Pınar Selek: “I saw the gravity of imprisonment”

A month or two after my arrival, I learned from the television that I was accused of having carried out a terrorist attack and that the authorities wanted to sentence me to death.¹ There were televisions in all the dormitories. I had come into the public eye and was appearing on the front pages of all the newspapers. I wasn’t sure how to fight back. The other prisoners encouraged me to forget about my potential trial and to stay active and make use of my time. I did, and I learned a lot during that period. Most, but not all, of the Kurdish women in the dormitory were activists. At the same time, they were vastly different from one another. There was no hierarchy, but we did organise ourselves, in a way, to manage community life and collective time. We had our own kitchen and took turns cooking. We needed an organisational structure to avoid simply passing the time. We didn’t want to let them succeed in confining us. We didn’t want to kill time, we wanted to venture beyond the walls.

We did about half an hour of sport every morning before breakfast. We scheduled meetings, discussions and conferences. We learned something every day. After lunch, we organised free time, with at least 4-5 hours of quiet time per day. These moments, when no one was allowed to speak, made it possible to create free time for each person. In the afternoon, we organised activities that were open to everyone.

There were workshops in philosophy, dance, choir, and theatre, and language workshops for Kurdish, French and English. That was when I learned Kurdish, and many other things besides. Once a month, we held community meetings where we discussed our organisation and what we would like to change.

We were allowed to move freely within the women’s unit and meet prisoners from other dormitories. When we went for a medical visit or to the visitation area, we went to the other side of the prison, and we could also see the male prisoners. I would go there three or four times a week, and I spent an hour or two talking to the men. We often spoke of politics. Visits with friends and family were held twice a week. There were screens and bars, but the officers were not with us. There were also visits with solicitors twice a week. So, in total, we could share information with the outside world four times a week. Prison, in my time and in my father’s time in the 1980s, had a significant impact outside.

My research work had been confiscated upon my arrest. In prison, I decided not to live in frustration and to continue writing instead. I began working on the Turkish peace movements to develop an anti-nationalist and anti-militarist critique.

I conducted sociological research through interviews, by way of letters sent in my name by my solicitors. I also wrote a lot about the trauma that I had experienced. During my arrest, the police officers had confiscated my private diary. They read it and commentated on it in front of me while I was attached to a wall. I think that seeing their hands on my private diary was one of the worst things I experienced. Around a year and a half later, I started writing in my diary again. That was hugely important to me. Some of the officers were fond of us and respected us. They let me set up a table between two dormitories where I could go to write at night, because the typewriter made a lot of noise.

That time was an incredibly positive experience for me. We could talk about anything, we had time to get a lot done, we had television and many books, and we could communicate with the outside world. My experiences of prison served me greatly after my release.

In 1999, the media said that prisons were being ruled by terrorist organisations creating radicalisation. The prison service began building new high-security prisons to isolate prisoners and counteract the influence of the organisations. Artists, actors, musicians, journalists, and poets rallied en masse. They went to the Ministry of Justice to protest these new facilities. In prison, we went on alternating hunger strikes to prevent our transfer. We followed the movement outside of prison through the newspapers: it was pretty incredible. Then two or three groups of political prisoners went on death fasts. In the beginning, they only had water and sugar. Then some of them stopped eating sugar. The hunger strikes were followed in all the prisons. I noticed that only the people on death fasts were taken seriously by prison management. I wanted to draw the public’s attention to this policy that forced us to go on death fasts if we wanted our demands to be heard. So, I started an indefinite hunger strike to protest. The media said that the terrorist organisations in prison were forcing young people to participate in hunger strikes, that they were being controlled and needed to be saved.

On the night of 19 December 2000, the 25th day of my hunger strike, soldiers carried out major military operations. The soldiers entered the prisons and started throwing bombs.

They wanted to forcibly transfer us to the new prisons. They called it “Operation Return to Life”. Some left-wing prisoners started to climb the barricades. The Kurds I was living with decided not to engage in a confrontation with these soldiers. We couldn’t find a way to resist. We could tell they wanted to kill us. They started setting fires, and I saw people beginning to burn. They gathered us together in a room. There were around 120 of us; there wasn’t even room to sit down. Through the window, we saw what was happening outside in the yard. I saw people I knew – friends – burning. In total, 38 people died during the operation, and many others were mutilated. We stayed in that room for three days.

