IX. Detention in Turkey

Edirne 

Human Rights Watch spent two full days visiting the Edirne Tunca detention facility.  The access we were given to the facility was particularly remarkable given the absolutely dreadful conditions we found there.  On the first day we visited, June 11, 2008, the detainee population was 703.  The capacity of the facility is 200.  By our second visit, 263 people had been released, including, as it turned out, nearly everyone who spoke Arabic and Farsi, the languages of our interpreters.  Nevertheless, we were permitted to interview anyone we chose in a completely private setting in a courtyard outside a building holding most of the detainees.[112] 

The Tunca facility at Edirne is comprised of two buildings, each divided into two rooms.  The smaller of the two buildings holds in one room women and children and in the other men who appear to have prospects of relatively quick identification and cooperation from their home consulates to effect their removal from Turkey. The countries of origin of the men in the small building included Algeria, Iran, Iraq, Kazakhstan, and Ecuador.[113]  The larger building which holds by far the larger number of detainees is divided into a smaller room for men who will be released to Istanbul because they are members of nationalities that cannot be deported, such as Somalis and Palestinians, and the larger room which holds the largest number of men-about 400 on our first visit-who are held indefinitely pending their relatives providing tickets for their return flights or until they can be deported.  Most of the men in the big room appeared to be south Asians from countries like Bangladesh, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, India, as well as various African nationalities.[114]  The authorities also put "Afghans," "Somalis," "Burmese," and "Palestinians" in the big room when they doubted their declared nationalities.

On the first day, we mostly interviewed detainees housed in the smaller building.  After we learned the significance of where people were detained, when we returned two days later we selected detainees exclusively from the big building.

An indication of the fear of the guards and the difficulty in conducting interviews, even when completely private, is the comment of one of the detainees to a Human Rights Watch researcher on our second visit:  "When you visited last time, people were afraid of expressing themselves and saying what happened to them.  We were afraid of what might happen to us that evening after you left the camp.  I want to talk to you, but I don't know what will happen to me after this."[115]

The conditions in the big building, particularly in the bigger of the two rooms, are abysmal-completely unfit for human habitation, even for a short duration.  As a place of indefinite detention, the conditions alone are inhuman and degrading.

Words fail to describe the sight and smell of 400 men crammed into a single room.  For our own security, we were not allowed to walk into the room, but stood at the only door to the room, a padlocked iron gate, where we peered into the darkness.  Though men crowded toward us, they parted their human sea so we could see the jammed crowd all the way to the wall.  There was no space between any bodies; they sat shoulder to shoulder both along the walls and in the room's interior. 

All the men were dirty and smelled foul.  Some appeared to be quite ill.  Men came forward who had particularly hideous skin infections and rashes.  We saw men whose torsos and faces were completely covered in open sores that looked quite contagious.  Those crowding against the bars of the door called out various messages, including: "There is beating here;" "The food is bad;" "I was slapped in the face;" "How long must we stay here?" "People are sleeping in the toilet."[116]

The big building looks like an old warehouse.  It is dark and fetid.  There are only small windows at the ceiling level and these are made of glass so are useless in terms of air circulation and cooling.  There is only one window fan and one other fan at the end of the room.  Although the larger of the two rooms has an exit that leads to the courtyard that could theoretically be used to provide fresh air and exercise, in fact, except for those interviewed by Human Rights Watch, none of the detainees had ever been allowed into the yard.  The smaller of the two rooms doesn't even have a door that leads to the yard. 

Some of the men who we picked for interviews had to wait for a long time in the courtyard.  When a Human Rights Watch interviewer apologized to one of the last men to be interviewed for making him wait, he responded that sitting in the sun waiting for his interview was the best day he had spent at Edirne:  "I have been here four times.  I have never before been out in the yard."

The strongest first impressions of Edirne are the overcrowding, the desperation, the stench and the grime. A man claiming to be Somali spoke about living in extremely cramped conditions:

There are not enough mattresses here for even half the people in this room. Every mattress has at least two or three people sleeping face to foot.  Some people sit up all night waiting for other people to wake up so they can take their place on the mattress and sleep.  We have no space. You have to step on top of other people to go to the toilet.[117] 

An 18-year-old Somali spoke about the overcrowding and his inability to keep clean:

When it's crowded, there is no place to lie down.  Someone trampled on me one night, but I said to myself, what's the point of hitting him… The blankets are worn out and never washed or aired.  I am getting a rash on my arms [shows dry flaky patches on his arms].  I think this is coming from the blanket and mattress.  They smell very bad, but we have no choice. I have itching on my private parts… There are three toilets. Cleaning them is not a routine process at all.  I myself try to clean them.  It's a Turkish toilet.  The police don't come into the room.  They speak to us from the door like you did. [118]  

