The Fight for Rights

Turkey is knocking on the European Union's door. Whether it gets in or not depends on the commitment of the Turkish parliament to political and economic reform. But it may also depend on one M.P. who has transformed herself from an internist at a provincial hospital into a human rights warrior: Sema Piskinsut.

Piskinsut is a member of the ruling Democratic Left Party and, until October 2000, was the head of the parliamentary Human Rights Commission. During her two-year tenure, Piskinsut vigorously investigated a wide range of issues, from press freedom to the penal detention system, both topics hindering the country's efforts to join the E.U.

Typical of her styles was a midnight expedition, shortly after she began work in March, 1998, during which she led her fellow commission members through the closed gates of Sanliurfa Prison to meet newly admitted inmates fresh from the torturers' wrack. She led similar swoops on police interrogation centers. Her modus operandi was always the same: straight to the cells, without prison staff accompaniment. "We were warned that it would be dangerous for us to conduct interviews without having guards present, but we wanted people to speak freely so we accepted the risk," Piskinsut says. The Human Rights Commission interviewed over 8,500 prisoners in provinces throughout Turkey. All the conversations were recorded and collated in 11 volumes, which are a chronicle of a penal system in which brute force was an accepted part of interrogation and discipline. The Commission interviewed 13-year-old children in Istanbul who had been subjected to electric shock therapy and convicts who had been interrogated while being hosed down with pressurized water. During the raids on police stations they recovered sticks, chains and implements of torture.

One of the most disturbing reports is on the Bakirkoy Detention Center for Women and Young Offenders in Istanbul, where children complained that they were still being beaten and mistreated even after a previous Commission visit. The findings suggested that human rights violations in Turkey were not the work of a few bad apples, as successive governments maintained, but the product of systematic abuse.

Turkish political commentators say the country's economic problems are due, at least in part, to a political system that has insulated itself from criticism and reform. Many of the measures being urged upon Turkey by the international community have as much to do with making government more transparent as with the details of monetary or fiscal policy. These reforms occupy a large chunk of the National Program, a document recently published by the Turkish government that sets outs its priorities — among them, a commitment that torture "cannot be tolerated under any circumstances" — in meeting the criteria for E.U. membership. Still, human rights abuses too often go either undetected or unpunished. Police and prison wardens who are tried for abuse have a mere 2% chance of being convicted, according to an Amnesty International report. The report produced by Sema Piskinsut's Commission comes to the same conclusions.

It's not E.U. admission that has motivated Piskinsut's work. "We want better democracy and greater freedoms for their own sake," she says. Piskinsut has paid a price for her outspokenness, though. At the end of last year, she was moved out of her position as head of the Commission and replaced by an M.P. from the far-right Nationalist Action Party. Piskinsut has now become an outspoken critic not just of the penal system but of parliament itself. "We can't call ourselves representatives of the people," she said, in obvious frustration that the meticulously documented criticism of parliament has not hastened the pace of change. She is calling for an overhaul of political party laws that transfer power away from individual lawmakers to the party leader. Piskinsut argues that Turkey will only have the will to make the reforms it needs if it strengthens the workings of its own democracy. In what turned out to be a more than usually futile gesture to prove her point, she presented herself as a rival to Bulent Ecevit, the party leader, at her Democratic Left Party's conference on April 29th. She was not even allowed to address the delegates and among ugly scenes in which her own son was manhandled, she left the hall early to defuse further uproar. "The truth may hurt," Piskinsut says, "but it can cure as well."