Four die as Turkish police attack death-fast houses
An Phoblacht/Republican News - 8th November 2001
Four activists died on Monday 5 November after police raided the death-fast houses where the relatives and supporters of political prisoners in Turkey have been carrying out a hunger strike for the last 13 months.
Official sources claimed that the activists committed suicide by setting themselves on fire when Turkish police attacked homes to forcibly take hunger strikers to a hospital, local media reported. Activists rejected this and aid the four had been shot dead by police.
Police were trying to end a year-old campaign of hunger strikes in which 42 people have starved to death. The demonstrators are protesting conditions in Turkey's new F-Type prisons, where political prisoners are held in isolation, leaving them exposed to possible abuse by guards.
The raid began with armoured police vehicles and heavy construction machines smashing through barricades set up by militants around the two houses in an Istanbul suburb. Police fired bullets and tear gas, and three militants were wounded by gunshots, Anatolia, a Turkish news agency, reported. Police said they took at least 14 injured people to hospitals and detained three others, Anatolia said.
Hospital officials were not immediately able to cite causes of death.
Inmates, their relatives and friends began the fasting campaign last year to protest the transfer of prisoners from large, dormitory-style prison wards to the F-Type prisons.
When the transfer of inmates to the new prisons began on 19 December 2000, 30 prisoners were killed in an operation that involved more than 20,000 troops and police. A soldier was also killed.
The hunger strikers have been taking sugar and salt water with vitamins to prolong their fast. They and their supporters threatened earlier this year to set themselves on fire if police intervened to stop the protest or take them away.
A prisoners' solidarity group, Ozgur Tayad, said one of the dead, Arzu Guler, had been fasting for 152 days. The other three were supporters of the hunger strikers, the organisation said.
After the raid, doors torn from their hinges lay by the roadside near the houses. Metal bars on the house windows were twisted and broken.
Husnu Ondul, the president of Turkey's Human Rights Association, said he was skeptical of police claims that the hunger strikers had committed suicide. "Given past practice, nobody can really say what happened,'' he said.
During the December prison transfer, six female inmates of an Istanbul prison died because of a fire in their cell. Government officials insisted the inmates started the fire, but a forensic report leaked by prosecutors suggested that security forces may have started it by throwing tear gas canisters into the cell.