BY VIV MILEY
At 5am on the morning of December 19, Turkish military units stormed prisons across the country in a bid to force political prisoners to end a hunger strike. The operation, code-named "Return to Life", involved the use of machine guns, long range rifles, tear gas, nerve gas, bulldozers and helicopters. Thirty-one prisoners died.
Eight hundred prisoners across Turkey were hunger striking at the time; 200 of them on a death fast they began on October 20.
The strike, launched by members of the Revolutionary People's Liberation Party-Front (DHKP-C), was in protest at government plans to transfer prisoners from Turkey's dormitory prisons, in which cells hold 100 prisoners, into new maximum security F-type isolation cells. The political prisoners feared such cells would leave them more vulnerable to abuse and torture from prison guards.
The justification put forward by Bulent Ecevit's government spokespeople was that the dormitory cells had been taken over by the DHKP-C, along with other radical leftists, and turned into indoctrination centres.
Military and government spokespeople have claimed that prisoners violently resisted with guns, homemade bombs, makeshift flamethrowers and gas masks. Authorities also claimed that leaders of the DHKP-C ordered members to self-immolate, rather than surrender.
Accounts from surviving prisoners tell a different story, of soldiers surrounding the prisons and pounding the dormitories with bullets, bombs and nerve gas. They maintain that it was the soldiers who massacred their comrades and set them on fire.
"I cannot remember how many more bombs they dropped, but we threw outside those we could get to", one prisoner, Filiz Gencer, a member of the DHKP-C, said in an account distributed by the London-based solidarity group, Ozgurluk. "At one stage they threw a different kind. It was an elongated one and I think its smoke was blue. It was not possible to ameliorate its effects. It chokes you and you feel you are paralysed. Then it gives you a pain as if all your internal organs are shredded. This bomb made us all faint."
Another DHKP-C member, Ayla Ozcan, who was on a death fast, was quoted by the same source as stating: "While our comrades were burning alive, the murderers were filming their creation with pleasure. They had the water hoses but they were not squirting water into the burning dormitory. Those who supposedly came for 'return to life' made their real intention very clearly. They came to kill or make us all surrender."
Many prisoners said they were taken to hospital and examined, but that their burns and bullet wounds were left untreated. They were told by soldiers that unless they ended the death fast, they would not receive medical treatment.
The siege lasted up to four days at some prisons. Thirty one prisoners and two soldiers were killed in the operation and hundreds more were injured. So far more than 1000 prisoners have been moved to the F-type prisons, most of whom are political prisoners. Many members of the DHKP-C have been placed in solitary confinement.
So far prisoners' worst fears about the F-type prisons have been confirmed. Amnesty International, along with several other human rights organisations, has accused the Turkish authorities of beating and torturing prisoners after transferring them to the new prisons.
After talking with prisoners' relatives and lawyers and doctors who had visited the new jails, Amnesty issued a statement saying "These sources consistently indicate that the prisoners were beaten and some tortured before, during and after the transfers to the new prisons. It is alleged that prisoners were stripped and subjected to rape with a truncheon on arrival at Kandira F-type prison near Izmit, but the claims could not be corroborated because lawyers' requests for forensic examinations to be carried out received no response."
Government officials have claimed that the operation was a success but it was not able to end the death fast and, if anything, has made the prisoners more determined. Since "Return to Life" many more prisoners have joined the hunger strike, and many on the original death fast are close to dying.
The operation may also have hampered Turkey's attempts to enter the European Union, many of whose member-states have been very critical of the country's human rights record, including its treatment of political prisoners.
Turkey hoped that its operation would both allow it to crack down on the left and bolster its case in the EU, by showing that it wasn't prepared to allow the hunger strikers to starve to death.
Instead it has done neither: its operation has only focussed more unwelcome attention on its human rights record and the prisoners remain unbowed. In a country where only a month ago the economy was bailed out by the International Monetary Fund to the tune of $7.5 billion and in which political discontent is rising, "Return to Life" may just have knocked a few years off the life expectancy of Ecevit's government.