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A hole in the damp basement, a bed on the concrete floor, and a corpse on a plastic chair – a gruesome photo has now reminded Turks that four years after the power struggle between President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and his former ally Fethullah Gülen, thousands of people continue to languish in prison.
The dead man in the chair was a policeman who had been convicted of being a Gülen supporter and who had pleaded in vain for medical help in prison before dying in agony in an isolated cell. The photo, apparently smuggled from the investigation files and published by a media outlet in exile, shows Turkish society the conditions of detention that human rights defenders have so far denounced in vain.
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Mustafa Kabakcioglu, 44, was a deputy police commissioner in Giresun, northern Turkey, until he was removed from the civil service by emergency decree in the summer of 2016, arrested and sentenced as a Gülen supporter to seven and a half years of prison.
Erdogan exempted political prisoners from amnesty
According to press reports, he was accused of donating five lire to a charity that was later banned as Gülen-nah, and of downloading an app on his cell phone that was used by many Gülen supporters, enough to get stuck in the finale. Trawl net that Erdogan used to hunt down supporters of his arch enemy after the 2016 coup attempt.
Thousands of people disappeared behind bars for such allegations, and most of them are still there: They were expressly exempted from an amnesty due to the coronavirus pandemic in April as political prisoners, while nearly 100,000 criminal convicts, including mob bosses. and right-wing extremists were released. Leader.
The amnesty was supposed to ease the prisons, but the prisoners noticed nothing, as the vice chairman of the parliamentary human rights commission, Sezgin Tanrikulu of the opposition CHP, discovered during an inspection of the prisons.
The eight-man cells are still occupied by 20 or more prisoners, Tanrikulu reported. Because there are only eight bunk beds and one bathroom in these cells, inmates have to take turns sleeping on the floor and rationing their necessities.
Visitation rights severely restricted due to a pandemic
Therefore, the prison budget estimates the equivalent of 90 cents per person per day to feed the prisoners. A balanced diet is not possible, says Tanrikulu, and the food in prisons is consequently bad, scarce and unhealthy. Sick prisoners would have to wait months for medical treatment. Visitation rights are drastically restricted due to the pandemic: to one visitor per month, for half an hour with one partition.
Kabakcioglu must have experienced everything in exactly the same way: it emerges from his letters and diaries, which MP Ömer Faruk Gergerlioglu from the opposition party HDP presented after consulting the widow. “We can’t breathe, we can barely move,” Kabakcioglu noted three years ago. Locked in an eight-man cell with 17 prisoners, the initially strong man lost his health in custody, became very emaciated and passed out.
Now it is determined: how the photo got to the public.
When he started coughing that summer, prison authorities put him in a solitary cell, but did not test him for Covid-19; It wasn’t until the autopsy showed that he was not infected with the coronavirus. The prisoner requested treatment from the solitary cell. “I have swelling in my mouth and leg, my arm is numb, I cannot feel anything below my waist and I cannot move,” he wrote in his last presentation to the prison doctor.
Two days later, a guard found him dead in the plastic chair opening the door in the morning, his head tilted back. It was August 29, but Kabakcioglu’s wife and children did not receive an answer to their questions. Only when the drastic photos of death row reached the public six weeks later did the prosecution feel compelled to explain: the man did not want to go to the hospital, he said. With a preliminary investigation, the judiciary now wants to clarify how the photos could reach the public: The images were likely released by “insidious fringe groups” to shake up society, the prosecutor said.
Kabakcioglu’s death is not an isolated incident, says human rights activist Gergerlioglu, who has been denouncing the situation in Turkish prisons for years. He himself knows dozens of cases of this type that the judiciary has covered up. In addition, Kabakcioglu’s lonely death probably would not have interested anyone again, he says, “if this photo had not appeared that moved the public.”
