palene Erda told the teenagers in jail. The CIA, the KGB and Turkey's security police decide to hold a competition to see who can catch a rabbit fastest. The CIA agents say, "We can do it in 10 minutes," so they let a rabbit out of its cage and the animal goes hopping into the woods and, sure enough, the CIA guys return 10 minutes later holding the rabbit. The KGB says, "Big deal. We'll catch the rabbit in five minutes," and they do. And now it's Turkey's turn, and the Turkish police say, "We can catch the rabbit faster than anybody." But after the rabbit bounds into the woods, the Turkish police are gone for 20 minutes, 30 minutes, 40 minutes, and when the Turkish police finally reappear after more than an hour, they still haven't found the rabbit. Instead, they're dragging a huge, beat-up elephant. When the CIA and KGB say, "Where's the rabbit?" the elephant says, "Uh, I'm the rabbit."@PGPH "Get it?" Erda asks the kids as they were sitting there in the jail. The Turkish police tortured the elephant until it was willing to say anything. Turkey's minister of justice works out of a suite at the top of a marble stairway. As we make our way up to see him, we pass clusters of men wearing suits with sunglasses and walkie-talkies, and when we enter the minister's private office he's wearing sunglasses, too. The moment we sit down, Minister Mehmet Ard [sp] says he wants to make something clear.
MEHMET ARD, Minister of Justice: [through translator] It is impossible to think of existence of systematic torture in Turkey.
DANIEL ZWERDLING: Actually, although Mehmet Ard is justice minister on the particular morning that we meet him, he's been essentially promoted since then to the post of interior minister. Ard says he and other government officials deplore the use of torture. He says the nation's laws forbid it, and the fact is, he says, the overwhelming majority of police have never tortured anybody. The few policemen who have are rare exceptions. When I cite a United Nations report condemning what it calls "systematic torture in Turkey," and when I cite another report by the Council of Europe charging the torture is widespread, Ard dismisses them.
MEHMET ARD: I should say that it is not appropriate. This assessment is merciless. You should go more places. You should do more investigation, and you should go to the four corners of this country, and then you will see that this assessment is not correct. I'm not saying that there are not human right violations. As in any country in the world, there are isolated cases.
DANIEL ZWERDLING: [interviewing] Of course, it's not just human rights groups who are making these charges, the U.S. State Department in this report right here says "torture is often employed." That's the U.S. State Department's word. Why do you think the U.S. State Department is so misinformed, if what you're saying is true?
MEHMET ARD: Of course, now there are human rights violations even in America. We can see that in the newspapers. We read about it in the newspapers. We see it on television. Our friends should be confident that there are no more human rights violations in Turkey then anywhere else in the world.
DANIEL ZWERDLING: And according to our recent court cases, show that Turkish leaders want to stamp out any torture once and for all. In recent years, he says, and the record confirms this, Turkish prosecutors have put dozens of policemen on trial on charges of committing torture, and the case of the 16 young people in Manisa is perhaps the most recent example. When the kids first reported they'd been tortured early this year, Turkish officials dismissed their stories. But a few months ago, a prosecutor filed charges against 10 policemen in Manisa on grounds that they tortured those young people. The policemen are on trial right now. Minister Mehmet Ard says cases like this prove that Turkey is a democracy. But the day after we talk to the justice minister, we talked to one of his own employees and he says, in effect, the justice minister is lying. Torture is one of Turkey's most common police techniques.
"Dr. SIRTAN," Government Physician: [through translator] Of course it is police policy. They are using it because they are ignorant.
DANIEL ZWERDLING: Call him "Dr. Sirtan." [sp] He's a government physician who treats people while they're in police custody. He agrees to talk with us only after we promise not to use his real name because what he's telling us could get him in trouble. We've also disguised his voice. Sirtan meets with us in a rather unlikely spot, considering the topic - a hotel garden restaurant filled with foreign tourists and complete with fountain and classical duo.
[sound of violin and piano music]
DANIEL ZWERDLING: According to police policy, law enforcement officials are supposed to have government doctors like Dr. Sirtan examine anybody who's in jail, which is what the police did in the Manisa case. While the young people were in detention, the police sent them to government doctors at the state hospital, and those doctors reported that they did not see any evidence that the kids had actually been tortured. Defense lawyers say this proves that the 10 policemen on trial are innocent, that they never tortured anybody. But the evidence suggests these medical exams are a sham. According to the group Physicians for Human Rights, government doctors almost never report that a prisoner has been tortured, even when they believe it's true because they're afraid of retaliation. Earlier this year, the groups says, the government fired four physicians who stepped out of line by reporting that a prisoner was tortured to death. The truth is, says Dr. Sirtan, the Turkish police are badly trained and badly equipped. They don't know how to investigate crimes. They seldom catch the real culprits, and so they take the easy way out.
"Dr. SIRTAN": Police usually using torture tries to make an innocent person confess to a crime. They have to catch someone and bring them before the court or they will lose their own job. So innocent people are being forced to admit to crime.
DANIEL ZWERDLING: There are two trials under way now in Turkey stemming from the day that somebody tacked up those protest posters around Manisa. And the trials' outcomes could suggest whether it's business as usual in Turkey or whether the country is taking a step toward democracy. In one courtroom, they're prosecuting the 10 policemen for allegedly torturing the young people suspected of putting up the posters. In the other courtroom, they're prosecuting the young people for putting put up the posters. But it's more than a vandalism case. Prosecutors charge that the kids are terrorists.
[sound of Jale Kirt's family talking]
DANIEL ZWERDLING: Back at Jale Kirt's family home in Manisa, the 18- year-old is out of jail on a sort of bond as she periodically attends her trial. She says she's trying not to think about the case but to move on with her life, playing a little music and going to counseling twice a week to cope with the scars of the torture.
JALE KIRT: After I left the police station, I felt very, very old, you know, really old. I like an old person. They know how they say here, you know, that old people know everything, they're wise. And- and usually then when they look at us, they say, "Oh, you're just a kid, you don't know anything." And I don't feel like that any more because, you know, nothing can surprise me any more, I've seen everything. I feel like that, and that makes me old, I guess.
DANIEL ZWERDLING: Nobody expects a verdict before the new year, either in the case against Jale and the other young people or in the case against the 10 policemen. But if you look at the outcomes of similar trials in Turkey, you can get a sense of what might happen. According to international human rights groups, the majority of Turkish policemen accused of torture either get acquitted or let off with minor punishments, such as being transferred to a different precinct. According to Jale's lawyer, most people accused of being terrorists get convicted, and if Jale Kirt and her young co-defendants are convicted, Turkish law says they'll have to spend at least 12-1/2 years in prison. And for this evening, that's All Things Considered.
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LANGUAGE: ENGLISH
LOAD-DATE: September 24, 1996