Turkey's Mixed Human Rights Record
Turkey's human rights record is improving in some ways, but it's also facing new challenges that make it difficult to claim a true advance, writes Tulin Daloglu.
Although it yielded no result so far, the Republican People's Party (CHP), or Turkey's main opposition party, submitted a proposal to the speaker of the parliament on Jan. 22 to inquire about the alleged torture suffered by Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan. "We propose opening a parliamentary inquiry in order to determine when, where, and how the prime minister was tortured," the CHP statement read, demanding that the torturers be identified and held responsible for this heinous crime.
In all sincerity though, they must have thought that the prime minister could be playing the role of a victim to garner sympathy.
Erdogan, however, claimed that he was tortured when he was jailed in 1998 for four months in Istanbul after reading a poem that was considered as inciting religious hatred. "I was tortured, too, and I have condemned such practices because we've been through that affair," the prime minister said in an interview on Dec. 21, 2012. "When I was imprisoned, a lot of our friends were unfortunately tortured afterwards. Some of them are now deputies."
Many outsiders know of Turkey through the infamous film Midnight Express, which put torture in Turkish prisons under an international spotlight. It's not clear whether Turkey has ever overcome the impact of this movie, but many people sensitive to human rights all around the world could not have stopped wondering and raising concern, especially throughout the 1990s, about the Kurds' plight in the hands of the Turkish security forces.
On Dec. 17, 2012, Bulent Arinc, deputy prime minister, also raised the issue of torture and agreed with those who went "up to the mountains" to join the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK). Referring to the unfortunate experience that Gulten Kisanak, co-chairman of the pro-Kurdish Peace and Democracy Party, went through, he said: "[T]his woman faced such intense and immoral torture in Diyarbakir prison that, if I had been in her place, I would also have gone up to the mountains. More than half of the inmates released from Diyarbakir Prison did so, while the other half praises those in the mountains."
