Fasting to Death.(prisoners conduct hunger strike to protest prison reform, Turkey)(Brief Article)

Basak Otlu never goes anywhere alone. She walks stiffly down the steeply sloping streets behind Istanbul's Taxim Square with her friend Mustafa, who has the same limping walk and the same haunted look in his eyes. Former political prisoners, they are on their way to a weekly appointment with Dr. Celal Calikusu, a psychiatrist who specializes in helping victims of police torture and imprisonment.

"We stick together because no one else understands what we have been through," says Basak, 27. Her nightmare began six years ago, in 1997, when she was arrested for participating in an illegal leftist demonstration for, ironically enough, prisoners' rights. At the police station she was strip-searched; her male friends were hung by their arms from the ceiling and beaten through the night. Mustafa, arrested at another demonstration, was beaten until he confessed to being a member of a similar group. After that, jail seemed a sanctuary of safety in numbers. Both Basak and Mustafa were assigned to standard dormitory-style cells containing as many as 60 other political prisoners, where warders rarely ventured.

Now Turkey is seeking to join the European Union and clean up its human-rights act--with police brutality, torture and prison conditions high on the list of reforms. For Basak and Mustafa, that meant a transfer two years ago to a more modern facility, closer to European standards. An improvement? Not as they saw it, for the new jail confined them in near-isolation, three people or fewer to a cell. That left them isolated and lonely, they say, and vulnerable to abuse from the warders. Basak likens it to being "buried alive."

This poses an ironic conundrum. On the one hand, people like Basak and Mustafa are victims of a culture of brutality, spawned by decades of political violence. On the other hand, though their ordeal began with political torture, Basak and Mustafa now limp their way through Istanbul because of physical damage they inflicted on themselves. It is the result of a protest against something that, to the outside world, represents a step forward. For their response to Turkey's decision to "Europeanize" its jails has been a hunger strike. Basak and Mustafa are two of approximately 230 leftist political prisoners who joined a notorious "death fast" that, since it began nearly a year ago, has claimed the lives of 47 people. (Another 36 have been killed during police raids, inside and outside jails, aimed at putting an end to the fasts.) And they have been terrible deaths, marked by dehydration, atrophication and the painful failure of internal organs, chiefly kidneys and livers. Sustained by a diet of sugar, vitamins and salt, their suffering lasts up to 300 days.

Needless to say, this doesn't exactly fit Europe's blueprint. Diplomats are flummoxed by the perversity of the situation. "As far as we can see, the new jails are more, not less humane," says one senior EU representative in Istanbul. Rather than demanding a return to their jails and prison lifestyle of the past, he suggests, the strikers ought to be protesting the torture and restrictions on such basic rights as ...