Donne senza confini

MESSAGE FROM A TURKISH JAIL

This is the letter written by a Kurdish girl now held in Turkey by November 24 th 1996 and still in the jail. Zeynep is suspected to belong to the Party of the workers of the Kurdistan, a group armed with opposition considered outlaw.
The matter of the Kurdistan is one of the thorniest matters in the international political panorama as so many others in the world a today's day.
Independently from the blames or from the reasons for this woman, she has suffered some serious injustices in the treatment that has been her reserved during the arrest and during the imprisonment.
She has been raped, tortured by executives of the police, and when she has tried to introduce report the attorney of Smirne, through her lawyer, he has dissuaded her to proceed for legal streets because - to his opinion - it would have been impossible to have a confirmation, from the medical point of view, of the suffered violences.
Zeynep from five years attends that the trial that concerns her arrivals to a conclusion and a definitive sentence. In attended that this happens, she doesn't have any possibility to ask justice for the suffered damages.
To every way, as Zeynep write in the letter that she has sent me, she has succeeded, also paying a tall price, to make to hear the voice of the women of the Kurdistan, women that they don't have possibility to express themselves in their society and that they hardly find channels to be listened in the rest of the world.
When I have read her history, when I have been able to know her tragedy and her sufferings through Amnesty International, I have immediately felt the need to write her, also only few lines. Because it doesn't seem me correct that the rights of Zeynep are injured without she can have the possibility to ask only justice because it belongs to a people that doesn't even have a territory. The Turkish authorities are trying to discredit hert, to attribute her psychic, to prevent her that its voice comes too far… that her message and her words too easily reach the public opinion.
I have learned a lot from her letter.
Until there will be people as Zeynep it will be possible to hope in what Zeynep and me believe: a world in which can reign peace, liberty and democracy.

Federico Bastiani