Human Rights
Prison Conditions in Turkey
Herman Schwartz is a professor at the American University law school in Washington, DC and is a contributing editor of The Nation magazine. In late March he visited Turkey on behalf of Helsinki Watch to investigate prison conditions in that country. He has done similar missions to Poland, Cuba, Czechoslovakia and Brazil. Ömer Karasapan and Joe Stork spoke with him in Washington in June 1989.
Your mission was to look specifically at prison conditions?
“The Fear Can Drive You Crazy”
“Roya” is how she wants to be known. She was arrested in Iran in the fall of 1982. She was released four years later and lived in Tehran for 15 months before coming to the US in early 1988. Eric Hooglund spoke with her in Washington in October 1988.
Can you describe the circumstances of your arrest?
One day I was at home alone. Four armed men in civilian clothes came looking for me. They showed me a card from the Revolutionary Prosecutor’s office. They shoved their way in and confiscated all our tapes, books, letters and other personal papers. Then they ordered me to come with them. They pushed me into their car, forced me onto the floor and took me to Evin Prison.
More Deadly Than Tears
The roll call of the 146 dead published by the Palestine Human Rights Information Center in Jerusalem, March 20, 1988, is dominated by gunshot victims: shot in the head, shot in the chest, shot in the neck. But among the 49 “deaths from other causes,” 31 were killed by a “non-lethal” riot control weapon euphemistically called tear gas. Physicians for Human Rights, which studied the massive use of tear gas against demonstrators by the South Korean government in 1987, says that tear gases should more properly be called “poisonous gases” and should be “banned from further use against human populations everywhere.”
International Human Rights Organizations and the Palestine Question
Unlike the news media, human rights organizations have only limited contact with mass public opinion, but they constitute a primary source of information on human rights conditions around the world. They play a subtle, crucial role in shaping the opinions of political leaders, news commentators and other strata of articulate opinion. Their ability to influence political debate and issues can sometimes lead to startling results, as recently happened when 40 US senators voiced their concern over Indonesian atrocities in East Timor. [1] This achievement was all the more remarkable in that it occurred in the absence of popular outcry and media coverage.
Human Rights and the Politics of Computer Software
Once the exclusive province of supranational bodies like the UN and small independent watchdog organizations like Amnesty International, concern for human rights has blossomed. Existing institutions have grown, expanding their scope and stepping up their activities, while a new generation of human rights organizations, often quite specialized in narrow areas of concern like censorship, or explicitly political in their aims, has seen the light of day.
Document: Testimony of a Syrian Censor
He does not wish to be identified because he believes that the long arm of the Syrian government will reach him anywhere in the world. Take his word for it, he said, he knew them better than anyone else. He ought to; he was once a censor in the ministry of information. He is also a writer and journalist who would like to continue as such.
Censorship as we know it now in Syria began with the first coup d’état in 1947 which was led by Husni al-Zaim, and which was followed by a series of coups. With each new coup, censorship increased and was further tightened. By the time of the last coup, led by Hafiz al-Asad in 1970, the whole state structure was transformed into one large intelligence and censorship apparatus.
Prison, Gender, Praxis
Do you, too, believe that I betrayed my motherhood when I left you, against my will, to go to prison?…. I have read an article by the Moroccan writer Hadiya Sa‘id…she expressed a point of view maintained by some of our friends who love me and are concerned about you. She says that I must cease my political work and leave it to Husayn, for the sake of you children…. [1]
So writes Farida al-Naqqash to her daughter in 1981, during her second confinement in the Barrages women’s prison just north of Cairo.
Police Riot in Yarmuk
Just after midnight on May 15, 1986, some 75 Special Forces of the Public Security Department stormed a dormitory at Yarmuk University to put an end to a student demonstration. They tear-gassed and clubbed the students with “a zeal that bordered on the ruthless,” according to witnesses. At least three and probably six students — men and women — were killed in the melee, scores were injured and hundreds detained. Three of those killed were Palestinians.
“A Policeman on My Chest, A Scissor in My Brain”
On Wednesday, June 16, 1987, police units entered the offices of the Jordanian Writers’ Association, ordered all writers and employees out, then searched and sealed the premises. The order to disband the Association came directly from the desk of Prime Minister Zaid al-Rifa‘i. Under the martial law in effect since 1967, he is also the military governor general of Jordan. The Ministry of Information claimed that JWA “members had gone beyond the Association’s aims by using the JWA as a meeting place to serve their own selfish interests.” [1]
“The Lion’s Right to Roar in His Cage”
Nabil al-Hilali has been active as a labor and civil liberties lawyer in Egypt since the 1950s. He serves on the executive committees of the Egyptian Bar Association and the International Committee of Democratic Jurists. He ran as an independent in the parliamentary elections of April 1987. In 1986 he was acquitted after a long trail on charges of being a member of the illegal Egyptian Communist Party. His defense in that trial has been published in Beirut as a small book called In Defense of Liberty. Joe Stork interviewed him in Cairo in February 1987.
How long have you been engaged in this work of defending workers and political prisoners?