Several of the detainees told Human Rights Watch that the water made them sick but that the building would get so hot that they would have to drink it anyway.  One man said, "The biggest problems here are the toilets and no water to drink.  My urine becomes very yellow because I only drink Coca Cola that I pay for.  There are two showers, but the taps are broken, so you can only use the faucet at the bottom and there is no hot water." [119]

Many of the detainees were in visibly poor health.  A Bangladeshi teenager now in Kırklareli told of his time at the Tunca facility: "Edirne was a very awful situation.  There was no place for bathing.  Insects would get inside the skin.  Everyone there gets skin diseases.  The food is a half a portion of bread and the hot food tastes like rubber.  There is no doctor."[120] 

Since the iron-barred door is usually padlocked and there is little movement in or out of the room, there is actually little contact between guards and other staff and the detainees.  But every point of contact is a source of friction.  Feeding a room filled with hundreds of hungry men through one slot in the bars of the door creates an obvious potential for conflict:

They think we are not men, that we are the same as animals…  It is never possible to communicate with the guards.  Nobody respects the two men who distribute the food.  They are not police.  The stronger one of the two, a big fat man about 40 years old with brown hair, had three loaves of bread in his hand.  He told me to take the smallest one.  I told him I wanted the other and I got angry and threw the bread in the dust bin.  He then took me outside, beat me up, and spat in my face.  He hit me four times.  He punched me twice with his fist and slapped me twice with his hand.[121]

               

When detainees at Edirne have any contact at all with guards and staff, beatings are common.  A 20-year-old French-speaking African man claiming to be Somali, who was being held in the smaller of the two rooms in the big building, talked matter-of-factly about beatings:

Sometimes the Palestinians and the Burmese get into fights.  The detainees stop the fights themselves because if they get too big the guards will come and beat them.  They beat us with a stick.  They will hit the same person two or three times and slap and kick him.[122]

As this man said, the most immediate threat of violence inside the rooms is from other detainees.  A 23-year-old Sri Lankan spoke about the tensions in the room and the fear of detainee-on-detainee violence. "There is no place to sleep.  The sleeping arrangements create fighting.  One of the fans doesn't work.  There is much smoking in there.  There are great language problems and there is fighting between people from different countries."[123] 

As little control as is exercised inside the detention rooms, when the fighting escalates to a certain point, the guards do intervene, coming in the room and beating people with plastic truncheons until they quiet down.  A "Burmese" man explains: "Everyone stopped when the police entered.  When one man wanted to say something, the police struck him with the black plastic stick."[124]

The Tunca detention center at Edirne does not have a doctor or nurse on site or even one that periodically visits.  Only in emergencies do the guards take a detainee to the hospital because with only four guards on duty at any one shift they don't have the manpower to do so.  

Edirne:  Intentionally Inhuman and Degrading Treatment 

The head of the Passport and Foreigners Department of the Edirne Province Security Directorate, Chief of Police Ali Türedi, called the Tunca facility at Edirne "a bleeding wound."[125]

Acknowledging the serious problems at the facility for which he is responsible, Chief Türedi argues that Ankara has denied Edirne the resources needed to run a more efficient-and consequently a more humane-operation.  He has a staff of 35 in a region of the country where 18,400 undocumented migrants were apprehended last year; in contrast, he said, about half that number of undocumented migrants, 9,250, were apprehended in Istanbul last year, where the Passport and Foreigners Department is almost nine times larger, with a staff of 300.  "We work with double the number of aliens with 10 percent of the staff of Istanbul," he said.[126] 

Chief Türedi told Human Rights Watch that the prison for common criminals in Edirne has 70 guards for 300 prisoners, but that Tunca only has four guards each shift responsible for 700 detainees (703 on the first day of the Human Rights Watch visit).  He said that Tunca has a capacity for 200, but held 1,030 detainees at one point in the summer of 2007.

Türedi also contrasted Tunca's staffing with the Kırklareli detention center for foreigners.  Kırklareli has a capacity for 2,500, a staff of 30 or 40, and a nurse on duty.  Edirne has no nurse and hardly any capacity even to use the four guards on duty to transport sick or injured detainees to the hospital for emergency treatment.

The consequences of few guards and many detainees crammed into a small space are as ominous as they are predictable.  The guards at Tunca have no presence within the closed rooms.  Control inside the rooms (or lack thereof) is entirely in the hands of the detainees themselves. One guard expressed to Human Rights Watch his sense of the impossibility of his job:  "I wake up every morning not knowing what I'm going to face that day and just hoping nothing happens, that a riot doesn't break out. It's a very stressful situation for us working here."[127]

The obvious question is why there were only 174 detainees at Kırklareli, a relatively open facility with large grounds and a capacity to hold 2,500 on the same day that the Tunca facility at Edirne with a capacity for 200 was holding 703 people.  When Human Rights Watch posed this question to Chief Türedi, he answered, "That's a good question."[128]

The police structure in Turkey is highly centralized. It is hard, therefore, not to draw the conclusion that the budget allocations for detaining foreigners are not accidental but rather a part of national planning and priority setting.

