Türkiye: broken spirits

When I arrived in prison, I was told that I would only be there for a few days and then I would be free. As I didn’t expect to stay long, I didn’t tell anyone, I didn’t close my bank accounts and I didn’t make any specific arrangements. I ended up staying in prison for almost two years.

I was first placed in an individual cell for those serving aggravated life sentences. The first night, I had no access to food, cleaning materials, linen or pillows. I was only given a blanket. The bed was so dirty that I decided to sleep on the floor. There were nine other cells and a padded cell room in the facility.

In each prison, there are generally two types of wards in which prisoners are held: wards for political prisoners and wards for non-political (“independent”) prisoners. In the case of independent prisoners, they are first forced to say that they have left the political organisation which they are accused of belonging to and that they regret their actions. The statement is then assessed by the management and supervisory boards, who decide whether it is satisfactory.

After being held in the single cell, I was placed in a ward for political prisoners. They decided to place me with a woman who had been there for 27 years. The warden and guards wanted to transfer me to another cell: they said that if I stayed in the political prisoners’ ward, I wouldn’t be eligible for probation. I didn’t want to be transferred because I knew that many independent prisoners collaborated with the prison officers, something I disapproved of. Being placed there also leads to a huge cancelling process that has ramifications for the rest of your social life. You are exiled from the community. Against all hope, I was transferred to the non-political ward sixteen days later.

In the non-political ward, the taps were broken and the water had been pouring out of them like a waterfall for a whole year, according to the other prisoners. They say they asked the administration to fix the problem, but nothing was done. They were afraid to insist or to ask for anything else because they feared being sent to another ward where conditions would be worse. The ward didn’t have a place to wash up, nor any chairs, or at least chairs that weren’t broken. The beds were disgusting, mouldy and covered in bloodstains. But if they wrote a petition to the administration, the latter would accuse them of wanting to protest and threaten them with disciplinary action. Prisoners were reluctant to submit petitions out of fear, but I always complained and demanded my rights.

The other prisoners began to hate me because they thought I was putting them in danger. They wanted to be invisible and avoid any problems with the prison administration. I felt like I was living in a state of mind akin to the Middle Ages. I was trying to remind others that we live in modern times, that we have rights and that there are consequences for infringing our rights.

The prisoners also hated and excluded me because I kept saying I was innocent. I behaved on the principle that I was not at fault and that I was being wrongly deprived of my freedom and my rights. All I had left was my life and my body. I wasn’t afraid of the repercussions. I felt like I was already at the final stage. I wasn’t afraid of losing anything else.

During COVID, I was always requesting hospital referrals so that I could get out. When I came back to the prison, I could stay alone in the quarantine ward for some time. I didn’t have to deal with others.

There was always a problem with the water in the prison. It was cut off at least two days a week. I think it had more to do with infrastructure than policy, because you could always get muddy water from the tap. There was no infrastructure for washing food or clothes. You had to use the bathroom sink. The climate in the region is very hot, reaching up to 50°C in the cells in summer. I developed uterine polyps and had severe menstrual cramps. It was unbearable. I asked for hot water bags to put on my stomach to relieve the pain, but because of the water problems, it was difficult to get them.

One night, I asked for an ambulance, but nobody called. I asked again, then again, then again, but no one came. Instead, at 11pm, ten female prison guards entered my cell and tortured me. They told me I was being erratic and forced me to beg not to be put in the sponge room (padded cell). I lost all my dignity. They broke my will and, despite my pleas, forced me into the sponge room anyway. It was in a terrible state. It looked like it hadn’t been cleaned for five years. It was covered in human excrement. The toilet was just a hole in the floor. And there was 24/7 camera surveillance that could see everything. After this incident, the treatment I received from the staff only worsened.

One day, they tried to force the prisoners to make their phone calls an hour early, at 8.30am on a Sunday. Many prisoners were still asleep. Some of us tried to resist and argued that the calls were supposed to take place at 9.30am, but they attacked us in response. All I had left in me was to accuse them of being torturers. But they responded that if they were torturers, then we must be terrorists. And so it was clear to me that they were admitting to being torturers and that there were circumstances under which they considered it acceptable.

I eventually managed to phone my mother. She suffers from psychiatric problems, so I need to be careful when we talk to not worry her. While we were talking, a prison guard started talking to me. I asked her not to interrupt my call. But she kept talking. Then other guards arrived and I started to get the feeling that something was going to happen, that they were going to attack me. As I was still on the phone with my mother, I started to tell her what was unfolding, after which the phone line was immediately cut. Everything that happened up to that point was audio recorded. The same ten guards who had forced me into the sponge room attacked me. They forced me to put down the phone, pulled my hair and dragged me back into the sponge room. They hit my head on the floor as they dragged me and I still bear the scars today. They told me to take off my underwear, but I refused. They hit me on the head and they broke one of my teeth. They kept me in the sponge room for three hours, constantly coming to ask me whether I was calm or not, to humiliate me.