38 years, sometimes as a lawyer and sometimes as a defendant myself.
An Unusual Hunger Strike in Istanbul
Sporting bleached blond hair, black stockings, heavy mascara and mauve-tinted lenses, some 30 homosexuals from Istanbul began a hunger strike at Taksim Park on April 27, the first day of Ramadan. Nearly all of them transvestites, and all proudly wearing bright pink boutonnieres, they said they would continue “until arbitrary police violence ends.” Eighteen of the strikers claim to be recent victims of police violence, and they have medical certificates to back them up.
“They Say There Is Democracy in This Country?”
“Unless you allow our sons, the journalists that you beat up, to come back here, you will have to move my dead body from this spot. They say there is democracy in this country — where? As if what they do to our people inside weren’t enough, they drag and beat us up, 70-year-old mothers and all. If I could, I’d pull up my skirt and show you my bruises…. We are afraid of nothing!”
Torture in Turkey
Political prisoners in Turkey have long confronted a chilling reality: once arrested, they face almost certain torture. Based on thousands of reports over many years, Amnesty International has concluded that “anybody detained in the country for political reasons is at great risk of being tortured, and very few detainees are not subjected to some form of ill-treatment in police stations, security forces’ interrogation and detention centres and prisons.” This has been true under all Turkish administrations, military or civilian, since the early 1970s.
Turkey: Reading the Small Print
In early April, the president of the banned Turkish Peace Association invited friends from END (European Nuclear Disarmament) and other peace groups across Europe to join him and the TPA executive in Istanbul in celebrating the tenth anniversary of the founding of the TPA. They planned to hold a public peace forum and a press conference.
The Trial of Khamis Chamari
For a few hours on Saturday morning last June 27, a small antechamber in Tunis’s main court building was filled to capacity with a veritable who’s who of Tunisia’s opposition. At any other time and venue, those present would have risked arrest for unlawful assembly. But there — beneath a large discolored print of President Habib Bourguiba in lawyer’s garb — they milled around without restrictions. Also in the room were a representative of Amnesty International, four or five journalists from the BBC and international news agencies, an observer from the International Commission of Jurists and a junior official from the American embassy.
Interview with ‘Abd al-Nur ‘Ali Yahya
The driving force behind the original Algerian Human Rights League is ‘Abd al-Nur ‘Ali Yahya, 66, a lawyer who has spent all of his adult life struggling for democratic causes in Algeria. He began as a school teacher in his native Kabylia, joined the Algerian People’s Party in 1945 and the National Liberation Front (FLN) 10 years later A founding member of the General Union of Algerian Workers (UGTA), he was arrested by the French in 1956 and spent the next five years in detention. Upon his release, he became secretary-general of the UGTA. After independence, he was elected deputy from Tizi-Ouzou. For a time he served as a minister in the Boumedienne government, but he resigned in 1968 and took up law.
Disaster Area
The recent history of the struggle for human rights in the Arab world is marked by some modest success, but the task remains enormous. The region is a disaster area in terms of human rights. Irrespective of the type of government, ideological coloration or foreign policy orientation, whether pro-West or pro-Soviet, conservative or “progressive,” theocratic or secular, nearly all regimes have displayed a thorough disregard for individual human rights. Most have been reluctant to cooperate with international human rights organizations; most have made it a criminal offense to disseminate information about human rights violations inside the country or abroad; most still have not ratified treaties such as the United Nations human rights charters.
The Middle East and Human Rights
Ibn Sina hospital, in a beautiful suburb of Rabat, is Morocco’s finest medical facility. It is the major teaching hospital of Morocco’s top medical school, a place where Moroccan and foreign medical experts carry on research and perform medical care at the highest level.
Not long ago, a patient jumped to his death from the top floor of Ibn Sina. His body bore signs of torture. A special section of the hospital, it turned out, had been used for years to detain and perhaps even to interrogate political prisoners.
Treatment of Prisoners of War in the Iran-Iraq Conflict
Excerpts from International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) press release, May 11, 1983:
Geneva — Since the outbreak of the conflict between the Islamic Republic of Iran and the Republic of Iraq the highest authorities of both those states have several times confirmed their intention to honor their international obligations deriving from the Geneva conventions. Despite these assurances and its repeated representations, the International Committee of the Red Cross, which has had a delegation in both countries since the start of hostilities, more than thirty months ago, has encountered all kinds of obstacles in the exercise of its mandate under the Geneva conventions.
Turkish Regime Pursues Journalists
On February 29, 1984, the Ankara correspondent for United Press International, Ismet Imset, was visited just before midnight by an acquaintance from the Security Forces. The visitor warned him that he and his wife (presumably along with their three-year-old child) were about to be taken into detention for interrogation by a special squad of police from Istanbul.
Deliberate intimidation or friendly warning? It hardly matters. Imset and his wife spent the next three days sheltered in the house of the Reuters correspondent. For them, the incident was the climax to a year of terror ever since Imset complained officially and publicly after police in Istanbul beat him up when he applied for a passport to go abroad on work for UPI.
