On International Human Rights Day .. Witnesses recount horrors of Turkish prisons

ZANA SIDI/KOBANÎ

On Monday, the world will receive the 70th anniversary of the signature of one of the most important documents on modern human history, just a few years after the end of the Second World War, the document of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, signed in Paris in 1948.

The prisons of Turkey ... hell and cellars of blood

The fate of hundreds of thousands of detainees in the prisons of a number of countries around the world, especially Turkey, which topped Amnesty International's list last year on the suppression of freedoms and humiliation of detainees, and the physical and sexual abuse of detainees.

Doubts remain in the actual implementation of the document material, which has been signed and translated into more than 500 languages, especially in Turkey, where the government dismissed more than 90,000 employees last year on charges of participating in the failed coup of the summer of 2016 ,in addition to the tens of thousands who were imprisoned, while the fate of hundreds of people who were taken from areas in northern Kurdistan remains unknown to this day.

Former prisoners in Turkish prisons said that the country has turned into a large jail and prisons have become hell and basements of blood. All opponents of government policies, especially the Kurds, are at any moment subject to arrest on fabricated charges meant made by the Turkish government itself.

A detainee recounts the facts

Fadel Mulla Khalil, a 27-year-old resident of Halanj village of Kobanî canton, has worked for years in northern Kurdistan to support his family. He says he was arrested on charges of being a terrorist Kurd without any other reasons and taken to one of Turkey's most dangerous prisons which is "Urfa Central Prison"

Fadel who was arrested in September 2017 and released months ago Says, "When I was arrested, I was not surprised because I know what Turkish politics means, they took me to unknown hills, they told me what is going on in western Kurdistan, who are the leaders who run these areas, you have to disclose everything, I did not already have that information  "I told them I have nothing to say. They tortured me a lot by beating me hard on my face and all the places in my body and they took me to the central prison of Urfa."

Fadel points to the high figure he found in prison for eight months in the prison and added, "one day 

 a Turkish newspaper wrote that the number of Kurdish detainees in Turkish prisons amounted to 300 thousand citizens. It was a shocking number. I met a lot of Kurds in western Kurdistan in that prison and we were subjected to the worst kinds of torture ,we did not see a single visit of UN inspectors or human rights organizations."

Article 1 of the human rights document states: "All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights, and they have given reason and conscience and must treat each other in a spirit of brotherhood."

While articles 5 and 10 contain "no one must be subjected to torture or to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment or to the dignity of all persons."

Earlier this year, Amnesty International published a report on the arrest of journalists and politicians in Turkey on charges of promoting the PKK. The organization accused Turkey to attach charges against the reality of the detainees.

A former prisoner, Mohammad Kerman who has been in jail for three months this year in the same prison, says he was arrested because of a photo of YPG fighters sent by a Turkish policeman deliberately to be jailed.

He added ,"the charges were that the detainee listened to a Kurdish song, or his mobile phone contained pictures of them in Kurdish clothes, or that he spoke in Kurdish, these reasons were sufficient to arrest the person."

A.H

ANHA