Given the difficulty and expense of deporting most of the detainees, the government shifts the burden of removal to the detainees themselves; they are held indefinitely until their families can arrange return tickets on their behalf. Because the Ministry of Interior could improve the deplorable conditions at Edirne if it chose to, it appears that it intentionally keeps conditions at Tunca in Edirne degrading and inhumane as a means of coercing detainees to self deport and as a signal to those who will be released to leave the country or risk return to the bleeding wound.

Kırklareli

The Kırklareli Gaziosmanpaşa Refugee Camp (hereafter Kırklareli) has had a long history as an actual refugee camp.  In 1989 it was a safe haven for ethnic Turks fleeing Bulgaria; in 1992, a shelter for refugees from Bosnia; and in 1999, a place of refuge for Kosovar Albanians.  It can no longer be described, truthfully, as a refugee camp, however.  It is rather a detention center for migrants, some of whom may indeed be refugees, but not refugees being protected from persecution, but rather refugees that Turkey is seeking to remove.

At the time of Human Rights Watch's visit, Kırklareli held 174 detainees, including four women and the four-year-old child of one of the women. 

Although the men are locked away in a long barracks building, they were freely wandering around the outdoor grounds of the fenced-in facility during the Human Rights Watch visit.  They appeared to be allowed to go outside the barracks during the afternoons.  The facility is surrounded by a chain-link fence topped with barbed wire.  Signs of its history as a former refugee camp are abundant in the form of old unused shelters with faded UNHCR logos and an overgrown soccer field that have not been used in many years, despite a rather comical attempt by the Kırklareli administrator to give Human Rights a guided tour intended to show that old classrooms and recreational facilities are still being used by the detainees. 

The women and child were housed in a separate building that the women told Human Rights Watch they had recently been asked to clean prior to a visit by another delegation.  The administrator showed Human Rights Watch a large-screen television set in one of the women's private rooms, but failed to note that the TV was not plugged in and didn't work at all.  Although the men are allowed to leave their barracks during most afternoons, the guards tell the women that they are not allowed to leave their building.  "The door is kept open to allow the child to come and go, but we are not allowed to walk out the door," said a 25-year-old Iranian woman. [129]

Both men and women at Kırklareli complained about the poor quality and small quantity of food.  A man claiming to be Burmese said, "The food is not good.  It is not fit for humans, and it is not enough.  Nothing happens if we complain.  The guards say, 'If you don't like the food, go to the market and buy your own.'" [130]

The main complaint, however, is that the detainees are not informed how long they will remain in detention.  Human Rights Watch spoke privately with a man who appeared to be an informal leader of the "Burmese" at Kırklareli.  He said that the Burmese numbered 160 of the 174 detainees in the camp and that most, including him, had already been held there for nine months and had no idea how much longer they would stay there.  "Just tell us what to do," he said.  "Give us a sentence.  If they let us leave, we will work and feed our families. Let us leave or kill us." [131]  

Even though the conditions at Kırklareli did not appear to be nearly as bad as at Edirne, tensions between detainees and guards were very high.  The camp administrator told Human Rights Watch, "Despite the good conditions here, there is an enmity towards us." [132]

On the night of the day after the Human Rights Watch visit there was a riot at Kırklareli.  The causes of the riot and the response of the security forces were under investigation when Human Rights Watch left the country.  In the course of putting down the disturbance, Turkish security forces shot and killed one of the detainees, a young man of unknown nationality who Human Rights Watch had talked to at length.

Izmir 

Migrants told Human Rights Watch similar stories to what Human Rights observed in Edirne about their treatment in the jail in Izmir.[133]  A 20-year-old man from Baghdad who made several failed attempts to enter Greece described his treatment in Izmir.  Noteworthy is that he was beaten at first for falsely claiming to be Palestinian, and then when he truthfully admitted to being Iraqi, they beat him again, accusing him of being a Palestinian:

In the Izmir jail there was no food and they would beat you to get you to admit you were Iraqi.  There were about 100 people held in a narrow room.  Iraqis are especially beaten to get them to admit to being Iraqis.  I was beaten until I admitted that I was an Iraqi.  Then they beat me because they accused me of really being a Palestinian.  They hit me with police clubs. Every day they beat me.  They beat me on the back.[134]

The jail facility in Izmir was described by some migrants as being underground.[135]  A 33-year-old Iraqi from Baghdad described the Izmir jail:

We were held underground for two weeks.  There were a lot of people there.  We couldn't breathe.  There were different nationality groups:  the Moroccans, the Pakistanis, the Palestinians.  The police feeding would take place once a day.  The bigger groups took all the food.  The police laughed at us.[136]