Meet Yavuz from Turkey: A life after torture spent helping other survivors
Now all of Yavuz’s muscles hurt fromthe hours he was kept hung by the wrists, arms tied behind his back. Every oneof his joints aches from hours surviving naked, buried in the snow, and years ofsleeping on concrete cell floors. He was once beaten up so badly that he wasshelved in a morgue. His many marks and scars still bear witness to the days hespent macerating in a septic tank, the many beatings and burns received, the timeshe almost died in a conveniently arranged car crash or fall down an elevatorshaft.
An ethnic Kurd from an aristocraticSufi family highly influential in Mesopotamia from the seventh century until1914, Yavuz is invested with a sense of mission. Early on, he joined anon-violent organization demanding greater cultural and political rights forhis people, spent some six years in jail during the military dictatorship thatfollowed the 1980 coup d’état, plus another year under civil rule. They tried repeatedlyto break him down in Turkey’s cruellest “torture laboratories”, the first timewhen he was only 12 years old.
After being severely wounded in afourth attempted murder in 1994, Yavuz was welcomed to Geneva as a refugee. Yet,soon after recovering, he could not resist the urge to help fellow torturesurvivors whose needs he knows oh-so well. In 1997, he went back to Turkey andtried to set up an organization for torture victims. The police quickly shut itdown and Yazuz received more death threats. Three years later, he again returnedto his homeland, which to this day perceive him as “enemy”, amidst the struggleover greater political and cultural rights for Kurds for the past four decades.
It is in the highly polarizedpolitical environment of Diyarbakir, in the southeast of the country, theepicentre of the conflict, that Yavuz finally managed – thanks to strongbacking from the Swiss Government and his ability to maintain his independence– to found SOHRAM, an ecumenical torture victim rehabilitation centre. In spiteof repeated attacks and computer thefts, the organization has during the past15 years provided psychological counselling to some 2,800 adult and childvictims of torture. Yet, Yavuz would like to help more as the scale of thedemands for torture rehabilitation he and his colleagues are facing isoverwhelming while international support for it lacking.
Yavuz, originally an engineer, laterreceived training as a psychotherapist to better help himself and other torturesurvivors. On top of their physical scars, most torture survivors must face theadditional difficulty of regaining confidence in the world around them and,above all, in themselves as the main objective of torturers is to break thevictims’ personalities through pain and fear.
“The first thing I tell them is‘It’s over now; you are safe,’” he says. “Torture victims need someone whorespects them, who understands them. You must offer them empathic solidarity.Those tortured for political reasons also need to know that someone is doingsomething for their people.”
Now that the war in the Syrian ArabRepublic has driven some 1.7 million Syrian refugees and asylum seekers (halfof them, children) into neighbouring Turkey, SOHRAM has also started providingemergency assistance and educational support to these war victims, promoting interreligioustolerance and dialogue.
Yavuz,57, does not see his work as slowing down anytime soon. He observes that in thefour months spanning 22 July and 20 September 2015, the Government executed1,964 “terrorists,” according to the Turkish Ministry of the Interior. Accordingto the media, some 8,000 people – a quarter of them minors – were in policecustody in southeast Turkey with another 4,500 in jail following a courtruling.
“Thereis a high likelihood these people will be tortured,” he said.
Itis no surprise that, in spite of his outstanding resilience, Yavuz hascompletely lost confidence in the Turkish State. Yavuz comes regularly toGeneva to see his wife and children, who were naturalized as Swiss citizens in2009.
“Itrust the Swiss State as it does not consider me an enemy – on the contrary, itlistens to me,” he said. “I really understood what it means to be a citizenonly here, in Switzerland.”
--by Lori Brumat (OMCT)
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