Turkish Hunger Strikers Risk Body and Mind

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The New York Times
by SOMINI SENGUPTA

Ismail Hakkisalic's memory is shot to pieces. He can read only a few paragraphs at a time. He has great difficulty concentrating, closing his eyes for several minutes as he struggles to form a sentence. When he finally does, his speech is often chillingly childlike. "I wish for a world in which there is no torture," he said the other day, sitting on the floor of a damp, cold apartment he shares here with a number of his equally wasted comrades. "I wish for a world in which hands would only be used for handshakes, for rubbing each others backs."

For 129 days earlier this year, Mr. Hakkisalic was on what is known here as a "death fast," to protest the isolation of political prisoners like himself. The government said he was a member of a terrorist group.

Carried out mostly from inside the country's prisons by members of a half-dozen banned leftist organizations, the fasts have left dozens dead and hundreds disabled, and have gained macabre notoriety for being part of the longest hunger strike in modern times, with some fasters surviving more than 200 days.

Today, a full year after the death fasts began, no solution to the standoff is in sight. The government has not agreed to the strikers' demands chiefly, to allow political prisoners to live in large communal dormitories, as they once did. The crowded compounds of the past, government officials say, became breeding grounds for terrorist organizations.

The hunger strikes have been carried out by members of a handful of marginal, mostly Marxist organizations, some of whom subscribe to armed struggle, some of whom agitate against the policies of the International Monetary Fund.

What unites them is their belief that confinement to cells that hold one to three prisoners, often with little contact with other inmates, is dehumanizing and that the new prison structure is designed to dismantle their very convictions by cutting off their interactions. They also say the new cells leave them vulnerable to torture by prison officials.

More than that, their cause is clearly an effort to shame a government with a spotty human rights record at a moment when it is struggling with issues about just how open a society it is willing to allow as Turkey vies for entry into the European Union. Even though the death fasts have generated wide attention and protest marches in Turkey and abroad, the government has been largely unmoved. It contends that it is too risky to let these groups operate unchecked inside the prison system. To do so, the director general of the prisons said in a statement, would "make it impossible for inmates to break ties with the terrorist organizations when they wish to."

A bill introduced in the Turkish Parliament last month seeks to prosecute those who encourage death fasts, with sentences of up to 20 years. According to official figures, 154 prisoners are currently on hunger strikes; estimates of the number of hunger strikers outside prison, from a half-dozen to a dozen. Roughly 40 of the hunger strikers have died, according to rights groups here; prison officials say 24 have died in prison. Outside, there are some 340 former death fasters who, like Mr. Hakkisalic, are now free and working to rehabilitate themselves.

After losing consciousness, Mr. Hakkisalic was taken to a hospital and released from prison on medical grounds in July. Since then, he has been eating, writing in his diary, exercising each morning walking a straight line between two strips of masking tape in the hallway of this apartment. At the moment, though, it is unlikely that he, or any of the hundreds of former hunger strikers who have made the drastic U-turn from starving to nursing themselves back to life, will ever again be whole.

The apartment Mr. Hakkisalic shares in a dense, working-class neighborhood is a gallery of determined self-destruction. One man trembles uncontrollably, as if from Parkinson's disease. Others, having lost their balance, have great difficulty with the simplest physical gestures getting up from a sofa, walking a straight line. Most have lost a lot of hair. Their eyes have a hard time focusing from one object to another. They can remember events from years ago, but not from yesterday. Most have lost the ability to produce new memories. "It's almost impossible to bring them back 100 percent," said Dr. Onder Ozkalipci, a physician with the Human Rights Foundation here who supervises rehabilitation. "Some of them were once leaders in their communities teachers, intellectuals," the doctor said. Today, he said, they are like "plants."

Hunger strikers usually don't last more than 60 to 70 days. But the Turkish hunger strikers have developed new ways to stretch starvation. They keep the body's metabolism going with huge amounts of sugar the equivalent of 60 sugar cubes a day along with an average of about 12 glasses of water.

One woman, Oya Acan, who fasted for 200 days, was known to have kept up yoga practice for much of that time. She read three newspapers, wrote letters, spoke to her parents about what they would do after her release all intended to maintain consciousness. "I never believed I would die," a chain-smoking Ms. Acan, 42, who has spent eight years in prison for writing for a banned leftist newspaper, said the other day as she displayed a hollow-cheeked photograph of herself taken at the end of her fast. "I always thought there would be a solution."

But there has been no solution.

A report by Amnesty International points out that while similar three- person cells exist elsewhere in the West, Turkish prisons severely limit the inmates' ability to come together for meals, exercise or study.

But a statement released by the director general of the Turkish prison system last week noted that inmates are now allowed to sign up for all manner of communal activities, from reading at the prison libraries to playing table tennis. Inmates sentenced on terrorism charges, the statement continued, have "chosen their own isolation."

In a report released last week, the European Committee for the Prevention of Torture called on the Turkish government to appoint a mediator to resume talks between both sides. It also urged the government to lift provisions of its terrorism laws that restrict freedom of expression. "Criticism of the existing provisions concerning this freedom forms an important part of the backdrop to the hunger strike campaign," the committee said.

Meanwhile, the country's four largest bar associations floated a compromise last month to permit the inmates to socialize with one another in the day. The director general rejected the proposal, saying that to allow the inmates to interact in groups "would again lead to negative practices," including hostage taking and rebellion.

Of the 59,000 inmates in Turkey's prisons, nearly 8,600 are charged, like Mr. Hakkisalic, with a violation of the state's antiterror laws, according to a recent report by the state- run news agency.

Mr. Hakkisalic, the son of a military officer and a stay-at-home mother, was studying the solar system at Ankara University when he was seduced by radical politics, he says. He was imprisoned in 1995, on a charge of belonging to a terrorist organization. Why did he join the death fast? "If they were going to strip us from our thoughts, from our identity, if their aim was to kill us that way, we told them here was our flesh and bones," he said, one slow word at a time, "But they couldn't take away our thoughts." When he regained consciousness after 129 days of fasting, he says he has a vague recollection of waking up in a hospital room with intravenous tubes in his arms and his parents at his bedside. "The first thing I asked them was, `Does resistance still continue?' " Yes, he was told, the fast continued in prison, but his had been ended. He, like others who joined the fast, when asked if they really wish to die, say no. It's a tactic, they say, the only one they believe available to them.

If he really wished to die, Mr. Hakkisalic says, he could have killed himself much more easily than starving for 129 days. A death fast requires a devotion to the cause. "The essence of the thing is decisiveness to the point of death," he says, a finger pressing hard on his temple. "It is actually a struggle for life."