In Turkey, a Matter of Conviction
Women Who Spoke Against Police Abuse Face Prosecution

By Molly Moore
Washington Post Foreign Service
Monday, May 21, 2001; Page A01

ISTANBUL -- Nazli Top was walking home from work nine years ago when she was stopped at a security checkpoint. She says she was taken to a police station where she was held captive for 10 days by officers who beat her, prodded her with electric shocks until her body went numb, then raped her with a truncheon. She was 32 years old and three months pregnant.

Last June, Top told her story at Turkey's first public conference on the abuse of women in police custody -- an event women's rights advocates hailed as a milestone in a country in which sexual violence against women is frequently ignored, covered up or deemed taboo for public debate.

Six months later, Top and 18 other conference speakers and organizers were charged with "insulting and raising suspicions about Turkish security forces." If convicted, each could receive a six-year prison term.

"The police who did this should be standing here -- not me," Top told the judge hearing her case. "I am being victimized for the second time."

The prosecutions come during an intensifying struggle over freedom of expression and individual rights in a country torn between the march toward integration with the European Union and an entrenched culture that protects government institutions from rigorous public scrutiny.

"If this was a democratic country, officials would start investigations against the police instead of going after the people making the accusations," Top, a nurse in the research laboratory of a hospital in suburban Istanbul, said in an interview.

Human rights advocates say Turkey's laws against insulting or belittling the government are often used to silence journalists, intellectuals, government opponents and victims of abuse by police and military forces. European Union officials evaluating Turkey's membership application have demanded it abandon or moderate such laws.

Amnesty International asked Turkish authorities to drop the charges against Top and her co-defendants "who are guilty only of peacefully expressing their views." Instead, the government recently reviewed the speeches made by several of the participants and filed new charges against five of the women, accusing them under Turkey's anti-terrorism laws of spreading separatist propaganda, according to Fatma Karatas, an attorney and one of the women facing the additional charges. Those laws, which cover a broad range of religious and ethnic issues, are among the most frequently used in freedom of expression cases in Turkey, Karatas said.

Another of the five women targetted with the additional charges is a 45-year-old Kurdish mother of five who is suing seven policemen for torture and rape during 33 days she was detained in 1992 in southeastern Turkey, where Kurdish separatists led a rebel uprising against Turkish forces.

Prosecutors in the cases against the conference participants did not return several telephone calls requesting comment on the government's position. Government authorities traditionally defend the laws used in this case as necessary to protect the state from separatist and religious extremist groups.

"This conference was the first of its kind," said Nahide Kilic, an official of Initiative Against Sexual Abuse and Rape in Custody, an Istanbul-based victim support group that helped organize the meeting last June. "People came forward and talked about their experiences to set an example for those too scared to come forward. Now, with these charges, the state wants to silence the people."

Participants in the Assembly Against Sexual Harassment and Rape Under Detention, which was attended by about 2,000 people, said they were stunned by the government's charges because the conference had been approved by the government and most of the victims had revealed details of their allegations in unsuccessful court cases against the police or in other official complaints.

Many of the speakers highlighted the court's reluctance to prosecute members of the security forces accused of raping or otherwise abusing detainees, especially women.

"Amnesty International has documented a general climate of impunity for those suspected of torture and ill-treatment in Turkey," the human rights group wrote in a recent report. "Even where complaints of serious human rights violations are pursued by the authorities and security officers are prosecuted, only a negligible proportion of them are eventually convicted. In cases where a conviction occurs, security officials often receive the lightest possible sentences."

Amnesty International cited figures it said were obtained from the Turkish government that show convictions for only 10 of 577 security officials accused of torture between 1995 and 1999. During the same period, 2,851 investigations into other forms of alleged ill-treatment of detainees resulted in 84 convictions. Turkish authorities have said they were attempting to eradicate such incidents of torture and were trying to increase protection for detainees. But women's rights advocates said Top's case was representative of the victims' experiences.

Top was walking home from the hospital where she worked on a late spring afternoon in 1992 when police investigating an attack on a nearby police vehicle stopped her to check her identification. After driving her to a police station and questioning her for hours, Top said one of the policemen told her, "Now we're going to take you to the operating room. But it's not like the ones you've seen in your hospital."

"They beat me with sticks with sharp ends," Top said, her hands shaking as she recounted the incident. "They tied my hands behind my back and hung me from a rope. They hit me like a punching bag.

"They put electric shocks on my breasts and genitals and all over my body. They kept increasing the voltage. After awhile I was numb, I didn't even feel the electricity. Then they raped me with a truncheon."

Top said she survived by talking to the baby she was carrying, even though she feared the fetus had died from the abuse. Her son survived.

When police released her several days later after pressing no charges, Top was taken to a crowded room where a doctor was examining detainees. The doctor asked, "Do you have any complaints?"

"I was tortured," Top said.

"Everyone is tortured," the doctor replied. "Do you have any other complaints?"

Top's case against the police who allegedly detained her dragged on for 2 1/2 years until the judge dropped all charges against them, accepting the prosecutor's explanation that Top had inflicted bruises on herself and had obtained a fake medical report from the hospital where she worked.

Top said she decided to address the Istanbul conference last year because, "When I was apprehended, there was no organized resistance. Now there is, and I'm part of it."