Abuses in Turkey

As a volunteer for Amnesty International, I am grateful for the expanding world news coverage in The Times. Your attention to human rights issues is commendable. You have reported atrocities committed by Iraq. More recently, you have been forthright about violations by Kuwaitis. Certainly, if we are to work for a more just world, we must first know where the injustices exist.

On March 22, you featured William Montalbano’s Column One article about Turkish President Turgut Ozal and his wife Semra. In view of your other excellent reporting, I was both surprised and disappointed to see absolutely no mention of the egregious human rights violations continuously committed by Turkish officials against the citizens of their country. While everyone should condemn Iraqi attacks on Kurdish civilians, we must also denounce the widespread abuses of Kurdish people in Turkey.

Reports arrive almost daily at Amnesty’s London office telling of Turkish Kurds held in incommunicado detention and tortured, of deaths in custody and of arbitrary evacuations of entire villages of Kurdish people by Turkish security forces. Throughout Turkey, journalists are detained for reporting on events in the southeast. Political activists and human rights workers are detained and tortured.

Carrying on business as usual with governments that torture is much the same as socializing at a party while the hosts’ child is being beaten in the next room. Turkish officials pay callous lip service to human rights; meanwhile, the beatings and the deaths go on. We must speak out as individuals and as a nation against all human rights abuses everywhere. Turkey tortures; we must say so.

MARY E. LANGLEY, Moreno Valley