Goodbye to a symbol of torture in Turkey

The day before yesterday another cold war wall fell, which for tens of thousands of Kurdish families is also a wailing wall.

Thomas Osborne
Thomas Osborne
27 October 2022 Thursday 19:30
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Goodbye to a symbol of torture in Turkey

The day before yesterday another cold war wall fell, which for tens of thousands of Kurdish families is also a wailing wall. On Tuesday night, cranes began dismantling the bomb-proof perimeter of Diyarbakir prison, a symbol of the repression brought about by the 1980 military coup.

In another coup, but by sleight of hand, Recep Tayyip Erdogan had announced on the spot, last Sunday, the closure of the prison and its reconversion "into a museum, a library and an artistic and cultural center". Its 18 hectares, in the heart of the city, go a long way.

On his infrequent visit to the unofficial capital of Kurdish Turkey, the president was flanked by two of his ministers. The Justice Department handed over the keys to the prison to the head of Culture, Mehmet Nuri Ersoy, for whom the museum "will allow us to learn about past mistakes so that they are not repeated."

The Diyarbakir prison, which the military dictatorship filled to overflowing, still housed 270 prisoners two weeks ago, when it was emptied, just before Erdogan's planned visit, which had to be postponed due to a serious mining accident.

Next to the Military Prison number 5 -its official name- the prisons of the Midnight Express look like rest pavilions. Instances of torture, electrocutions, harassment and extrajudicial executions of political prisoners have been widely documented

Jordi Tejel, a specialist in Kurdish history, recalls the horror stories heard out loud: "They don't forget the warden, who walked around with a dog trained to bite the genitals." Tejel considers that the idea "is good from the start", but that "we will have to see the content, so that history is not rewritten". Likewise, he says, "wanting to be so many things can dilute meaning." Another risk is “to close falsely, because the present is not resolved. Erdogan's great rival in the Kurdish areas, Selahattin Demirtaş (HDP), is imprisoned in Edirne.

When Erdogan sounded out the conversion of the prison into educational centers 13 years ago, Demirtaş's reaction was that if it was not torn down, it could only be a museum. Now, however, Demirtaş's successor, Meral Danış Beştaş, says that Erdogan "is offering a false spring to those whose vote he persecutes."

Another HDP deputy goes further, saying that Erdogan "closes one prison after opening many more." After the purges after the attempted coup of 2016, these were not enough.

But ex-prisoners like Abdurrahim Semavi, who entered there at the age of 16 and left at the age of 23, believes that the museum "will preserve the memory of a dark age."

However, the writer from Diyarbakir, Erhan Sunar, warns that the museification "does not make sense, if there is not first an in-depth investigation of that period that clarifies responsibilities". "In the eighties," he recalls, "there were many deaths from torture disguised as suicides." At least 57 in three years.

Fifteen months ago, Erdogan had already anticipated on television that he would turn the aforementioned prison, "a symbol of cruelty and torture", into a cultural center "to eliminate this nightmare from the memory of Diyarbakir".

This will not be the first time that the Turkish president has converted a prison. More than a decade ago, in Ankara, the Ulucanlar prison, where the writers Nâzim Hikmet and Yaşar Kemal were imprisoned, was already transformed into a museum.

Erdogan himself spent four months in jail in the late 1990s, when, as mayor of Istanbul, he read a textbook poem at a rally that read: "And the minarets shall be our bayonets."

Needless to say, under Erdogan, the leader of the 1980 coup, General Kenan Evren, was tried and died under house arrest, as a private soldier.

Although the first coup dates back to 1960, when the conservative Prime Minister Adnan Menderes, whom Erdogan admires, was executed after a summary trial in Yassiada, opposite Istanbul.

This tiny island was reopened two years ago as the Island of Democracy and Freedom. Although its detractors have renamed it Cement Island, because not a single tree was left standing.