Journalist Cevheri Güven says eyewitnesses have described the alleged torture of former Air Force Commander Gen. Akın Öztürk and other soldiers inside a sports hall in Ankara after Turkey’s July 15, 2016 coup attempt, an account that challenges the state’s handling of detainees in the first days after the failed putsch.
Güven opens his account with what one police commissioner assigned to the Ankara Police Department allegedly told detainees in the hall:
“We are going to play a game with you now. When I ask, ‘Who is a first lieutenant?’ the first lieutenants will stand up and say, ‘I am a son of a bitch.’ When I ask, ‘Who is a noncommissioned officer?’ the noncommissioned officers will stand up and shout, ‘I am a son of a bitch.’ Now I am asking, ‘Who is a first lieutenant?’”
According to the civilian witnesses Güven interviewed, no one joined in the commissioner’s “game.” The punishment for the first lieutenants and noncommissioned officers who refused, they said, was to be kicked in the face while being insulted.
The central figure in the hall, the witnesses said, was Öztürk, a former four-star general and former commander of the Turkish Air Force. In the prosecution’s version of events, Öztürk was cast as one of the key figures behind the coup attempt, a claim he has rejected in court.
Güven said he interviewed two separate eyewitnesses who described what happened next.
“They stripped the people in military uniforms in the hall down to their underwear. Akın Öztürk was completely naked. The police were beating him constantly. There were hundreds of soldiers of different ages in the hall. They forced everyone to watch the torture. From time to time, when the police got tired, they called over low-ranking conscripts and made them beat Akın Öztürk. These conscripts were strange people with razor marks on their arms.”
One witness said the abuse included sexual humiliation.
“Sometimes they would put Akın Öztürk on an elevated place, expose his genitals and humiliate him by saying, ‘This is your commander’s ass, this is your commander’s…’ During days of torture, Akın Öztürk did not scream or break down. Only once, when they suddenly stepped on his little toe, he cried out. Other than that, he remained silent.”
The witnesses said the practice of forcing detained conscripts to beat their commanders later became common inside the hall.
“They would bring the high-ranking officers in the hall to the front, order the conscripts to ‘attack’ and have the commanders beaten again and again. Driven by the anger of the situation they were in, the conscripts attacked Akın Öztürk the most and beat him the most.”
The witnesses said the detainees were not allowed to speak to one another while the abuse continued for days.
“Days passed like this in the hall, where we were also forbidden to talk to one another. Eventually we were all formally arrested. When we went to Sincan Prison, we ate food for the first time, and for the first time we spent a night without being woken up by kicks.”
Güven argues that documenting such accounts is necessary to expose torture and ill-treatment that he says continued after the coup attempt and has rarely been addressed in official proceedings.
He said defendants who attempted to describe torture in court were often silenced, leaving only limited references in official records. Öztürk, for example, was quoted during a hearing as saying only, “I am ashamed to describe the torture I experienced.”
Güven said the absence of independent media in Turkey has left many such allegations unreported, even when they are widely known among people who followed the post-coup trials closely.
He also criticized Turkey-based correspondents for international news organizations, saying they avoid the subject to protect their press accreditations. As a result, he said, the international public has only a limited understanding of the scale of abuses reported in Turkey after the coup attempt.
“I am currently in Europe, and everything I recount sounds new to European journalists,” Güven wrote.
He urged journalists from Turkey who have reached Europe to overcome fears of being stigmatized and to show solidarity in reporting abuses.
“This is the only way to tell the world what is happening in Turkey,” he wrote. “But we still have not overcome this labeling complex.”
