The Turkish government must stamp out the widespread use of torture if it is to be allowed entry into the EU, writes Maggie Ronayne.
By all means let us debate Dublin's uncritical support for Turkey's application to join the EU, but let us also have the facts.
I have just returned from a two-week fact-finding mission undertaken on behalf of the department of archaeology, NUI, Galway, and the Kurdish Human Rights Project, based in London. I went to investigate the impact which the many large dams planned or built there are having on the environment and cultural heritage of the people.
My brief extended to monitoring the context for those dams and, specifically, whether the reforms to Turkish law on paper were actually being implemented.
In my journey through four different Kurdish cities and several towns and villages, I found that while there may be "safeguards" on paper against torture, it continues to be perpetrated.
The very violent forms of torture such as electric shocks, beating on the soles of the feet, cigarette burns, hanging by the arms, rape and other sexual torture, routine for decades, are not now used against everyone, but other forms of torture, physical and psychological, are still systematic and widespread.
These include heavy and repeated beatings on the street and in detention, sleep, food and toilet deprivation, bright lights and noise, isolation cells, blindfolds, threats to rape or kill detainees and their relatives, being forced to stand for long hours or stand up and sit down repeatedly, repeated strip searches.
The more violent forms of torture are still used, particularly against Kurdish and other activists, captured guerrillas and those imprisoned for political offences.
I concentrated on the women's case - almost always hidden - against the dams and against war in the region. The Kurdish women said: "We know what the women in Iraq are going through." Women in Turkey, and particularly Kurdish women, still face the threat of rape and other sexual torture by state agents. They also face a situation where the security forces know that even if they do not rape women detainees many men in the community will think they have, and the women will be ostracised or threatened. All the more incredible then that women survivors and their women lawyers have spoken out about this torture, gained international attention and managed to force its reduction.
Women, including older Kurdish women from the villages, are strip-searched in public by the security forces as a form of harassment on demonstrations. This is routinely accompanied by racist insults, with female soldiers commenting that they have to wash their hands after touching dirty Kurdish women. The women's veils are often ripped from their heads.
Many of these women have been displaced from their villages with their families since the 1990s by the military; still unable to return, they are struggling for the survival of their families. There is widespread malnutrition and many have no access to clean water or adequate medical care.
Visiting a village raided by the army only 10 days before, I recorded accounts by the women of house contents turned upside down, children and animals distraught and soldiers who sexually insulted and assaulted the women.
In at least one respect a recent editorial in The Irish Times on Turkey's membership of the EU was right about this being European military practice - though it is hardly known outside of the Catholic community in Northern Ireland. Women there will recognise some of these tactics as characteristic of low-intensity warfare, targeting women in order to attack the whole community.
The context for much of this is the renewed war between the state and Kurdish guerillas. I recorded evidence from human rights defenders and villagers of increasing violations and atrocities, including the execution of captured guerrillas and the mutilation of their bodies, their remains left in the street by the army, with relatives too intimidated to take them for burial.
The situation close to the border with Iraq is particularly tense, with innumerable checkpoints and forms of harassment. I myself was followed almost constantly by plainclothes and uniformed police and, at one point, followed into my accommodation by members of a special forces team carrying sub-machine-guns.
A lot of nonsense is being written and spoken about cultural differences with Turkey, which is ironic considering that the same commentators would claim the origins of European "civilisation" came from the "ancient Near East". But this kind of talk is a distraction. It is not "cultural" to perpetrate systematic torture against a population, any more than crimes committed in the North of Ireland by the British security forces are somehow characteristic of "British culture".
The women at the receiving end in Turkey provide ample evidence for that country to be refused a date for membership negotiations with the EU until this torture, impunity and the apparatus of enforced poverty and repression that is used against Kurdish people especially is stamped out.
Maggie Ronayne is a lecturer in archaeology at the National University of Ireland, Galway, and co-ordinator of the Global Women's Strike in Ireland. She is the author of The Ilisu Dam: Displacement of Communities and Destruction of Culture