HUMAN RIGHTS Activist cites ongoing plight of Turkey's Kurds BY STEVEN STYCOS

During an appearance this week at Brown University, Kurdish human rights activist Mehdi Zana recounted his experience of torture in a Turkish jail. But an audience member challenged Zana’s claim that Kurdish separatist guerrillas are not terrorists. In an interview after the speech, Zana also criticized Providence-based Textron for agreeing to sell 145 KingCobra attack helicopters to Turkey.

In 1977, Zana was elected mayor of Diyarbakir, the largest city in the Kurdish region of southeastern Turkey. Speaking through a translator, he related that voters were thrilled by his willingness to speak Kurdish while campaigning. Following the 1980 military coup, however, Zana was jailed and repeatedly tortured. He was frequently beaten, hung from his arms, and shocked with electricity, he says. Prisoners were also beaten if they spoke Kurdish during family visits.

Thanks to pressure from the European Community, Zana says, his physical torture stopped in 1983. Then, in 1984, he received an armful of letters from supporters in Europe and the US, alerting him that Amnesty members knew of his plight. The letters, he says, were like a blood transfusion for the spirit.

After Zana was released in 1991, his wife, Leyla, decided to run for parliament, even though he warned her that she would probably be jailed and maybe killed. She won and took her oath of office in Turkish. But she then caused parliament to erupt into shouts of "Separatist" and "Terrorist," by adding in Kurdish, "I shall struggle so that the Kurdish and Turkish people may live together in a democratic framework." (Fearful that agitation for a separate Kurdistan will further fracture the Turkish state, Turkey discourages Kurdish language and culture. Kurds may have the full rights of Turkish citizenship, but only if they use Turkish names and speak Turkish.)

Three years later, Zana’s political party was banned and she was jailed after what Amnesty International calls "a flagrantly unfair trial." She has been in prison ever since and is currently Turkey’s most prominent prisoner of conscience. This is only one of many cases comprising the miserable human rights record of Turkey, a prominent US ally. In its 2003 report, Amnesty reported, "Torture in police custody remained widespread and was practiced systematically in the anti-terror branches of police stations in the southeast. The perpetrators were rarely brought to justice."

Although Turkey passed new human rights laws in 2002, Amnesty calls them "ambiguous and insufficient," observing that one man received a 45-month jail term last year for playing Kurdish music to passengers in his minibus. Although the new laws allow Kurdish-language courses, Amnesty says, thousands were arrested last year for signing petitions requesting education in Kurdish. In addition, several parents were tried after they attempted to register their children under Kurdish, instead of Turkish names, the report states.

During his November 10 speech at Brown (sponsored by Amnesty International USA), Mehdi Zana, who currently lives in exile in Sweden, surprised some by saying that no Kurd has ever committed a terrorist act. Aslihan Tokgoz, a Turkish graduate student, challenged him, noting that Workers’ Party of Kurdistan (PKK) guerrillas have killed women and children. Zana insisted the victims were accidentally caught between the PKK and the Turkish military.

But in 1995, Amnesty took a more critical view, blaming the PKK for 170 "deliberate and arbitrary killings" including bombings of civilian targets. In an interview after the speech, Zana stressed his commitment to non-violence, but defended PKK violence as a form of self-defense for Kurdish provinces. And he claims that the government often blames its own violent acts on the PKK.

Finally, Zana criticized Textron’s efforts to sell to Turkey helicopters similar to those used by the government during a scorched earth campaign in Kurdish provinces in the early ’90s. "In a humanitarian perspective," he says. "It’s not right. They are used against the people — to destroy homes."