Evening Standard, June 20, 1995, Pg. 28, A vigil for the vanished;

Crisis For Turkey As Marchers Demand Answers To Missing Prisoners

By Colin Adamson

In Grim echoes of the film Midnight Express, candlelit vigils and marches

are being staged throughout Turkey to mark the sinister disappearance of

hundreds of young people.

As the West steps up pressure on the Turks to improve human rights

with a threatened European Union customs deal veto, Amnesty

International has delivered a shocking dossier on prison torture.

It says Turkish forces have tortured people by hosing them with cold

water under pressure, hanging them by the arms or wrists, giving them

electric shocks and sexually assaulting them.

The bold, new human rights campaign has seen dozens of protesters with

missing sons and daughters march on Ankara's security police headquarters

wearing T-shirts printed with images of their loved ones.

'You took them away alive,' they shouted. 'We want them back alive.'

The highly-charged public demonstrations of grief and anger have

sparked a crisis in the coalition government.

In most cases, the disappeared had suspected political connections to

illegal leftist or Kurdish groups and were seen being arrested or being

interrogated in police stations.

So far this year, 103 young people have vanished without trace. Some 540

people say they were tortured last year at police stations in Istanbul.

Turkey's human rights minister, Algan Hacaloglu, has been forced to

concede that one of the worst torture cases being highlighted by the

protesters was 'a shame for the Turkish democracy'. He ordered an immediate

investigation of mortuary files after a post mortem revealed that Hasan

Ocak, a young man believed to have had links with illegal communist

groups, had been strangled with a wire.

His body, traced by his grieving family after 55 days of relentless

searching to an unmarked grave in a forest cemetery, also had signs of

torture,including burns and cuts. Officials made contradictory statements

suggesting he had been taken into custody. At least two witnesses said

they saw Ocak at a police station.

His family, joined by relatives of other missing people, launched a

campaign to find him. Ocak's mother served 12 days in prison for contempt

of court when she showed up at a trial and shouted: 'We want our sons!'

Akin Birdal, chairman of the independent human rights organisation,

dismissed arguments by main coalition party True Path that allegations of

human rights abuses are part of a Western plot to discredit Turkey.

Calling for a security police register of political detainees, he

complained: 'When these people die under torture, there is no record to

verify that they were arrested.'

This was painfully confirmed by restaurant owner Naki Dehmen, whose

20-year-old son Serhan disappeared nearly two years ago after being

hunted by police as a suspected member of the urban guerrilla group Dev

Sol, whose name translates as the Revolutionary Left.

'When his friends told me Serhan was captured, I was relieved,' Dehmen said.

'I thought he would be safe. Now my son appears to have simply vanished

off the face of the earth and the authorities claim they never had him in

the first place.

'Police had come to my house almost every day for weeks until Serhan was

reported missing,' Dehman said. 'If the police did not capture him, why

did they stop looking for him?'