“During 11 months of protracted round-the-clock lockdowns imposed on residential areas in Turkey’s southeast, Turkish security forces deliberately and illegally obstructed access to health care by using state hospitals for military purposes, preventing the free movement of emergency medical vehicles, and punishing health professionals for delivering treatment to the wounded and sick,” reads a report published by Physicians for Human Rights (PHR), which won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1997.
“Several emergency medical personnel came under active fire, as security forces did not respect their neutrality and status as humanitarian workers. Local residents were shot at, and even killed, for attempting to move their wounded family members to safety.”
They also accused the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) and associated youth militias of contributing to “civilian loss of life and obstruction of emergency medical assistance by conducting indiscriminate attacks that have caused serious damage to health facilities, building barricades that make entry to neighborhoods under curfew difficult, and instigating clashes with Turkish security forces in densely populated urban neighborhoods, thereby exacerbating the damage to civilian life.”
The decades-long conflict between the PKK and Turkish security forces reignited last summer. The army imposed military curfews to combat the PKK and youth militias who had declared self-autonomous zones behinds barricades in predominantly Kurdish cities and towns. Whole neighbourhoods were destroyed by the heavy clashes in the streets. Many were subsequently bulldozed flat by the army.
Hundreds of thousands of Kurds were displaced.
A PHR team visited southeast Turkey in late April and early May 2016 to investigate health care and the situation of the medical system under the curfews, which PHR described as “round-the-clock sieges” that “have no legal basis.”
While the PHR team was in the country before the attempted coup, they state in their report that the state of emergency imposed after July 15 was “in many ways, an expansion of a de facto state of emergency that has kept the country’s Kurdish-dominated southeast under intermittent siege since July 2015 and silenced any criticism of the government’s tactics against the Kurds.”
Their team was denied access to Cizre, the site of the worst reports of violations of the civil population where an estimated over 100 people were killed in three basements in the city.
The exact number of those killed during the military curfews is unknown and will likely never be confirmed as Turkish forces have destroyed evidence, including bulldozing the basements in Cizre.
According to PHR, state media and officials reported 7,561 deaths between July 24, 2015 and May 23, 2016, not including civilians. The Human Rights Foundation of Turkey documented at least 338 civilian deaths between August 16, 2015 and April 20, 2016.
The International Crisis Group has documented 1,856 total deaths since July 20, 2015, including 319 civilians.
PHR stated that the military curfews will have a long term effect on healthcare in the southeast of the country, saying that the curfews have “debilitated the region’s health care infrastructure and resources.” Many medical centres were damaged in the fighting and not all have reopened after curfews were lifted.
Throughout the 11 months of curfews, Turkey failed to fulfill its legal obligations of medical neutrality and right to health care, PHR concluded. They also note that safe spaces for Kurds within Turkish society have been irrevocably damaged.
“For the Kurds, there is no longer any space for journalists or human rights activists to document persecution of the Kurdish population and demand equality and justice.”
