ANKARA, Turkey—Eren Keskin, the vice-president of the Turkish Human Rights Association (IHD), has probably done more than most people for human rights in her country. And she has undoubtedly paid dearly for her work. She has been the subject of about a hundred lawsuits related to her human rights activities.
In 1995, Keskin was sentenced to two-and-half years in prison for using the word “Kurdistan” in the article “The World Owes it to the Kurdish People,” which she published in the pro-Kurdish Ozgur Gundem newspaper. The same year she was named by Amnesty International as a prisoner of conscience.
But Keskin said the issue is bigger than just the use of the word Kurdistan. “We are talking about a geography which has been divided into four parts,” she told Rudaw in a recent interview. She said she learned about the hardship of the Kurds in Turkey by hearing of past massacres.
“My aunt was Armenian and I heard about the Armenian Genocide when I was a child. And as I grew up, I read about the Kurdish genocides and massacres and witnessed the war crimes committed by Turkish officials in Kurdistan, which helped me understand the true nature of the Turkish state,” she said.
Her license as a lawyer was suspended for one year in 2002 by the Union of Turkish Bar Associations in a decision that was backed by the Turkish ministry of justice. For a speech she delivered the same year in Germany about sexual abuse committed by Turkish armed forces, she was sentenced to 10 months in prison.
“In all wars, women are seen as spoils of war,” said Keskin. “That was the case in the war in Kurdistan as well.”
It seemed that every time Keskin received a prison sentence in Turkey, at the same time she received an international award as recognition for her work. In 2004, she received the Aachen Peace Award "for her courageous efforts and activities for human rights."
Keskin said when she started her project in 1997 to record and help women affected by the conflict in Turkey, most stories she heard were about sexual assault.
“I believe that sexual torture is the hardest type of torture to talk about,” she recalled. “Every time we went to Kurdistan during the most intense period of the war, Kurdish women spoke to us secretly and said that horrible things had been done to them by state officials.”
“They sought help from us but we were not able to do anything because they were so scared of talking openly,” Keskin added.
She said that Kurdish women subjected to sexual assaults during the conflict never got justice because the judicial and investigative system often turned a blind eye to the issue.
“All those crimes go unpunished,” she said. “There is a great level of impunity for the criminals. That is what we mean when we say torture is a state policy in Turkey. All state institutions, executive, legislative and judicial powers -- including judges, prosecutors, and doctors of the forensic medicine -- are all a part of this system.”
Keskin said that the condition for women prisoners in Turkey is not as dire as it used to be “because people get the news through media much more quickly than before.”
“Yes, the state officials cannot apply the same harsh methods of the past,” she added. “Maybe they still want to apply the old methods but they are not able to do so.”
As an observer and someone who has single-handedly fought for prisoner rights in Turkey, Keskin said that Turkey can only prove its sincerity about peace by releasing all political prisoners.
“The only meaning of peace for me would be the release of all political prisoners,” she said of the peace process agreed by Ankara and the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK). “I do not have any more expectations from the Turkish state. When people are still held in jails, how can we talk about a peace process?”
