mehdi zana

[sorgul]

My name is Mehdi Zana. I am a Kurd from Turkey. From 1977 until my arrest in 1980, 1 was mayor of Diyarbakir, the most important town in southeastern Anatolia, or Turkish Kurdistan. What are our demands? We want to be allowed to speak our own language, to learn it in school, to have newspapers and radio and television broadcasts in Kurdish. We want to live with respect for our dignity, our personality, our identity That is why we are imprisoned, tortured, and killed.

I was born in 1940 in Silvan, an ancient city that the Romans called Martyropolis. During the 10th and 11th centuries, the city was known as Meya Farqin, the capital of the Kurdish state of the Merwanides. Silvan is located about 50 miles from Diyarbakir, where every stone, every street, every neighborhood bears witness to a timeless past of Kurdish cultural traditions. The neighborhood where I was born, like the Great Mosque of the city, still carries the name of Salah-al-Din, or Saladin, who was victorious over the Crusaders. How many people know that he was Kurdish?

During my adolescence, I heard many stories about past Kurdish revolts. The customers talked about it in the tailor shop where I worked as an apprentice. They spoke of the revolt of Sheik Said of Piran in 1925, a year after Mustafa Kemal Ataturk banned the use of the Kurdish language. There was also the Ararat revolt of 1930 and the Dersim revolt in 1937-38, which left the Kurdish movement exhausted for a generation or two. Massacres and deportations decimated the population and devastated Kurdish lands.

In 1960, I was drafted into the Turkish army. At the barracks, we slept three to a bed. Because I am Kurdish, I was assigned to dishwashing and janitorial duties. That lasted for two years. On my return home from military service in 1963, I went back to work as a tailor. We used to listen to the "Kurdish Voice" radio broadcast from Iraq. It was barely audible, but it was amazing. One night, I scrawled "Long Live Barzani!" [a Kurdish leader] in big letters on a wall in town. It was my first act of rebellion.

That year, the Turkish Workers' Party was formed. It was the first party of the left, and I joined because it was the only movement that, at least in theory, was not hostile to the Kurds. Those were hard years in Turkey. Everyone was scared. For me, the most important thing was to reassure them. About 1967, we decided to attempt democratic assemblies and to organize a tour of Kurdish towns. For the first time, I spoke in public about the Kurdish problem and Kurdistan. We prepared a small leaflet. Members of the Workers' Party took part in those demonstrations. The police also were present en masse at our rallies, and the rumor began to circulate that there were "meetings in the East." "The East" is the official code word for Kurdistan. You see, since 1924 we had not existed, at least not officially. For a long time we were supposed to be "highland Turks" who spoke some sort of dialect.

In 1971, while I was holding a public meeting in Hilvan, a small town in Urfa Province, I was arrested and jailed. I was held from March, 1971, to July, 1974, in Diyarbakir Prison. We had little to eat, but we were not beaten. Compared with what I would have to live through in the 1980s, that detention now seems idyllic.

When I got out of prison in 1974, I learned that the Turkish Workers' Party had been banned for three years because it supported Kurdish rights but that a Socialist Party of Kurdistan had been formed.

In 1977, there were municipal elections in Diyarbakir. At that time, it was the ninth-largest city in Turkey, with about 225,000 people (today it has more than 1.5 million). I was elected mayor out of 14 candidates, with 54 percent of the vote. At first, the Turkish authorities, the prefect and the military commander, resented my election and refused to validate it. But there it was: I had been democratically elected. My voters, simple folk from working-class districts, soon discovered what a dedicated group of municipal civil servants can accomplish in serving the people, despite obstacles. But the political situation was getting more and more chaotic. Extreme-left and extreme-right groups were resorting to violence. The economy was deteriorating.

On September 12, 1980, on the pretext of restoring law and order, the army provoked another coup, with the usual brutality. Parliament was dissolved, and parties, unions, and associations were banned. Municipal councils were dissolved, and mayors were replaced by officers. Following a plan drawn up well in advance, the army and police began arresting people: ministers, legislators, party and union leaders, mayors, professors, activists in legal and illegal organizations, journalists--in short, everyone they found undesirable or contrary to their ideal Kemalist republic.

* Mehdi Zana, a Kurdish activist, has become a symbol of the Kurds' struggle for the rights to speak their language and practice their culture inside Turkey. Now 54, Zana has spent more than 15 years in Turkish prisons; he was most recently arrested in 1994 and is serving a four-year sentence. In the following article, adapted from Zana's new book, "Prison No. 5: Eleven Years in Turkish Jails," released in February in France, Zana describes the horror and torture he suffered at the hands of his Turkish captors from 1980 to 1991.

