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Soldier tortured in same military prison as Kantar sought deputies' help
Pvt. Uğur Kantar was killed after enduring physical abuse and torture at a “disco,” slang for a disciplinary prison in the military. He died on Thursday at İstanbul's Gülhane Military Academy of Medicine (GATA), 80 days after he was nearly beaten to death by his superiors. Military prosecutors have launched an investigation into the identity of the alleged torturers, but it has emerged that Kantar was not their only victim.
A young man who served in the same unit as Kantar, going by the initials G.H., petitioned the parliamentary Human Rights Commission during his military service. G.H. said he was subjected to various methods of torture in the disco, including being forced to wade through a sewer canal. He wrote:
“Hell begins after the person who delivers you there turns their back and leaves. They put prison clothes on me and then started hitting my hips with batons. They opened up a lid and forced me to go in there. It was full of human feces in there. You couldn't put your feet on the ground because of the sewer rats. They kept me in there for about 10 minutes, and ordered me to get out. Then they wanted me to do a low crawl for 50 meters with all that dirt on me. Then they watered me with a hose at the disco and left me there.”
Another excerpt from G.H.'s petition reads:
“They treated us like animals. They made us clean the toilets after dinner. We were forced to clean the hole of the toilet seat with a tiny brush, much like a toothbrush. You could hear people weeping under the sheets every night. We only had about three hours to sleep at night, and we spent those three hours crying.”
In related developments, Justice and Development Party (AK Party) Sakarya deputy Ayhan Sever Üstün, the head of the Human Rights Commission, said the commission will investigate the Kantar incident. Üstün said:
“His father visited me and asked for help. He was beaten. Then they made him sit in the sun for two hours and poured hot water on him. His father was angry because the only response he got to his queries to the military was that ‘two privates had been arrested' over Kantar's death.” Üstün added that the commission had received many complaints from abused draftees, particularly in İstanbul and the western provinces. Üstün said most of the complaints included beatings and verbal insults. “We have to stop this. We have to end abuse in the military so that young people who are sent off to the military by friends and family joyously can come home in the same way.”
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