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After
the Minister for Justice, Cemil Cicek, declared "If
the families come to me, I would like to meet them”,
on Tuesday January 14, Niyazi Agirman*, member of
the association of mutual aid of prisoners’ families
(TAYAD) went to the Ministry to lodge a petition.
When
he went there, he met Ali Suat Ertosun, the director
of the prisons and the penitentiaries. Comment on
what was said is superfluous.
Here
is the conversation which took place between Ali Suat
Ertosun and Niyazi Agirman:
Ertosun:
What is your request?
N.
Agirman: Abolishing isolation. What I seek is
the possibility of placing a certain number of prisoners
in a common space.
Ertosun:
No, it is not a question of isolation (in the prisons).
N.
Agirman: Yes, there is isolation. Since the F-Type
prisons came into being, there has been isolation
in the prisons. People are confined in individual
cells or in three-person cells.
Ertosun:
It is not isolation. Moreover, they are not cells
but rooms.
N.
Agirman: According to you, then, what is a cell?
Ertosun:
A cell is a place which does not have a courtyard
and which has lighting in the ceiling. On the other
hand, in the F-Type prisons, the prisoners play ball,
make objects out of earthenware or pottery. Your brother
has only to leave to be able to profit from it too.
N.
Agirman: Isn’t this reserved for those who
accept the "treatment" (ie. abandon their
political beliefs, a condition of using such facilities)?
You speak as if everyone could leave and profit from
it.
Ertosun:
One cannot go back to the old system. There, one did
not even manage to carry out roll calls. We could
not even get into our dormitories. Now, everything
is relaxed. All is as we wanted it.
N.
Agirman: Why did my son die then? He wanted just
to hear some voices. He said: "Ah, if I could
hear a human voice, the world would be with me".
Ertosun:
They are terrorists.
N.
Agirman: No, They are children of the people.
Not terrorists.
Ertosun:
We have to agree about this. They are terrorists.
Political prisoners are people who write columns in
newspapers.
N.
Agirman: No. Neither my son nor my brother are
terrorists. They are political prisoners.
Ertosun:
We eradicated them. We will never allow them to be
organised.
N.
Agirman: This is why you killed 28 people during
the operation of December 19.
Ertosun:
It had to be done. It was necessary to eradicate the
organisations.
N.
Agirman: You were on a mission during the operation.
In the prison of Bayrampasa, you burned six women
alive.
Ertosun:
They had to be burned.
N.
Agirman: Who killed my son? Then the assassin
of my son is you.
Ertosun:
Yes, I am an assassin. It is I who killed your son.
Have you anything else to say? Go away...
N.
Agirman: I do not have anything to say to the
assassin of my son.
Then
Niyazi Agirman leaves the office, slamming the door.
What
you have just read is what an assassin revealed to
a father. You could note the spirit which animates
those who are in charge of the prisons. If the director
of the prisons has such a mentality, you can imagine
what the prison guards in the F-Type prisons are like.
*
Last year, Volkan, the son of Niyazi Agirman, hung
himself in his cell after suffering from depression
due to isolation in an F-Type prison cell.
For
more information, please consult the sites:
www.tayad.org
www.noisolation.de
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