Deniz’s picture kept from his granddad: Seeing danger in a butterfly!

ÇAĞLAYAN ÖZ

Think hard before you ask if a person’s conditions in prison are good or not, because the question is wrong from the outset. This question is based on the premise that if you are not hungry, can take a bath and the cell is not cold, either - in other words, if you are permitted to remain alive - this means that the conditions are good.

And then you have the comparisons with 12 September. If you do not go through precisely the same in Silivri they will have you believe that the conditions are good. Some people expect us to be overjoyed that they are not hanging your body up on some contraption as if they were crucifying you and giving you electric shocks and never stop inquiring, probably in good faith: ‘But the conditions are good, aren’t they?’

Yes. I will now tell you how good conditions are in Silivri No 9 prison.

A rule accepted by all is that the punishment to be given to those who commit a crime is to be shut up in prison and deprived of their liberty. This is because there is no greater punishment on earth than being deprived of your liberty. There is not a single person on earth who cannot understand that.

Well, everything that is dome over and above this punishment is torture and ill treatment.

* To throw a person while under arrest into a sports hall full of eighty FETO and PKK gangsters is to put their life in danger. This is torture and ill treatment.

* To make a person lie on a concrete floor without cover or mattress for two nights is torture and ill treatment.

* For a person to be taken from their home by anti-terror squad members and taken to an unknown fate without their relatives being informed is a distressing form of mental torture to impose on them, their spouse and children.

* To deny a person visitation by relatives and lawyers for days and imprison them in an unknown world in which outside contact is denied is torture and ill treatment.

* To confiscate the coat a person is wearing on a winter day saying it has a hood and condemning them to freeze and forcing them to wait ten days until a visiting day to ask for a new coat and then for the new coat brought on visiting day to be rejected saying, ‘Today is not our day for accepting effects’ and to spend a full thirty coatless days shivering away in the freezing November cold until the coat is accepted the following week is torture and ill treatment.

* To deprive a journalist for months of the books he requests is ill treatment. An intellectual’s world stretches far beyond the Silivri library. He read most of the books in the library in his early youth. A true journalist monitors the latest publications, investigations and research, literature, poetry, magazines and books, even having a preference for their translators. To deprive him for months of the books he has requested is torture and ill treatment.

* The seven-metre-high wall surrounding the exercise area is topped with razor wire. But this is not enough. The sky is shut off with steel-framed cage wire in the exercise area, the only place where you see the sky and that gives you an uninterrupted connection with the world. Some detainees managed to throw things to one another from exercise areas! A decision was taken: Let’s cage the sky. It is torture and ill treatment to shut off the sky from people.

* To wear down both the detainee and their relatives and leave them despondent with illogical rules and make items be repeatedly brought, like, for example, refusing to accept shoes brought for the detainee saying there are laces and then giving detainees ties or clotheslines. Or for some reason refusing to permit laced shoes that have been supplied to another detainee. Or not to give advance notice that the metal pieces in shoes must first be removed so that almost all detainees’ relatives bring shoes unable to deliver them and have to take them back. All of this is ill treatment.

* The walls of the cell’s 4x7 metre exercise area have been made so high that the sun only comes down to face level in the middle of March. For three people to have to queue up to get their face into this corner of the exercise area for a few minutes and to be deprived even of the sun is torture and ill treatment.

* If the holding of private visiting sessions with relatives, wives, children by telephone from behind a glass screen, the recording and intercepting of private conversations, the searching of detainees’ relatives as if they were terrorists with the underwear they are wearing being tugged at and everything up to their paper handkerchiefs, medicine, scarves and hats being confiscated as if there were no intervening glass screen and it were possible to pass them anything is not torture, how else is it to be explained?

* What do you imagine to be the reason for a restriction even being placed on the bringing of photographs to detainees? What is the logic behind even an innocent picture of a butterfly being confiscated?

The butterfly awaiting freedom in its hiding place

Final comments:

His four-year old grandson drew a butterfly for his granddad. It was such a lovely butterfly that Picasso would have been jealous if he saw it. The mere sight of it transported you on a flight of fantasy. Its multicoloured wings looked like they were about to flap. One glance set you up to fly off with it. It would have passed through the cage over the sky and flapped its wings skywards. It was an indescribable butterfly.

The tiny picture of a butterfly that an innocent tiny kid drew was not delivered to his granddad. The butterfly is not on the list of effects in Silivri. Nor was it returned to me. It supposedly got lost. They saw the danger, of course. That butterfly would have carried granddad off to Deniz. Grandad would have been overjoyed, and so would Deniz. They lost the butterfly.

That butterfly was unique in the world. There is not another one like it. Both his grandad and I have been mourning the loss of that butterfly ever since.

But we are not losing our hope. We know that butterfly is awaiting freedom in its hiding place.