Mehmet Ertürk can no longer eat the bread his wife Hatice prepares. This Turk with sunken cheeks has just been released from a Syrian jail and half of his teeth are missing, while the others are in danger of falling out. “It was torture upon torture,” he says.
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He mimes the baton blows to the mouth that he says he received from the guards of the Palestine branch, a section of a Damascus prison where he spent part of his almost twenty-one years of detention in Syria .
Arrested in 2004 for smuggling, Mehmet Ertürk found his village, Magaracik, on Monday evening, perched at the top of a winding road in the middle of ocher land dotted with olive trees, 10 minutes from the Syrian border across fields. “My family thought I was dead,” says the 53-year-old man, whose face and gait make him look twenty years older.
The night he was released, he heard gunshots and began to pray: “We didn’t know what was happening outside. I thought I was finished.”
Then loud hammer blows begin to resonate. A few minutes later, the rebels who entered Damascus to bring down Syrian President Bashar al-Assad opened the prison doors wide.
“Like in a coffin”
“We hadn’t seen him for eleven years. We thought he was dead. We had no more hope,” confesses his wife, sitting in the courtyard of the family home with their youngest daughter, barely six months old when her father was arrested.
Sentenced to fifteen years of imprisonment, the Syrian prison administration will leave the father of four children to languish in an underground dungeon, at the mercy of zealous guards, without worrying about his end date of sentence, scheduled for 2019.
“Our bones came out of the flesh when they hit our wrists with hammers,” he says. “They also poured boiling water down the neck of a fellow inmate. The flesh on her neck has gone all the way down,” he said, pointing to his hips.
He pulls down a sock to reveal his right ankle, darker in places: the mark of the convict chains.
“During the day, it was strictly forbidden to speak […] There were cockroaches in the food. It was humid. It smelled like toilets,” he continues, recounting the days “without clothes, without water, without food: it was like being in a coffin.”
“Rope on the ceiling”
“They put 115, 120 people in a cell of 20 people. “A lot of people died of starvation,” he said, adding that the guards “threw the dead in dumpsters.”
The ex-detainee also says he has paid the price for the hatred devoted by the former Syrian government to Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who from the first months of the war in Syria, in 2011, urged Bashar al-Assad to leave power.
“We Turks were tortured a lot because of this,” explains Mehmet Ertürk, who also says he was refused medicine because of his nationality. To escape the horror, he will come to hope of being hanged. “One day they took us to a new prison area and I saw a rope hanging from the ceiling. I said, ‘Thank God we’re saved.’
He interrupts his story for the umpteenth time to thank heaven and “our dear President Erdogan” for being back, alive, with his family and not being among the countless victims in Syrian prisons, possibly more than 105,000 since 2011 , according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (OSDH), an NGO close to the Syrian rebels.
One of his sisters hands him a handful of old photographs. In one of them, he poses with a lifelong friend, Faruk Karga, who shortly after this photo ended up with him in the same Syrian prison.
Faruk Karga never returned home. “He died of starvation in prison, around 2018,” says Mehmet Ertürk. “It weighed 40 kilograms.”