That is when I was arrested and the torture began. Three other Kurds and I were taken straight to the Military Academy, which has 40 tiny cells in the basement. For sleeping, there was only a narrow board a foot off the ground. When the guards closed the door, I had the feeling of being buried alive. After two hours, the guards came to get me. They blindfolded me and shoved me ahead of them. I heard soldiers whispering, "That's Mehdi Zana coming." Right away, about a dozen of them beat me up. After that, I was taken back to my cell. But that same day--in the evening, I suppose--they came for me and blindfolded me again, and I went through another beating. Blows and abuse were coming at me from every side.

After that session, they left me alone for two days, then started up again, with variations so that I would never know what awaited me. They started with falaka, a very old torture that involves beating the soles of the feet with a rod. Another trick was feigned hanging. They would put me up and slip the noose around my neck, so I thought they were executing me. But they would stop the execution and begin interrogating me again. Sometimes they would put us in coffins with just a crack to breathe through for two or three days, depending on how resistant each of us was. And then there was the "goose dance": naked, under a shower of cold water, we had to hop ahead with our feet bound, hunched down under a rain of blows, until we fainted. Our feet were split open, and our testicles were numb. But they were not trying to kill us. No, they stepped up the torture by degrees to see how much we could take.

The guards watched us day and night. They were obsessed, tireless. As soon as we were overcome by numbness, they started over. The soldiers and policemen would take turns beating the numb, blindfolded detainees, their bodies swollen all over. Entire days were devoted to uninterrupted torture except for a few moments to eat and drink.

After a month of this routine, I was separated from my companions and put into an isolation cell for 10 days. Then I was taken before the state's attorney and imprisoned again. When he reviewed my file, the judge could find no reason for my detention. "I am sorry," he said, "but the military authorities have ordered that you be kept in prison. There's nothing I can do." With three other Kurds, two of whom had been my assistants in the mayor's office, I was transferred to Military Prison No. 1 in Diyarbakir and put into solitary confinement.

After 30 days of detention without trial and 11 days of incommunicado detention, I was finally allowed to see relatives. We were not allowed to speak in Kurdish. My mother cried at my silence (I refused to speak in Turkish) and complained, "My son has gone deaf and mute!" Shortly thereafter, I was transferred to Prison No. 5, the modem prison in Diyarbakir. There, our schedule was strict. We woke up at 5 and had breakfast at 6:30--a soup made with our vermicelli. We had to pray, to thank Allah for his blessings and to wish long life to the Turkish nation and army! If we refused, we got no food and were beaten. Before long, our numbers had grown from 160 to 320. The cells became very crowded. In winter, temperatures fell below zero, and we had no mattresses. I had only a raincoat for warmth. While they administered physical torture, the jailers carried out a carefully thought-out program of psychological torture. They would bring five pieces of bread one day, then four, then three, and then none at all--to make the prisoners in a cell fight one another. We were not allowed to smoke or even to have cigarettes, and would be beaten if caught. But sometimes they would distribute five cigarettes to a cell, and as soon as we lit them, they forced us to put them out and swallow them. One day, in the cell next to mine, the guards ordered the prisoners to bray-yes, like a donkey. The prisoners answered that they didn't know how to bray. "What! You don't know how? It's an order! " A prisoner said, "Teach us how, and we'll do it." The other prisoners laughed, and the guard was offended. "So, you say I'm a donkey? You find that funny? Let's see who has the last laugh." They got no food for 20 days. We did everything we could to get a little food to them.

I had been in prison for 18 months when, one day, I was taken to court. I asked to go to the toilet. I wanted to see myself in the mirror. I was surprised at the change. It was me, but it wasn't me anymore. I looked at my face. I was thin, and the four teeth they had broken made me look strange. My skin was pockmarked from the vermin. Then there were things that were not visible but that I could feel: my breathing, my back, and, perhaps worst of all, the loss of memory. (I had lapses until 1986-87; then my memory gradually came back.

I was in prison for 10 years and eight months, beginning in 1980, under conditions that Europeans would find hard to imagine. I was tortured so badly that I suffer even today. All because of a commitment to something that, to me, seemed elementary: the rights of the Kurds. I had to prove myself worthy of the confidence of the Kurds who had voted for me. My presence among the prisoners was also important: I was the senior prisoner. I had to hold on, to set an example, whatever torture I suffered and despite all I suffered because of the torture inflicted on those who were younger. But they did not break me.

[Diri]