By Jennifer Thompson
"The revolutionary prisoners have won. All their demands are met. The prisoners in Eskisehir — 'the coffin' — will be moved to Umraniye, Istanbul. Now the ambulances are going into the jails to bring the prisoners to hospital."
This was the July 29 report by activists from Turkey's Revolutionary People's Liberation Party-Front announcing the end of a 70-day hunger strike by Turkish and Kurdish political prisoners. Eleven prisoners died before the Turkish government agreed to their demands, and another died a short time later.
More than 300 prisoners had been on strike since April 25, in protest at the government's treatment of political prisoners. Many of the prisoners had been in jail for years awaiting trial.
Turkish and Kurdish prisoners have a history of hunger strikes. The first wave was after the military coup of 1980. July 14 was the anniversary of the death on hunger strike of four Kurdistan Workers' Party political prisoners in 1980. There were further strikes, most directed against the Eskisehir prison, built of single-person cells. The system of wards in other prisons allows political prisoners to put up a collective resistance.
The recent hunger strike demanded an end to torture and beatings and reversal of a policy of sending prisoners to remote jails, making it impossible for them to see their lawyers, and an end to restrictions on visits from families. The new strict prison rules were introduced at the beginning of May, fuelling the hunger strike.
The prisoners also demanded the closure of all isolation prisons and an end to the brutal oppression of Kurdish prisoners in Erzurum and Diyarbakir prisons. "I agreed to their demand that at least 20 inmates from Eskisehir Prison be transferred to Umraniye Prison in Istanbul", said the new Islamist Refah Party justice minister, Sevket Kazan. "It is out of the question that the Eskisehir Prison is completely closed", though, Kazan said, adding that 82 other leftist inmates in Eskisehir would be transferred to Gebze jail, to the east of Istanbul, partly meeting the prisoners' demand.
The Islamist Refah Party entered a coalition government with Tansu Ciller's secular right-wing True Path Party, after the previous coalition government between True Path and the other right-wing secular party, Motherland, fell.
Kazan, who took office in July, promised reforms in the rules, which led to hundreds of Kurdish prisoners ending their protest. Other prisoners did not think he went far enough and continued the hunger strike. The government still refused the demands of the prisoners not to be separated into single cells; to receive legal reading material; to receive food from their friends and relatives; to be allowed to see a doctor without prison gendarmes being present; and not to be chained while in court.
On July 17, the 59th day of the hunger strike, thousands of prisoners, who had interrupted their hunger strike on the 45th day, resumed it.
By late July even the mainstream media, usually rabidly anti-Kurdish and anti-left, were weighing in against the government's intransigence."The Government's Disgrace", said the secularist daily Milliyet on its front page. "Where is Sevket Kazan, what kind of justice minister are you?", stormed prominent columnist Mehmet Ali Birand in the secular daily Sabah.
The resumption of the strike by 6000 Kurdish prisoners finally forced the government to the negotiations that ended the drastic action in success. n