21
December 2001
2. "The Hunger Revolt in Turkey's Prisons", 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.
4. "U.S. War on Iraq? Some Arabs Are Wary", most Arab governments share the American sentiment that removing Saddam Hussein, the Iraqi leader, could much improve the neighborhood.
5. "Turkey an Argentina", columnist Fikret Bila writes on the economic crisis in Argentina and compares its economic situation to Turkey's.
6. "Let's learn a new", columnist Mehmet Yilmaz writes on Foreign Minister Ismail Cem's recent ambitious remark that the government would 'teach the world the facts about Cyprus' from Turkey's point of view.
1. - BBC - "Turkey hunger strikers charged":
Prosecutors in Turkey have demanded long prison sentences for 13 people
connected with the year-long hunger strike in which more than 40 people
have so far died. They have called for the maximum sentence of 22 years
and six months for four hunger strikers and two of their supporters
charged with membership of an illegal organisation. Seven other hunger
strikers have been charged with assisting an illegal organisation. They
could face seven-and-a-half years in prison. The group was arrested
when Turkish police raided the house where they were living using armoured
vehicles and bulldozers.
Prison reform
The left-wing strikers are protesting at changes in the way prisoners are housed. They say transferring prisoners from old-style dormitory prisons to small cells would leave them defenceless to abuse by prison guards. But Turkish authorities say that the reforms are needed to restore control in prisons. They say dormitories are a breeding ground for rioting and hostage taking, leaving prison guards powerless.
Raids
A year ago, Turkish paramilitaries were sent in to regain
control of several jails across the country to try to stamp out an ongoing
hunger strike. Prisoners put up fierce resistance and at least 26 people
died in the battles. But prisoners and their families continued their
protest, taking vitamin B to prolong their lives. 
2. - The International Herold Tribune - "The Hunger Revolt in Turkey's Prisons":
ISTANBUL / 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 that he shares 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 organization.
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 the longest hunger strikes 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 clandestine terrorist organizations.
The hunger strikes have been carried out by members of a handful of marginal, mostly Marxist organizations, some of which subscribe to armed struggle, some of which 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 create 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 prison sentences of up to 20 years.
According to official figures, 154 prisoners are on hunger strikes. About 40 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 his 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 though from a heightened case of 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."
Generally, hunger strikers do not last for more than 60 or 70 days. But the Turkish hunger strikers have developed novel 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, kept up yoga practice for much of that time.
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 each other during 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 have been charged, like Mr. Hakkisalic, with a violation of the state's anti-terror laws, according to a recent report by the state-run news agency. MR. HAKKISALIC, the son of a military sub-officer and a stay-at-home mother, was studying the solar system at Ankara University when he was seduced by radical politics.
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."
He remembers regaining consciousness after 129 days of fasting, with 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," he said, "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."
3. - Sueddeutsche Zeitung - "In Turkey, rape is a taboo topic; even so, a young woman has now openly accused her assaulters: two policemen":
ISTANBUL / by Christiane Schloetzer / translated by
Kurdish Media 
On the evening that she will never forget, Leyla Bozaci was traveling
with a friend. The two women had visited Sile, a beach resort on the
Black Sea coast, only an hour by car from Istanbul. On the way back,
they were pulled over by a car with two policemen in it. They demanded
the women's identity papers. Leyla had forgotten hers. The men said
she would have to come to the police station. Then it all began.
The young woman was taken not to the police station, but to a hotel. Guns drawn, the policemen dragged her into a room - before the eyes of numerous witnesses. Leyla was raped, and that she escaped with her life she probably owed to her friend, who tracked her down. That the case is coming to a Turkish court in January, four months after the incident itself, Leyla can ascribe to her own courage.
The young woman has broken a taboo. She has spoken publicly about what happened on that night in August. In Turkey, rape is a subject on which people remain silent. When it is discussed, then it is treated as besmirched honor, as violence which must be wiped out with violence. But the target of the new violence is not the rapist himself, but rather the woman.
Leyla's husband Eyup was thus advised by relatives to kill his wife. "I love my wife" was his response to such advice - and on Turkish television, at that.
He will not become a murderer for the sake of "family honor". Eyup speaks of honor as well, but he means something different. "For me, it is a question of honor to struggle against such a mentality."
On the telephone, Leyla speaks with a slight accent. She was born in Romania, met her Turkish husband there, and came with him to Turkey. The couple have three children; the youngest son is only twelve months old. "I refused to keep silent," she says "so that other women don't suffer the same thing."
Turkish journalist Nazlan Ertan writes that Leyla's story is not merely a case of abuse of power by the police: "It shows the traditional view of many Turks toward Slavic women." Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, many women from Russia, Romania, Ukraine, and Azerbaijan came to Turkey, then relatively more prosperous, seeking work - including as prostitutes. They are still referred to as "Natashas", and in certain areas of Istanbul, blonde women, in particular, can often find themselves being propositioned as "Natashas".
