My reporting on the Kurds landed me in a Turkish prison

When Jake Hess began investigating human rights abuses, he didn't expect to be locked up and interrogated himself

I bumped into a local journalist friend on a recent afternoon in Diyarbakir, the unofficial capital of Turkish Kurdistan. "This is Turkey," he said wearily when I asked if the police were still harassing him because of his work. "If the police didn't bother us [journalists], we'd think something was wrong."

In retrospect, it was a silly question. After all, only three months before, a judge in that very city had sentenced Vedat Kursun, the former editor of Turkey's only Kurdish-language daily newspaper, to 166 years in prison for "doing propaganda for a terrorist organisation". Hamdiye Ciftci, a young Kurdish reporter known for her coverage of state violence in the southeastern province of Hakkari, had been thrown in jail on "terrorism" charges in June.

Critically reporting on the Turkish government's treatment of the Kurds is risky business indeed. I was barely surprised, then, when civil police from the anti-terrorism branch of the Diyarbakir Security Directorate knocked on my hotel room door and declared that they had come to arrest me for "being in contact with and carrying out activities on behalf of terror organisations", namely the PKK and a related civilian body, the KCK. I did my best to prepare for the uncertain journey ahead as we took off for the the anti-terror department's detention centre, where I'd spend my next four nights in a dingy cell. The reasons for my detention quickly became clear as my interrogators rifled through a binder stuffed thick with copies of my writings on human rights abuses in southeastern Turkey, private email exchanges with human rights activists, transcriptions of phone calls, and pictures of me snapped in public places. They said they had been monitoring my communications and following me on foot for 7 or 8 months.

"Why did you write about torture?" asked the head interrogator, in reference to a story I had published with the Inter Press Service. "There's no torture in Turkey. Look, we aren't torturing you!" he insisted, awkwardly avoiding eye contact. "It takes a lot of effort to repair the damage that people like you do to [Turkey's] international reputation," snapped another.

Following detailed debates about my articles dealing with the Turkish army's use of forest fires as a weapon of war, state violence against Kurdish women, and Turkish bombings of northern Iraq, my captors turned the conversation to what would, after my writing, become the second major focus of the charges against me: my contacts with human rights organisations in Britain and Turkey. At the end, I was sentenced to deportation without possibility of appeal and sent back to the US. The others who have been arrested as part of the same operation, haven't fared so well.

Read hole article: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/my-reporting-on-the-kurds-landed-me-in-a-turkish-prison-2066157.html