While charges against prison officers accused of raping and sexually abusing children in the Pozantı children’s jail have been dropped, 4 of the victims are going on trial and facing life sentences.

As protests continue after the brutal rape and murder of Özgecan Aslan in Mersin, charges against prison officers accused of the sexual abuse and rape of children in the Pozantı children’s prison have been dropped. Four children accused of throwing stones at the police in 2012 face long prison sentences.

578 years in jail, one million lira in fines

The chair of the Mersin branch of the IHD (Human Rights Association),  Ali Tanrıverdi, said that of 129 children arrested and put in prison, cases against 67 of them had concluded and resulted in convictions, and none had been acquitted. He said the children concerned had received a total of 578 years, 11 months and 6 days imprisonment and fines totalling 978,180.00 Turkish Lira. Also in 2012 families had been fined 1,270,000 lira by the Mersin governor’s office.

Tanrıverdi added that charges against 20 prison officers at the Pozantı jail accused of sexually abusing Kurdish children had been dropped, while 4 of the victims had been charged with ‘damaging state property’ under article 302 of the Turkish Penal Code, which carried a maximum sentence of life imprisonment. He added that the Internal Security Package currently going through parliament was already being used against Kurdish children in Mersin.

Tanrıverdi said that when children in the Pozantı jail reached 18 years of age, indictments were drawn up and they were once again remanded in custody and transferred to the Adana Kürkçüler F Type prison. He said they faced the same inhuman treatment there.

He added: “The state sees Kurdish children as potential terrorists. With the evacuation of villages in the 1990s many Kurds came to Mersin and now more than a third of the population is Kurdish.” He said that children growing up in the city suffered discrimination, poverty and unemployment.

Tanrıverdi said children who were arrested suffered torture in police stations and were pressurised into becoming informers. He added that reports from official forensic institutions regarding children’s competence were unreliable.

‘Those who refuse to become informers are exiled from the city’

Tanrıverdi said children and families in Kurdish neighbourhoods of Mersin were constantly threatened or bribed into becoming informers. “Children who refuse to cooperate are arrested on trumped up charges and their families forced to leave the city. Families are also presented with astronomic fines on the grounds that their children have damaged state property,” he said, adding that all this indicated that the deep state’s operation to ‘cleanse Mersin of Kurds,’ launched in 1996, was still continuing.