As a human rights defender, I was always quite sensitive to the Kurdish question. However, I had just begun to understand how tragic and and profound it was, when I started to work for the Kurdish Human Rights Project (KHRP) in London between 1997 and 1998. KHRP back then was taking cases before the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) on behalf of Kurdish victims.

In those years, it became almost a routine for the ECHR to hold fact-finding hearings in Turkey to hear Kurdish victims and Turkish officials, who had almost always denied any wrongdoing on their part. Turkey was found guilty in almost all these cases of village destruction, torture and extrajudicial actions brought by the Kurds against Turkey. I attended so many hearings held for these cases during those years. I felt deeply traumatized after attending every single hearing in which the victims were heard by the court. They were telling unbelievable horror stories. I saw victims whose legs were amputated because of the gangrene they developed after being held in a built-up area during extremely hard winter conditions.

Security forces just simply threw them into this unfinished building because all other detention facilities were full of Kurdish detainees. I heard a mother who had to witness the death of her little daughter [eviscerated by] a hand grenade thrown into their house by the security forces, who saw the terrible condition of the little girl but just left her in the isolated village which had no medical aid of any kind. (See Ahmet Özkan and other Turkey cases, in particular the minutes of the fact-finding hearing by the European Commission of Human Rights.)