Of course, there were no toilets. When we needed a pee, we knocked on the door so one of the guards would take us there. On the way, I passed a television, where they were saying that the terrorist prisoners had taken up arms and killed people. There was no way we could have had weapons! The media showed burned women who were crying out.

They described us as lunatics, outcasts, dangerous people. That’s when I realised the justice system might not see the truth. When I arrived back in the room, I pretended to sleep so I could cry. I wanted to stay strong for the others.

After seeing me cry, one of the girls from my dormitory said to me, “Pınar, I have a surprise for you. I had been waiting, but I think now is the right time.” When I left the dormitory, I had taken everything that was on my desk but, in the rush, I had overlooked a notebook containing the most substantial part of my research on the peace movements, which was on my bed. She had seen it and retrieved it for me. She gave it to me, telling me how important it was to stay active and that I should write the preface now. That’s exactly what I did.

A number of the prisoners were taken to the new high-security prisons. The rest, including myself, were taken to an ordinary prison in Istanbul. We were assigned to two dormitories, alongside prisoners from three other prisons, while we waited to be sent elsewhere. We met other prisoners during recreational walks, and we asked them what they had experienced in their former prisons. We were all devastated.

One day, on the television, I saw my father, my mother, my sister, my loved ones, my coworkers, children living on the streets, trans people, and activists for various causes, crowds of people, all in front of the prison. And I learned that I was going to be released. Experts had been able to determine that the explosion at the spice market had not been from a bomb. My father had requested my release while awaiting the hearing. The next day, I made newspaper headlines: “Pınar Selek is innocent.” I had just gone through the powerful experience of that operation with my friends, and now I had to leave. I remember we exchanged gifts. Our bonds were so strong that we wanted to have souvenirs of each other. The soldiers knocked at the door. “Pınar Selek, get ready!” Leaving my friends was hard, but I left. I was able to take the notebook in which I had written my preface by hiding it against my stomach.

All I could think of was how the media had shown my friends who cried out, who burned, who had lost everything.

I wanted to make a speech, use the media, take advantage of their strength. I was fortunate because all the people that I wanted to reach in my life were there, waiting for me.

When leaving, I made a very humanist speech, in a fairly gentle tone, explaining that violence begets violence and that I planned to dedicate my life to fighting it. It was live, and I knew my friends in prison were listening to me. That is how my life in prison ended on 22 December 2000.

Suddenly, because I had been exonerated, my image had changed. All the journalists wanted to take my picture. But I refused. They followed us all the way to the house, and I didn’t leave for three days. They wanted to show that “Pınar Selek was released from prison, she’s happy, she’s satisfied, she’s eating…” But the operation had just resulted in several deaths, and many people were still on death fasts. My mother succeeded in getting me out of the house, evading the journalists. She brought me to the prison where I had been held and showed me the window of my dormitory from the outside.

I thought back to my arrival, to the habits I had formed, to my perspective, which had been narrowed to focus on the people surrounding me. And I saw the gravity of imprisonment. That’s when I finally felt free, when I looked at where I had lived for two and a half years.

Prisons have drastically changed shape since 2001. I am in correspondence with many loved ones who are currently in prison. Now, prisoners are held in two- or three-person cells. These are not necessarily people who get on well with each other. There are no longer any collective dynamics. Social life is significantly reduced. Everything that happens is very arbitrary. Many people who are seriously ill are not treated.

When my father was in prison, during the military regime, there was a lot of violence in prison. In my time, torture was systematic in police stations but not in the prisons. The torture I endured utterly destroyed my body. I haven’t been able to lift heavy objects ever since.

Today, torture in police stations is less systematic, but you hear many stories of physical violence in prison, in particular in the Kurdish prisons. They seem more out of control and arbitrary.

There is also a procedural issue. Most of the people arrested only learn their count of indictment after being sent to prison, sometimes even a long time afterwards. They do not know how long they will stay behind bars. “Anonymous witnesses” are sometimes used. You aren’t given any opportunities to defend yourself. It’s incredibly challenging. Some solicitors are tortured or subjected to strip searches when they go to see prisoners. Prison conditions vary within the same prison, and how prisoners are treated differs from one person to another, making ill-treatment difficult to control.

Now, prisoners must pay part of the electricity bill, and when there isn’t enough money, the power is shut off and they are left in the dark. It’s another way of reinforcing their isolation.

Detention’s individualisation makes it harder to establish means of resistance. We are in a highly militarised, very nationalistic context, where the government rhetoric is frightening. In this context, it is vitally important that legal associations and international institutions go to Türkiye to visit the prisons.