Turkey deasas up jails

Press, 14 May 1984, Page 10

Turkey deasas up jails

NZPA-AFP Ankara The civilian Government of the Prime Minister, Mr Turgut Ozal, has launched an all-out drive to clean up the tarnished image of Turkey’s military prisons, condemned last week as torture centres by Amnesty International.

The Government spokesman and Minister of State, Mr Mesut Yilmaz, denounced as "false and totally groundless” yesterday a long study in which the London-based human rights group alleged that prisoners had been tortured and mistreated in Turkey’s military jails.

Mr Yilmaz said that such accusations were, “a wellknown propaganda tactic against Turkey by ideological terrorists who have fled abroad.” The Government statement dealt individually with witnesses quoted by Amnesty International, saying that they had either never officially complained of torture during their time in prison or that their complaints had been investigated and been found groundless. It went on to accuse Kurdish separatists of spreading false stories of torture to discredit the Government.

A concerted effort to imthe image of the

prisons began in April when the Army published a study by a Government commission denying the systematic use of torture or mistreatment of prisoners. The investigation said that 53 people had died in the country’s military prisons, and that only two of the prisoners had been killed by torture.

Seven had starved themselves to death, 14 had committed suicide by hanging, 32 had died of natural causes, and seven had died for unknown reasons, the report said. In late April the military authorities organised a tour of prisons in Ankara^ and

Diyarbakir — a jail in south-east Turkey holding Kurdish separatists — for a visiting Council of Europe delegation. Subsequent reports from the visit, which painted a fairly positive picture of prison conditions, have become key elements in the Government’s defence of its military prisons and were often cited in the official response to the Amnesty International allegations. Mr Yilmaz said that conditions in Turkish jails were "no worse than in any other country,” and he emphasised that his Government would continue efforts to improve the situation “within the limits of our economic conditions and to prevent the exceptional cases of mistreatment.” Turkish prisoners received the same quantity of food each day as soldiers in the country’s Armed Forces, were given regular medical check-ups, and had unrestricted visiting privileges, he said. But the Government’s view has been contradicted ,by numerous accounts gathered in recent months from former inmates and familities of prisoners, who allege that continuing hunger strikes by jailed activists are evidence of poor prison conditions.

The military announced the end of one such hunger strike at Ankara’s Mamak Prison on April 4, but a week later revealed that 266 Leftist prisoners in two Istanbul military jails were refusing food- in protest against their conditions. Relatives of the prisoners said that the hunger strike was to the death. “It should be clear that their conditions are unbearable since they’ve been led to begin this protest," said one relative. It appears that Mr Ozal’s Government, which took power in December after three years of military rule, has convinced Army authorities that the image of their jails needs improving. For the civilian Government it is a question of boosting the credibility, particularly among European allies, of the democratic nature of today’s Turkey. The military seems to have understood the importance of this task, and relatives of inmates in Ankara's Mamak Prison have reported a noticeable improvement in the running of the jail, even if conditions in Istanbul and Diyarbakir appear to be unchanged, say of prisoners.