Five police officers are being investigated following the kidnapping and beating of a 14-year-old Kurdish boy in Diyarbakir, in Turkey’s southeast, during Nowruz celebrations last week, local officials said.
The incident again raises the issue of police brutality and impunity in Turkey, particularly in the Kurdish-majority southeast.
The teenager, identified only as Y.D., was attacked on March 21, according to a statement from the Diyarbakir governor’s office. Prosecutors launched an investigation and four days later “a commissioner and four police officers … were taken into custody.” The five were suspended from duty.
Nahit Eren, chair of the Diyarbakir Bar Association, said Tuesday that a court had “unlawfully released” two of the officers under conditions of judicial control.
According to media reports, Y.D. was walking home after celebrating Nowruz, the Kurdish spring festival, with a 10-year-old friend in Lice, a town 70 kilometers (43 miles) northeast of the provincial capital, when they were stopped by police.
The younger boy was let go, but Y.D. was placed in an armored police vehicle and his hands and feet were tied. He was beaten with the butt of a long-barrelled gun, throttled, threatened with death and forced to say he was Turkish and denigrate his Kurdish identity, the Mezopotamya news agency reported, citing the boy’s testimony.
Y.D. was also made to recite the Turkish national anthem and other nationalist tracts. Finally, he was dumped, bound and gagged by a stream and was later discovered by a villager. He was taken to hospital and released the following day.
In their statements, the officers said they had detained the boy after a group began throwing stones at them. They all denied injuring Y.D. The officers were arrested for “deprivation of liberty and deliberate injury” after Y.D. identified at least three of them.
Nujiyan Yildirim, from the Amed Labor and Democracy Platform, condemned the assault as a “mentality that feeds on violence and darkness.”
“It is understood that they want to return the country to the dark days of the 1990s,” he said, speaking at a protest against the detentions over Nowruz. The decade was the peak of the conflict between the Turkish military and the Kurdistan Workers Party, when villages were emptied and thousands were killed or disappeared.
The assault of Y.D. came shortly after the ninth anniversary of the death of Berkin Elvan, a 15-year-old boy who was killed by a police tear gas cannister while he was shopping for bread in Istanbul.
He died after nine months in a coma following the incident in June 2013 during the nationwide anti-government Gezi Park protests.
Although the police officer responsible was sentenced to nearly 17 years imprisonment in June 2021, he remains free while awaiting a decision from the Supreme Court of Appeals.
The European Court of Human Rights ruled in February that the Turkish authorities had failed “to conduct an effective investigation into any part that Istanbul’s law enforcement director and/or governor might have played in relation to the death of Berkin Elvan.”
In a joint 2022 report, the Human Rights Foundation of Turkey and the country’s Human Rights Association outlined the scale of killings and mistreatment by police.
In the year’s first 11 months, 15 people, including a child, were killed in “summary executions on the grounds that they did not abide by stop warnings or [by] random fire by law enforcement,” the report stated.
It added that torture and ill-treatment at police stations and prisons, as well as “in the streets and outdoors,” led to the claim that “the whole country has virtually become a space of torture today because of the political power’s mode of government based on repression and control.”
According to data collected by the foundation, at least 5,148 people, including 143 children, were subjected to some form of ill-treatment while in law enforcement custody between January and November. Some 225 people suffered ill-treatment in an outdoor space.
The report also described the scarcity of prosecutions for police violence, with accusers more likely to end up facing charges such as “resisting a public officer.” More than 28,600 people were prosecuted under this offense in 2021, while only 130 were charged with a crime relating to ill-treatment by a public official.
“The huge gap between the number of cases brought against persons in torture and resistance charges clearly demonstrates the dimensions of impunity and the ways in which impunity is maintained as a systematic policy,” the report noted.
The New York-based Human Rights Watch, in a 2022 report, said abductions and enforced disappearances were not investigated properly in Turkey.
“There was little evidence to suggest prosecutors made progress in investigating the rising allegations of torture and ill-treatment in police custody and prison reported over the past five years,” the report continued. “Few such allegations result in prosecution of the security forces and a pervasive culture of impunity persists.”
Source:Al-Monitor
