Who said ‘zero tolerance’ to torture?
by
ORHAN KEMAL CENGİZ

The scene was terrible; truncheons were being raised in the air and began striking the bodies of the students, who screamed and cried.

As a child, I was unable to understand the political and cultural “significance” of the police officer’s reference to the “state,” but on that day it dawned upon me that wherever the “state” is, there must also be trouble. And as far as Turkey is concerned, this was true.

During the ‘70s, ‘80s and ‘90s, the human rights situation in Turkey was terrible. Torture was widespread and systematic. Extrajudicial killings, disappearances and so many other grave violations of human rights became routine here.

The “state,” with which I became acquainted as a child, on that day not only carried out all these terrible human rights violations but also denied doing so. Torture, for example, had been forbidden by law since Ottoman times, but it had always been practiced quite routinely. The “state” was not only torturing but also “lying.” It would be quite interesting to compare Turkish and Israeli state customs in this sense. Israel, for example, had always used “coercive interrogation techniques,” which, most of the time, reached levels amounting to torture, but did so under strict written rules and never denied what it did. They tried to justify their departure from international human rights law by making references to the “extraordinary” circumstances they were allegedly in. Turkey, on the other hand, always denied what it did, though it did it quite systematically and on a widespread basis.

This denialist attitude of Turkey received a very strong blow when it started to confront international human rights mechanisms. Both the United Nations and the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) condemned Turkey for torture and other human rights violations.

Turkey introduced “firsts” to these international human right mechanisms. The ECtHR issued its first verdicts on “torture” (Aksoy v. Turkey), “village destruction” (Akduvar v. Turkey) and “rape in custody” (Aydın v. Turkey) in Turkish cases. Not only was Turkey found guilty of these crimes in all Council of Europe countries but was also condemned countless times by the court, the UN and international human rights NGOs.

Starting in the 2000s, though, a miraculous development took place concerning police custody. Widespread and systematic torture started to disappear, and instead we started to here incidental stories of torture. After all those years, it was hard for me to believe that I was witnessing many accused being transferred from the custody of the Counterterrorism Unit to the courts without being tortured. This indicated a radical shift in police culture and practice in Turkey. However, while this miraculous thing was happening, we also started to witness widespread police violence in the open air during demonstrations. We started to hear terrible stories of violence and abuse by police during transfers from and to security directorates.

While I appreciate the government’s desire and effort to suppress torture and ill-treatment in police custody, I am strongly allergic to its reluctance to take action against police officers who unleash their hatred and violence on demonstrators. Is this violence compensation for not torturing demonstrators when they are in custody? How can this government explain its tolerance to brutal police violence while proclaiming to have “zero tolerance” of torture?

This weekend we once again saw police attack university students who wanted to protest Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in İstanbul, and beat them severely. Many students were hospitalized and one female student had a miscarriage.

Just last month the UN Committee Against Torture (CAT) warned Turkey about police brutality. The committee expressed its particular concern about reports of “numerous, ongoing and consistent allegations concerning the use of torture, particularly outside unofficial places of detention in police vehicles, on the street and outside police stations” while noting the continuing failure of the authorities to conduct effective, prompt and independent investigations into allegations of torture and ill-treatment.

What is happening outside police stations destroys the good work inside them. Turkey is once again becoming a country that is associated with police brutality and violence. I strongly urge this government to take radical steps to put an end to the impunity of these vandals in uniform. Otherwise, “zero tolerance” will turn into an “eternal” joke and a cause of shame for this government.