Child Torture Not Unusual in Turkey, U.S. Group Says

ISTANBUL, Turkey — Nermin Alkan was 16 years old when, moved by the gathering Persian Gulf War clouds over Turkey’s southeastern border with Iraq, she hung up a poster in her classroom saying “No to This Unjust War.”

The gesture was fated to teach her much about injustice.

The school principal denounced her to the local police. They took her to the Istanbul security headquarters. There she said she was blindfolded, beaten on the arms, legs and head during interrogations, forced to confess and locked up for 75 days in fetid, adult jails.

“Nothing unusual” for Turkey, Alkan told an investigator from Helsinki Watch, the U.S. human rights monitoring group.

That comment is the title of a new report from the group released Monday alleging systematic torture of children in this major U.S. ally. Graphic descriptions by nine teen-agers, six of them accused of nonviolent political activism like Alkan’s, included tales of mass beatings by groups of policemen, beatings of the soles of the feet, “Palestinian hanger” suspensions by hands tied behind the back and occasional use of electrical shocks to limbs and genitals.

“We have received dozens more reports from reliable sources. It is a systematic practice,” Helsinki Watch Executive Director Jeri Laber said at an Istanbul news conference to announce the report.

Laber said one aim of Helsinki Watch is to link Turkey’s human rights performance to U.S. military aid, budgeted at $700 million this year.

Laber acknowledged that the group was highlighting the torture of children to condemn the general practice of police beatings and torture of suspects, of which she said at least 15 people died in 1991.

Laber said Turkey was “a very different and better place than under the generals in 1983, when everyone at a human rights news conference might have been arrested.” But, she said, the new government of Prime Minister Suleyman Demirel has to live up to its October, 1991, election pledge to stamp out torture altogether.