The Forgotten
Asiye Guzel Zeybek is a journalist, editor-in-chief of Atilim, the magazine of the banned communist party. She is also one of hundreds of prisoners who have accused the Turkish authorities of rape. In Istanbul alone, 132 women who claimed to have been raped in custody sought help from a legal aid project between the summer of 1997 and November last year.
Most of the victims are from the country's Kurdish minority, and their alleged rapists are mainly policemen. But gendarmes, soldiers and prison guards have been implicated as well. On December 19 last year, when 10,000 soldiers stormed 20 prisons to break up non-violent protests by inmates, 30 inmates and two gendarmes died. Several prisoners claimed to have been anally raped with truncheons, and there were reports that Zeybek was shot in the back and leg. She was paralysed for a time, and is now said to be in fragile health.
Her allegation that she was repeatedly raped while under interrogation at the Istanbul Security Directorate Political Department was investigated by the Turkish authorities, who were provided with a report confirming the attack by the psycho-social traumatology centre in Istanbul. The eight accused were brought to trial in November 1998, but the case was dropped late last year. Zeybek has since published a book about her experience.
This story is far from unique. Between 1995 and 1999, according to official figures, investigations into complaints of torture and rape against 577 officials resulted in only 10 convictions; in the same period, 2,851 allegations of ill treatment brought just 84 convictions. According to Amnesty International, there is "a general climate of impunity for those suspected of torture in Turkey". Human Rights Watch says there is "a long history of gendarmes using excessive force in Turkish prisons". On those rare occasions when a policeman or a prison guard is convicted, they usually receive the lightest possible sentence.
But the situation for rape victims such as Zeybek is even worse than the figures suggest. In June last year, a group of women who claimed to have been sexually abused in detention attended a conference where they talked about their experiences. As the conference ended, some of them were arrested and charged with insulting the security services, a serious offence under the Turkish penal code.
Sixteen people appeared in court in March this year, including the women's lawyer and the father of one of the victims. One of the defendants, Nazli Top, was originally arrested in 1992. "They brought me to the back room of a police station," she recalled. "They started to beat me. They applied electric shocks to my toes and fingers. They raped me with a truncheon."
A 19-year-old Kurdish woman, imprisoned for being a member of the armed opposition group, the Kurdistan Workers' party, has also described how she was raped and tortured during interrogation. Fatma Deniz Polattas says she was beaten, suspended by the arms and hosed with cold water, and anally raped with a serrated instrument at police headquarters in Iskenderun in March 1999.
When Zeybek appears in court this week, accused of membership of the outlawed Marxist-Leninist communist party, international observers from several countries including Britain will be present. Her case has been taken up by the English Centre of PEN, the international writers' organisation, and is widely seen as a test of the Turkish government's attitude to human rights. If she receives a long prison sentence, nine months after her alleged rapists were cleared, it will also say a great deal about Turkey's attitude to women and the brutal patriarchy that continues to rule in its prisons and police stations.
