THE INDEPENDENT
Working as a jail torturer ruined my life
Patrick Cockburn on the former soldier who has joined the political
prisoners he tortured in Turkey’s Mamak prison by suing the generals
who led a regime of terror
Patrick Cockburn
Wednesday 15 February 2012
A former Turkish soldier, Dogan Eslik, is suing the generals who
seized power in Turkey in a military coup in 1980 and tortured
hundreds of thousands of people. He claims his experiences in Ankara’s
dreaded Mamak Prison dehumanised him, turned him into a monster, and
have effectively ruined his life. He joins thousands of other
complainants filing charges against those they hold responsible for
torture and murder.
What makes Mr Eslik’s legal action different from the others is that
they are suing because they suffered torture while he is one of those
who inflicted it. Today he is full of remorse at his past career as a
torturer. Claiming he was compelled by threats of being beaten
himself, he says that his emotional well-being has been permanently
destroyed, he has received psychiatric treatment, and he was so
traumatised that he has never been able to marry.
Called up to do his military service, Mr Eslik was made a prison
warden in Mamak Prison in 1982 and received special training from
officers in methods of inflicting pain. He is now filing charges
against the retired Generals Kenan Evren and Tahsin Sahinkaya, the
leaders of the junta which staged the coup and established a reign of
terror in Turkey at its most intense between 1980 and 1983.
“My reason for filing charges is because I was stopped by the junta
from serving in the military,” Mr Eslik told the Zaman
newspaper. “They broke our mind, our will and made us beat inmates
like animals.”
The history of barbaric punishments inflicted by the state on
opponents continues to mark Turkish society. Of the four military
coups since 1960, the most repressive was that of 12 September 1980. A
quarter of a million people were arrested and tortured according to
Amnesty International, while Turkish human rights organisations say
the true number is two or three times as great.
They list 37 different techniques used by the torturers including
electric shocks, whipping of the feet, hanging by the arms and legs
and the use of high-pressure water. Some 419 people are suspected of
being tortured to death in custody in 15 years after the coup and
thousands more were maimed for life. Many disappeared and their bones
are still being found in secret cemeteries.
Torturers have begun to admit what they did, though often claiming it
was under duress. Kamil Altiman, a private soldier who was a warden in
Mamak, says “many young people, intellectuals and writers were
jailed. My friends and I only carried out the orders we were given,
but we never supported torture.”
One victim, Yasar Yildirim, recalls how the chief warden at Mamak
ordered prisoners into the yard and then set German Shepherd dogs to
attack them. “The torture lasted for 45 minutes,” says Mr
Yildirim. “What disturbed me most was the fact that the prison warden
gave the order for the dogs to attack us as he was sipping is tea.”
With so many of the perpetrators and victims of torture still alive,
memories of past repression add hatred and fear to contemporary
Turkish politics. The army has not wholly abdicated its political
role. “Demilitarisation will take a long time,” says Cengiz Aktar,
professor of political science at Bahcesehir University. “It has taken
30 years in Spain which in many ways is similar to Turkey.”
A difference between the two countries is that in Turkey many are
unconvinced that the brutal repression of the past is ancient
history. Army generals are accused of plotting a coup as recently as
2009. Murat Belge, professor of comparative literature at Bilgi
University, argues that popular opposition is still not strong enough
to prevent a fifth military takeover of the Turkish state, though he
wonders if the army still has the organisation to carry out a coup.
He sees hopeful signs that at least some senior officers “don’t like
the way the army behaved with the Kurds – all those murders and
criminal actions – and want a cleaner state.” He believes that
revelations about secret military meetings and plots to plant bombs in
mosques as a provocation show there are those in the officer corps
struggling to prevent another coup by leaking information to the press
or the police.
But many doubt that the old ruling élite of army, security forces
and judiciary ever left power, despite the three electoral victories
of the Justice and Development Party (AKP) since 2002. They see signs
of the continuing influence of this “deep state” everywhere. The most
glaring of these came on 17 January when a court decided, ignoring
evidence to the contrary, that the murder of Turkish Armenian
journalist Hrant Dink in 2007 had been the work of a few young men and
had not involved state personnel.
In power for almost a decade, Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan has
a decreasing incentive to eliminate “the deep state”, punish the
perpetrators of past crimes, and cut back the army’s independent
power. The military and the AKP seem to have reached an
accommodation. “Reform is only half done and that is very dangerous,”
says Professor Aktar. He fears that the security forces are not
permanently defanged “but the government is happy because it knows
that the military are not going to act against [it].”
Past progress on human rights was significant. The AKP came into power
10 years ago saying there would be “zero tolerance for
torture”. Allegations are still made, but the incidence of
mistreatment is nothing like it was previously. On the other hand, 99
journalists, 60 per cent Kurdish, are in jail along with 500 students
and 3,000 Kurdish politicians, activists and protesters.
Guilt by association, along with collective punishment, continues to
fill jail cells. Though these tactics are demonstrably
counter-effective, the Turkish state is once again acting as the
recruiting sergeant for the insurgents of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party
(PKK), an organisation that looked a few years ago as if it was being
marginalised. The war in Kurdish south-east Turkey is heating up again
and incidents like the killing of 34 Kurdish villagers, 19 of them
children, by Turkish air force jets near the Iraqi border on 28
December, brought Kurdish anger to boiling point.
For the moment, the prospects for democratic change are not good and
reforms may never be more than half completed. Ece Temelkuran, a
journalist who wrote about the 19 Kurdish children killed in the air
strike, was forced out of her job. Mr Erdogan threatened those who
used the word “massacre” to describe what had happened. Free
expression is under sustained attack.
Not all developments are negative. Torturers and torture victims now
speak of what happened in the past. Some of the perpetrators are being
pursued. But the apparatus of state repressionwas never dismantled and
is once again showing alarming signs of life.