HIrgUr MUstemleke; Sanki Fiyasko Ha

[newsdesk_aps_nl at apsf.aps.nl]

From: newsdesk_aps_nl at apsf.aps.nl (newsdesk at aps.nl)
Subject: HIrgUr MUstemleke; Sanki Fiyasko Haberler, 7/3/95, 08:00 TSI


(3) Turkish writers form "closed university" behind bars

By Aliza Marcus

HAYMANA, Turkey, March 6 (Reuter) - Behind the stone and steel walls of
Turkey's Haymana Prison, set in gentle hills an hour's drive from the capital
Ankara, some of Turkey's most dangerous intellectuals languish behind bars.

There is Fikret Baskaya, a 55-year-old economics professor schooled in France,
who wanders this prison of small cells and open courtyards in a sweater and
button-down shirt.

Baskaya's cell-mate, Haluk Gerger, is a middle-aged writer with a paunch and
an English honed to fluency as a student at Johns Hopkins University in
Washington and Oxford in Britain.

Just across the concrete corridor is the poet and journalist Yilmaz Odabasi,
32, who spends his days hunched over a pad of paper churning out verses.

Their crimes? Baskaya wrote a book critical of Turkey's socio-economic
development and its ideological underpinnings. Gerger theorised violent
movements erupt when peaceful channels for dissent are closed. And Odabasi
wrote poems.

The charges? Separatist propaganda or racism -- because they criticised
Turkey's policies towards its Kurdish minority and the 10-year Kurdish
guerrilla war in the country's southeast.

"In Turkey, the philosophical concept 'I think, therefore I am' is understood
as 'I think, therefore I am a terrorist,"' said Gerger, who like Baskaya will
spend 15 months in this prison now dubbed the "closed university" because of
its rollcall of distinguished intellectuals.

"I was trying to understand the reasons for the war (with Kurdish guerrillas)
but even trying to understand this has become a crime of terrorism," the
bespectacled Gerger told Reuters during a recent interview in the prison.

Turkey has never enjoyed total freedom of expression in its 70-year history as
a modern state. Longstanding laws can jail people for insulting the military,
state authorities and the republic's founder Mustafa Kemal Ataturk. But human
rights watchers and lawyers say over the past two years the state, nervous
that
the Kurdish issue and the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) insurgency in the
southeast is spiralling out of control, is taking a harder line.

The war, in which more than 14,000 people have been killed, costs an estimated
$7 billion a year and has led to allegations of massive abuses by the security
forces against civilians.

The fate of the three men is not uncommon in Turkey, where both the U.S. State
Department and Amnesty International have said dissent, especially over the
Kurdish issue, is stifled.

Zealous prosecutors armed with a wide-ranging penal code have put over 110
people behind bars for saying or writing something contrary to official views,
mainly about the Kurds, said Turkey's Modern Journalists Association.
Consider the couplets that got Odabasi four months behind bars: "What an
unjust place I am in; I say I am a Kurd; my songs are full of pain; I am a
melody of pain; Kurdistan..."

And another 4,000 people -- including trade unionists, lawyers, journalists
and human rights workers -- are on trial for separatist propaganda, according
to figures collected by the Human Rights Foundation of Turkey.

Turkey, on the point of a customs union with the European Union in what it
hopes is a first step to full membership, is under pressure from its Western
allies to make changes. But draft legislation, which in any case would only
remove some restrictions on freedom of expression, languishes unprocessed in
parliament. Allowing Kurdish-language education or television is not even on
the agenda.

"The de facto situation is that things are getting worse in Turkey and from
whatever angle.. democracy, human rights, I do not see anything to be hopeful
about," said Baskaya.

Last December, eight Kurdish parliamentarians were convicted of supporting the
illegal PKK on the basis of their public statements in favour of Kurdish
rights. Six drew sentences of up to 15 years in a case that alarmed the West.

This year, Yasar Kemal, one of Turkey's most famous writers, was charged in
connection with an article accusing Turkey of "a campaign of lies" to justify
oppression of the Kurds.

In February, the leading pro-Kurdish newspaper was forced to shut down.

"The state is scared of democracy because then their lies will be exposed,"
said Gerger. But observers in Turkey say if the goal of the state is to
frighten people into speechlessness, it is backfiring.

As the war hits home -- the PKK has set off numerous bombs in Turkey's western
provinces -- discussion is growing. Some publishers regularly issue books
about
Kurdish history in Turkey and even publish interviews with PKK leader Abdullah
Ocalan from exile.

The imprisonment of Baskaya and Gerger was satirised on television and
bemoaned
in newspaper cartoons and columns, while Turkey's overall human rights record
is proving a stumbling block in its relations with Europe and the United
States.

This is a consolation to Gerger, whose time in prison will stretch into an
additional three years if he refuses to pay a fine of 200 million TL ($5,000).
"If I think my protest means something, then I will not pay. I want to live
in a country where people can be ordinary, but at times in Turkey you have to
act like a hero," he said.

(4) Bonn to decide on Kurdish deportations next week

BONN, March 6 (Reuter) - Germany will decide whether to resume deportations of
Kurdish refugees after a parliamentary hearing next week, Interior Minister
Manfred Kanther said on Monday.

Kanther was speaking after meeting interior ministers from regional states,
many of whom want Bonn to maintain its freeze on such deportations for the
time being. Some state officials have said repatriated Kurds face torture or
the death penalty in Turkey, which is fighting an armed insurgency by
separatist guerrillas of the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) in the southeast
of
the country.

Kanther, who has said in the past he wanted the deportation ban lifted by the
middle of March, said Germany was still negotiating with Ankara about
assurances on how returned refugees would be treated. Kanther last month
extended the deportation freeze for a second time to allow parliament more
time
to discuss the matter.

--- APS (Newsdesk)