"Would the crime be any less if Leyla, or Lacramiora, which is her Romanian name, had been one of the Natashas?" asks Nazlan Ertan. Her answer is clear: The case before the court will be a test of the functioning of the justice system, since it is a question of the police. And in such cases, covering things up is more the rule than the exception.
When Leyla fell into the hands of her assaulters, a number of people had closed their eyes. The manager of the hotel had looked away as the two men dragged her into the building, and he had later put off Leyla's friend.
The latter had thus gone in desperation to the police station, where she had found only one elderly official. He had pushed her to call the main headquarters in Istanbul, so that a more senior official could give the order to investigate at the hotel in the resort. It had only been after the call to Istanbul that a police patrol had gone to the hotel, taken the two men into custody, and left Leyla's friend at the station with the semiconscious Leyla. Even there, Leyla was not safe. One of the two men offered her money to remain silent. When she refused it, he smashed her head against the wall. Salvation only came when a policeman informed Prosecutor Sabiha G. of the affair. She came to the station at four in the morning, questioned all involved, secured the evidence in the hotel, and lodged charges. The policemen in question are now in custody.
In the meantime, Eyup Bozaci's employer has let him go. It cannot be proven that this is a result of his public appearance. Even so, the family was soon without economic means. "Look here, this is Turkey!" read the headline in one of the big daily newspapers, in support of the couple. Such media involvement is new, and this brought the Deputy Governor into the affair.
Now the couple is getting financial assistance, and Eyup
has gotten a new job in his profession of welder. The Deputy Governor
said that one cannot "besmirch the entire police force" on
account of the two criminals in uniform. Even so, the state will be
"at the side" of the Bozaci family.
4. - The International Herold Tribune - "U.S. War on Iraq? Some Arabs Are Wary":
CAIRO 
Most Arab governments share the American sentiment that removing
Saddam Hussein, the Iraqi leader, could much improve the neighborhood.
But, despite reports from Washington that support is growing for an attack on Iraq, there seems to be little stomach yet in the Arab world for watching the United States take war to yet another Islamic nation after Afghanistan. Indeed, some Arab governments believe that the U.S. priority in the Middle East should be halting the bloodshed between the Israelis and the Palestinians rather than trying to rewrite the end of the Gulf War more than a decade after Saddam's government survived.
The absence of any evidence tying Iraq to either the Sept. 11 or anthrax attacks increases the difficulty of convincing Arabs that it is necessary to strike now. A U.S. attack on Iraq may well enhance the perception that the United States is making Muslims its target and thus unravel the reluctant Arab support for dismantling Al Qaida.
"Most countries would like to see Saddam go," said a senior Egyptian official. "But attacking Iraq will not solve the problem of Saddam Hussein. It will just attract sympathy for him." Many Arabs blame the United States for Palestinian deaths because Washington supplies weapons to Israel, and also see America as the prime mover behind the sanctions that have brought hardship to Iraqis. If more Iraqis die under American bombs, many in the region predict, radical Arabs will gain strength and American allies will feel undermined. "It will add to the frustration and anger that is rampant in the Middle East," said Amr Moussa, secretary-general of the Arab League. "If you continue to pressure people and act regardless of the feelings of people, you shouldn't blame them if they oppose the United States."
People in the region draw a clear distinction between targeting the Taliban and targeting Saddam.
"The whole policy of the Taliban was opposed by the vast majority of Muslim and Arab countries," Mr. Moussa said, "so the cause of supporting bin Laden and so forth by the Afghan regime was a strange cause, while the cause in Iraq is how to save the Iraqi people from the rigors of the sanctions, which has a very strong appeal in Arab public opinion."
The governments of American allies, notably Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Jordan, are already struggling to contain public outrage over their ties to Washington in light of its strong support for Israel. For the last 14 months, television screens across the region have been filled nightly with images of Israeli soldiers gunning down Palestinian protesters.
So far, Arab governments have contained popular dissent largely by banning demonstrations. But they are wary of their domestic constituencies.
Senior officials in Egypt and Syria have warned of the dire consequences of attacking Iraq. In Saudi Arabia, Crown Prince Abdullah, who runs the country, has made a public display of trying to distance Riyadh from Washington.
For two months he has held almost weekly sessions with different groups of leaders to explain how the Saud dynasty is trying to put pressure on the United States to help the Palestinians. "The Saudis are trying to calm down their own internal audience," said Abdul Rahman Rashed, editor in chief of Al Sharq al Awsat, the London-based daily. "They need to take a break from American adventures that lead to nothing."
