Turkish Hunger Strike, Paolo Pellegrin | TURKEY 2001

Nuriye Gülmen, a primary school teacher, has started hunger strike after a Statuary decree amendment passed by the government during the State of Emergency, disqualifying her employment as a teacher, making her unemployed until a second decision. Statuary decree has not presented reason of the decision, nor claim. 

It is more than 300 days, today and nothing changed. She was then jailed as her hunger strike to be taken as an act against the law and her situation even worsened. 

Today the prosecutor demanded her release but the judge rejected it. We can not understand what is court and judge supposed to be in Turkey.

We were feeling terrible, and terrible at those days. A massive depression and melancholia, frustration of those days, efforts given since at least 20 years for the hope of establishing a democracy on this land, have faded away for the people of Turkey through 2016 and then it was pale grey. 

Their hunger strike was an another bad news, another murky cloud, another heavy hit anyway seeing young people in such situation. 

An only hope, yet for an only eagerness left to try once more, was staying together, feeling so broke; and everyone felt once more how torn apart we are once again... 

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Paolo Pellegrin's story from 2001: 

The Turkish hunger strike is the longest and now the deadliest hunger strike against a government in modern history. The striker's main demands are abandonment by the government of the new Turkish prisons, in which the inmates are kept in one to three man cells. The strikers feel these modern prisons are just another way for the government to isolate and torture the prisoners. In addition to abandoning the new prison plans, the strikers want an international monitoring committee to be sure the government is complying. There are three different houses full of hunger strikers, all in various stages of death. With the addition of over 180 new recruits the death toll will be in the hundreds, and there is no sign of the strikers abandoning their protest even though the government has stated that the demands will not be met.

One of the houses where female hungers strikers were gathered. Later they all died.

Family and friends visiting Umus SAHINGOZ , who later died after hungerstriking for more than 300 days. 

Hunger Strike over their government's prison policies. Fatma Sener, far left, at "Henna Night," commemorating the 1996 hunger strike.