For Immediate Release (# 42)
202-483-6444 (Tel.)
March 25, 1999

Last night, March 24,1999, President Bill Clinton addressed the nation to cite his reasons for America's entry into the war as part of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) against Serbia. Among these, he said, "In 1989, Serbia's leader, Slobodan Milosevic,...stripped Kosovo of the constitutional autonomy its people enjoyed, thus denying them their right to speak their language, run their schools, [and] shape their daily lives."

In the same address, referring to Turkey, he noted that it is our ally.

Given the tremendous demands placed upon his shoulders, President Clinton may
not know that in Turkey, an ethnic minority known as Kurds numbering some 15 million people can not speak their language, run their schools and shape their daily lives no different than the Kosovars in Serbia.

But Clinton's aides know this and know more, for example, that it is the United States' supplied weapons that have enabled Turkey to enforce these draconian laws on the Kurds. Some among the Kurds have taken up arms, the way the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) has, and have fought the Turkish army that has cost the lives of 37,000 people, the destruction of 3,432 Kurdish villages and the displacement of more than 3 million Kurds. Silence seems to be the mood on this issue in the capitals of the world, though.

To count on Turkey as an ally to undo the wrongs of Slobodan Milosevic in Kosovo while letting Turkey get away with the same faults in the Turkish controlled Kurdistan can only be interpreted as disingenuous. President Clinton has had strange bedfellows before, but in an adventure that may cost the American lives, it behooves him to disassociate himself from Turkey for the credibility of the United States.

The American Kurdish Information Network (AKIN) condemns this blatant double standard and urges the United States government to counsel its own ally as it continues with the costly adventure of undoing the wrongs of Mr. Milosevic in Kosovo.

The American Kurdish Information Network (AKIN)
provides a public service to foster Kurdish-American understanding and friendship
E-MAIL: akin@kurdish.org HOME PAGE:www.kurdistan.org

TORTURE
EXPERIMENTS

Inside Turkey's Diyarbakir Prison

On September 12, 1980, a military coup took over in Turkey. The Kurds who comprise one third of the country's population and live in the southeast, also known as, northern Kurdistan, bore the fury and the wrath of the generals and their soldiers. Because the Kurds had asked for civil rights, thousands of them were arrested and put in the Diyarbakir Military Prison. For four years, torture methods, akin to those used by the Gestapo, were practiced on them. Like all experiments, some were failures. Scores of Kurds succumbed to death, injuries and psychological scars one after the other.

Mazlum Dogan hung himself on Newroz day, March 21, 1982, a day that has always symbolized resistance for the Kurds. Ferhat Kurtay, Necmi Oner, Esref Anyik and Mahmut Zengin burnt themselves to death on May 17,1982 in what has become known as "The Night of the Four." Hayri Durmus, Kemal Pir, Akif Yilmaz and Ali Cicek began a hunger strike on July 14,1982 which culminated in their deaths. Mehdi Zana, the duly elected mayor of Diyarbakir has chronicled those days in his book, Prison # 5 now available in bookstores across America. By the time the inmates of the military prison were dispersed to other jails, fifty seven other Kurds would die of torture and many others would be crippled for life.

These drawings, expressing the methods of torture used by the Turkish prison officials, were done by Zulfukar Tak and sent out in secret. Born in 1961 at Siverek in the Urfa province, Mr. Tak was imprisoned in 1980, placed in the infamous Diyarbakir prison and was given a death sentence. As of this writing, his sentence has not been carried out. He now serves time at another prison, at Elbistan in Maras province in Turkish controlled Kurdistan.

For more information, contact:
The American Kurdish Information Network (AKIN)
2623 Connecticut Avenue NW, Suite # 1
Washington, DC 20008-1522
202-483-6444
202-483-6476 fax
akin@kurdish.org
www.kurdistan.org