The Irish World
Irish delegation meets hunger strikers
By Tom Griffin

A member of an Irish delegation which last week visited Turkey in support of political prisoners there has spoken of his sadness after learning of the death of one of the hunger strikers he met during the trip.

Twenty-two-year-old Zehra Kulaksiz died on Friday, June 29, at a house in Istanbul where she had refused food for 221 days in sympathy with prisoners protesting the introduction of new F-type jails. She was the twenty-sixth person to die on the hunger strike.

Shortly before her death she had been one of several hunger strikers visited by members of the Irish delegation.

"I was talking to her on Tuesday afternoon," said Terry Harkin of the Irish Republican Socialist Party. "It's heartbreaking."

Mr Harkin added that the visitors had been shaken by the experience. "I've never seen courage like it," he said. "The fact is that those people could have walked away at any stage."

Also on the delegation was Alex McCrory of the Ballymurphy Prisoners' Group and Rory O'Driscoll of the Committee for Struggle against Torture through Isolation (IKM), which organised the visit.

As well as meeting hunger strikers, the group met a former state prosecutor, Netcati Ozdemir, sacked for speaking out about conditions in the Turkish prisons.

The Turkish government is trying to move prisoners to the new F-type prisons, which it says meet European standards and break the influence of political prisoners. The hunger strikers say the new cells isolate prisoners and make them vulnerable to police brutality.

Mr Ozdemir told the Irish group that a recent European Union delegation had been given a false impression of the F-type prisons. He said that new walls had been installed after the delegation left, so that the prisoners would be held in solitary confinement.

On his return, Mr Harkin said he would be lobbying travel agents not to sell holidays to Turkey and Irish people not to visit the country.

"Given the support the Turkish people gave us in the 1981 hunger strikes, it's incumbent on us not to go on holiday to Turkey and provide the regime with hard currency," he said.

"This is not a party political issue," he added. "It's an issue of political status and any organisation that's ever had political prisoners should be behind it."