I asked them: “Why are you torturing me? Did the State give you a mandate to torture me? We’re not enemies!”. One of the officers replied: “I haven’t killed anyone. I didn’t put you in a Palestinian hanging¹, that’s real torture”. This revealed to me that she had a very precise definition of torture, that didn’t include many other forms. The guards would come in and tell me, “don’t commit suicide, don’t commit suicide”, and repeat it over and over again, to try to put the idea of suicide in my head. So it wasn’t just physical violence, but also systematic psychological violence. What they did to me was a form of psychological and physical torture.

I began to suffer from gallbladder pain, probably due to stress, and I was gripped by violent episodes of pain. When they realised the severity of the situation, they took me out of the sponge room with my hands cuffed behind my back. They forced me to say that I regretted my actions. I was shaking. It was a Sunday, but the prison governor came to see me. I insisted on filing a complaint for assault and battery, which frightened them. I managed to get myself transferred to the hospital. When I got to the emergency room, the doctor pointed out bruises on my wirst but didn’t look at my forehead or my teeth. I hadn’t even had a chance to look in the mirror, so I didn’t know whether I had visible injuries or not. I was in a state of shock.

When my family came to visit me, they asked me, “who did this to you ?”. I mentioned the prison guardian, who is also from Adana, where my family lives. As conversations are monitored, the guards got scared when they heard me mention her name. They saw this as a threat and accused my family of threatening the warden. They tried to make peace between the prison warden and I, because they were afraid I would go to the members of parliament (MP) or the media. They told me not to talk to anyone about what had happened. But I sent a sealed envelope to one of the Turkish MPs anyway. Then they forcibly transferred me to Kayseri prison.

The prison guards at Tarsus hated me. I could see it in the way they looked at me. I believe they had an inferiority complex towards me because I had passed a prestigious civil service entrance exam (KPSS), which enabled me to be appointed to a high-level civil service post in the State Hydraulic Works Department. I later discovered that this was one of the reasons why I was tortured and had to be transferred. The prison warden of Kayseri prison told me that the prison warden of Tarsus had called him and told him that I was always talking about my exam results and that this was creating a problem with the staff, who frequently complained to him.

In Kayseri prison, I decided to stay in the political prisoners’ ward because of what I had experienced in Tarsus. But the context in this ward was different from the one in Tarsus. The political prisoners followed a strict self-imposed military regime. There were specific times for waking up, going to bed, talking and so on. For security reasons, they never went to see the prison warden, the prosecutor or even the psychosocial service if there was a problem. Their philosophy was: “If we’re alone, we’re vulnerable. Even psychologists have prejudices against us. We must always act collectively”. So we didn’t feel safe when we were alone. For example, talking to the prison warden was a decision that had to be made and carried out together. Even petitions were signed on behalf of the entire ward.

The prisoners in this ward were sentenced to at least 10 years, most of them more, whereas I was only sentenced to two years. So they would say I was making a lot of noise for someone who was not going to stay in prison long.

I was then placed in a 4m2 single cell for about five days. It was filthy and I had no water or cleaning equipment. They told me to use the water from the sink, but it was very dirty. There was very little ventilation and wire mesh covered the window, so I could barely see out. My eyesight deteriorated because of my time in prison, I could never see far. I still have problems today. Because of the lack of stimuli, I became very sensitive to light and noise, even the smallest sound seemed overwhelming. I also ended up suffering from liver problems, my second serious health problem involving an organ, whereas I was in perfect health prior to prison.

I also had severe cramps and heavy flow when I had my period. I bled intensely, but we were only allowed two pairs of pyjama bottoms. I could not clean them because the room was so cold and the clothes wouldn’t dry. So I had to wear them with blood stains. They told me I could hang my clothes outside to dry at 5.30pm, but when the time came, they told me I was supposed to do it before. Some guards came in and teased me about my bloodstains, saying “I’ve got 10 pyjamas, unlike this animal”. They even filed a defamation suit against me. They accused me of calling them animals! The guards who tortured me in Tarsus also filed a lawsuit against me, claiming that I had attacked them! I referred the matter to the National Preventive Mechanism, but they told me that the incident did not constitute torture. I tried to appeal against this decision. This practice of bringing charges is also frequently used against political prisoners, accusing them of insulting prison officers.

I was finally placed in another political ward, where I remained until my release.