As Turkey continues to ratchet up their post-coup purge, with mass detentions and wholesale firings the order of the day, Amnesty International is warning that there are an alarming number of credible reports of torture and rape of detainees by the Turkish government.
Amnesty cited interviews with lawyers, doctors, and people on-duty at the detention centers. In the 9 days since the failed coup, an estimated 10,000 have been detained, some taken to actual jails but a lot of them just held in makeshift unofficial detention centers.
Lawyers reported that they saw detainees being brought in for interrogation by prosecutors with their shirts already covered in blood, reporting they’d been denied food and water for days. The detainees largely aren’t allowed access to legal counsel.
Amnesty is pushing hard for Turkey to agree to position independent monitors in those detention centers, particularly important for the makeshift ones. With Turkey’s state of emergency allowing them to detain people for any reason they want, and their withdrawal from the European Council for Human Rights, its not clear if this torture in detention isn’t simply by design.
That would also explain why discussions of the treatment of detainees are conspicuously absent in Turkey. Indeed, the reports of mass detentions that were common in the early wake of the coup have mostly disappeared from Turkish papers, replaced instead with talk of wholesale sacking of “plotters.”