Renowned activist Nuriye Gülmen talked about the torture she and her friends had been through in Istanbul Police Station.
CEVHERİ GÜVEN
BOLD – The last three years in Turkey saw the Erdogan regime dismiss more than 150 thousand civil servants from their posts.
The “Solidarity Concert” was to be held in Istanbul to protest the decrees that Erdoğan issued to dismiss civil servants and to meet with those who lost their jobs. However, the concert on Saturday (November 23) was banned by the local authority at the last moment.
Turkey’s well-known activists and academics who lost their jobs came to the concert and 18 people including Nuriye Gülmen and Acun Karadağ were detained.
During the 4-day detention process, Nuriye Gülmen confirmed that practices such as torture, ill-treatment, and medication ban were implemented as expressed by the lawyers previously. Gülmen told BOLD about their experiences she had in custody and the resistance movement that they started with a few people against emergency decrees.
Four-day detention with non-stop torture
“When we were taken into custody, they handcuffed us behind our backs and our arms forced almost till the breaking point. We were not allowed to use the toilet when we wanted to, and they did not answer our questions. The place where we were kept was very dirty.”
“On the last day, they said, ‘We’re going to get fingerprints.’ In fact, it was designed to torture us. Normally our fingerprints are already in the police records.
The torture scene was prepared
“The female cops evacuated us from the detention facilities and took us to a room with 15-20 men inside. They laid us down, reversed our arms behind our backs, insulted us constantly and kicked me in the head repeatedly. They crushed my chest so that I would not chant the slogan ‘Human dignity will overcome torture,’” Gülmen said and carried on, “They have a certain technique I’ve never encountered before. They crush your chest and prevent you from breathing and make you unable to chant slogans. I lost my conscious after some time due to continuous blows and because of their conduct that made me unable to breathe. They also used a method of foot crushing. When you are lying face down, they press on your ankles with their feet, make your ankles unmovable. So they torture you without breaking your bones and without causing a scar on your body parts.”
“As they stood on me, they insulted and humiliated me by saying ‘Let this be a teacher’s day present to you’.”
Medication Ban
Gülmen also mentioned about another method of torture during detention which is withholding medication for the patient ones:
“None of the patients in custody were provided with the medication they needed. We had three elderly friends, 60-70 years old, their medications were not given. Acun Karadağ who has a cardiac pacemaker was not provided with any medication too.”
Speaking out against the emergency decrees normalized
Nuriye Gülmen says that all the activists are proud of the point she has reached today against the emergency decree dismissals:
“On November the 9th [2016] I went out on my own. When we first went to the streets, people were hesitant to say that ‘I am dismissed with an emergency decree.’ Losing your job because of these decrees is a serious ground for isolation among people. It was our resistance that defeated the fear surrounding the emergency decrees. We made this legitimate. If one can say ‘I am dismissed by an emergency decree ‘ today, this is thanks to these resistances. We are most proud of it.”
Who is Nuriye Gülmen?
An academician and an activist, Nuriye Gülmen was expelled from the university she worked in over the accusation of being a member of the Gülen movement with an emergency decree issued after the July 2016 coup bid.
On 9 November 2016, she started a stand-alone protest in front of the Human Rights Memorial on Ankara Yüksel Street with the slogan ‘I want my job back’.
When the protest initiated by Gülmen started to attract masses, the prohibitions and detention processes started one after the other. Gülmen and her academic friend Semih Özakça went on a hunger strike. As the reaction grew, the two were arrested but they continued with their hunger strike. They maintained their hunger strike for 324 days. They were released months after their health problems increased. Gülmen and Özakça ended the hunger strike on January 26, 2018, after the state of emergency (OHAL) commission rejected their applications. Nuriye Gülmen had lost weight until she was 34 kilos in the last days of her strike.