By Jack A. Smith, Mid-Hudson NPC-IAC
An epic tragedy is taking place in Turkey’s prisons, long known for vicious brutality toward inmates. Over 1,000 Turkish political prisoners and their supporters have participated in a protest hunger strike against prison conditions since last October--one of the longest recorded such actions in world history.
On July 9, a 30-year-old inmate named Ali Koc became the 28th person to die after fasting for 251 days, a toll that includes supporters outside prison. Many more prisoners--who subsist on salted and sugared water and vitamins--are expected to expire in coming days and weeks as emaciated human bodies wracked with pain succumb to the absence of nourishment. More than 50 of those still living have lost their mental faculties due to hunger. Another 31 protesting prisoners were slaughtered and many more were injured when the Turkish army went on a rampage against them last December.
News of the historic protest has been virtually nonexistent in the United States. Repressive Turkey is a NATO member and Washington’s close ally, while the heroic hunger strikers are mostly socialists and communists, thus rendering their deeds and lives of no consequence to the U.S. corporate mass media. In contrast, the 48-nation Council of Europe and various countries have called on Turkey to make certain concessions to end the protest. In Ireland, for example, where 10 republican political prisoners in the northern counties died as the result of a hunger strike in 1981, the Dublin government last April publicly regretted the deaths in Turkey and urged Ankara to find a prompt solution.
The Turkish political prisoners began their hunger strike on Oct. 20, protesting government plans to transfer them from dormitory-like incarceration wards to so-called “F-type” facilities modeled on U.S.-style ultra-maximum security prisons (replete with behavior modification features and isolation in tiny cells). “The purpose of the new system,” said Turkish former political prisoner Cemile Cakir at a forum in Boston June 17, “is aimed at breaking down the high level of solidarity and organization among Turkish prisoners” in the wards. The meeting was sponsored by the group Justice for Turkish Political Prisoners and the International Action Center.
The hunger strike was organized by prisoners from the Revolutionary People’s Liberation Party-Front (DHKP-C), the Communist Party of Turkey-Marxist-Leninist (TKP-ML), and the Communist Workers Party of Turkey (TKIP), but inmates from other political organization soon participated. All told, there are about 12,000 political prisoners in Turkey, representing the left and revolutionary forces, the Kurdish struggle, militant Muslim groups and independent progressives.
By mid-December the government agreed to discuss ending the strike with human rights advocates, but when it appeared a settlement might be possible, according to Cakir, “the Turkish army attacked 21 prisons with bombs and chemical weapons on Dec. 19, resulting in a massacre.” The hunger strikers were then forcibly taken to F-type facilities. Many were tortured upon arrival. Instead of breaking the strike, she continued, “the number of strikers rose to 2,000” in the aftermath.
This is the third mass hunger strike in Turkish prisons in recent years. Cakir, who subsequently wrote an article in Workers World newspaper about the history of the struggle, said a 74-day hunger strike took place in 1984, resulting in four deaths from starvation. The second, lasting 79 days, took place in 1996, resulting in 12 deaths.
Left-wing and human rights groups around the world have condemned the Turkish government’s responsibility for the strike, and many have praised the strikers. When Zehra Kulaksiz, 22, starved to death June 29, for example, the Irish National Liberation Army and the Irish Republican Socialist Party declared: “Zehra gave her life after 221 days on a death fast, not only for her comrades in the Turkish F-type isolation prisons, but for those who struggle for freedom everywhere....In the 20 years since our own hunger strike, we have remembered our three comrades who fell martyred then with their seven IRA comrades, and from this point on we will always remember Zehra and her comrades with pride.”
Zehra Kulaksiz, a non-prisoner, had refused to eat in solidarity with the hunger strikers. Her sister, Canan, 19, starved to death somewhat earlier. They died in a “death fast” house in Istanbul. Two other women have also expired in the same house. Former Irish republican prisoner of war Alex McCrory and an Irish delegation visited Zehra Kulaksiz just before her death. The Irish group also met with another women, Sevgi Erdogan, 45, when she had been fasting for 245 days. The authorities had released her from prison in an effort to break the hunger strike, so she became resident in the death fast house. She told McCrory: "When I learned of the [1981] Irish struggle and of Bobby Sands, I became very conscious that our struggle against fascism and imperialism was a struggle across the globe. I am one with you.” McCrory, whose trip to Turkey was financed by the Ballymurphy Ex-Prisoners Group, said the former POWs “now intend to organize a campaign demanding that the Turkish government negotiate a solution."
Justice for Turkish Political Prisoners urges sympathetic Americans to write Prime Minister Bulent Ecevit “demanding an end to the F-type system and attacks on the prisoners.” Forward letters to JTPP, c/o International Action Center, 31 Germania St., Jamaica Plain, MA 02130.