Any attack on Iraq would require at least tacit approval
from the Saudis, not to mention logistical and other military support.
They quietly allowed the Americans to use the technologically advanced
command and control center at Prince Sultan Air Base south of Riyadh
for the attacks on Afghanistan. But it would be far more difficult to
maintain such a low profile in combat with an Arab nation right next
door. For Egypt, a coalition against Iraq could be fraught with danger.
Discontent is rising - the economy is in tatters and unhappiness over
the plight of the Palestinians is rising - and the time seems ripe for
Islamic movements to flourish. "It comes out in indirect ways,
in creating tension with Islamic forces," said Bassma Kodmani,
a political analyst with the Ford Foundation, speaking of the worries
of Arab governments about Islamic movements. "In the inability
to confront these forces, political assassinations can happen, radicalization."
The U.S. track record on Iraq makes governments doubly wary. In 1991,
Kurds and Shiites responded to Washington's call for an uprising. But
they got no U.S. military support and were brutally suppressed by Iraqi
forces.
5. - Milliyet - "Turkey an Argentina":
Columnist Fikret Bila writes on the economic crisis in Argentina and compares its economic situation to Turkey's. A summary of his column is as follows:
"The collapse in the Argentinian economy has turned into a social and political crisis. People rushed to the streets and looting began. Now Argentina has hit rock bottom. Turkey and Argentina had been like twins; they were both countries implementing IMF programs and also being closely monitored on world markets.
But now while Argentina is being dragged into social and political collapse, Turkey is entering the New Year with new signs that it is emerging from its own crisis. Certainly, there are great differences between the economies, administrations and customs of the two countries. The power and capacities of these two economies have differences as well. In these respects Turkey is much stronger.
In Argentina the rejection of its loan demands and the cutting of ties with the IMF has played an important role in the collapse of its economy. Many important measures including restructuring, and enhancing the banking sector have bolstered the confidence in Turkey. The determined stand, and firm will displayed by Turkey have also played an important role in preventing Turkey's fall in international markets.
The increasing share of Turkey's geopolitical importance post-Sept. 11 and its correct policy pursued in the developments vis-a-vis Afghanistan cannot be denied. These are two points in Turkey's advantage, and it must use them in the best way possible. There are two important lessons to be learnt from the Argentinian experience.
First, there will always be a breaking point if the savage
rules of capitalism are implemented ruthlessly. Second, the economy
should not be left entirely in the hands of foreign aid and loans. Turkey
must enter the New Year with these two facts in mind. Because, as we
know, a lasting economic recovery cannot be sustained on the shoulders
of Turkey's geopolitical importance alone."
6. - Milliyet - "Let's learn a new":
Columnist Mehmet Yilmaz writes on Foreign Minister Ismail Cem's recent ambitious remark that the government would 'teach the world the facts about Cyprus' from Turkey's point of view. A summary of his column is as follows:
"Foreign Minister Ismail Cem has issued an ambitious statement regarding Turkey's initiatives on Cyprus saying that Turkey would teach the world new facts and erase old judgments. In fact, recent developments seen in Europe on Cyprus seem to confirm this statement. It is important to comprehend the changing world conditions and balances in time, erasing the old prejudices created by former policies and adopting a stance in line with the new situation.
When all is considered, not only Europe but also others will also have to learn certain lessons. In order to convince one's counterpart, one has to learn the facts of the issue and believe in them. One must be able to form a new policy in line with the new situation, to relate it, and bring one's opponents over one's side. For example, Cyprus should not be compared with Crete. The developments which led to the deportation of Turks from Crete must not be confused with today's events.
Turks must see that in a new constitutional order to be shaped by the Copenhagen criteria within the European Union, the Greek Cypriots will not be able to act as they did before. It should be known that national interests cannot be protected by quarreling with all neighboring countries. Therefore, supported by the confidence given by the country's military power, peace talks must be conducted.
As the Greek Cypriots have based their policy on the intransigence of the Turkish side, the negotiations must be continued taking this card out of their hands. On Iraq, new policies must be pursued. Saddam should not be seen as the sole guarantor of Iraq's territorial integrity. The international community must give the guarantees on the issue. Turkey should defend free and democratic Iraq, not Saddam's .
When the economic embargoes and sanctions are lifted Turkey will be one of Iraq's most important trade partners. It should be recalled that the reason why trade with Iraq has slowed to a trickle is the aggresiveness of Saddam and his presence in Baghdad.
The Copenhagen criteria, must be reavaluated and it must
be understood that Turkish creative power can be seen more clearly in
a more democatic climate. It is our belief that Turks will not be satisfied
with a lesser democracy than those in Western European countries. In
fact, no one would be dissatisfied by a country where there are broad
democatic and legal rights and which is a part of a free Europe."