Compared to most internally displaced Kurds in northern Iraq, Shamal Qadir is almost lucky. Since the Turkish army devastated his village, Kuzine, in a bombing raid Jul. 1, he’s been living in a schoolhouse, where room temperatures are comfortable and basic amenities are accessible.

Holding shrapnel in his hand, a local Kurd inspects bomb damage near a civilian house in Serkhan village, northern Iraq. Credit: Jake Hess

“Our family bought land and started building houses in Kuzine in 1996. We did it for our children, so they’d have a place to live in the future,” Qadir tells IPS. “Now, our dreams have been destroyed.”

Qadir is one of roughly 6,500 people who have been driven from their homes by Turkish and Iranian bombings of Kurdish border villages in northern Iraq since May 24. About two-thirds of the displaced are currently living in dusty tent camps scattered across barren mountain ranges, their essential needs barely being met by international aid agencies and local authorities.

“We’re frightened people will die here during the Ramadan fast because conditions are so poor,” explains Halima Ismail, a woman living in Doli Sahidan internally-displaced persons (IDP) camp near Sangasar town.

“I had only the clothes on my body when I fled,” Doli Sahidan resident Sham Ahmet-Ahmet, 92, says. “We slept in the open air for several days until aid agencies brought us tents.”

The UN refugee agency office in the northern Iraqi city of Suleymaniya says the approximately 500 families living in Doli Sahidan may be forced to move again in three months, after a nearby river rises with autumn rains.

People living in the IDP camps complain of insufficient aid, health problems, intense summer heat, and difficulty in accessing electricity. Many are facing economic catastrophe, as they have been forced off their lands at the start of the planting season they depend on for income.

“Our fields, crops, and vineyards have all been burned by the bombings,” Abdullah, a man living in Gojar IDP camp near Qaladza town, tells IPS. “We can’t make money here. This isn’t life — we’re not living, just not dying.”

Red Cross officials in Suleymaniya say there is currently no acute humanitarian crisis in the camps. However, they add that there is a medium- term threat that health conditions could deteriorate due to a lack of proper toilet facilities and problems with waste disposal.

And there are the attacks. At least two children have been killed and several civilians injured as a result of the recent bombings.

Turkey says its attacks are aimed at the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), the leftist insurgency that demands greater rights and freedoms for the country’s Kurds. Turkey has been bombing northern Iraq periodically since 1983, the year before the PKK formally began its military campaign against the Turkish state.

For its part, Iran asserts that its cross-border shelling targets the Party for a Free Life in Kurdistan (PJAK), an armed organisation of Iranian Kurds closely connected to the PKK ideologically and logistically.

In 2007, the Bush administration deemed the PKK a ”common enemy” of Washington, Ankara, and Baghdad. The U.S. government subsequently began to provide Turkey with actionable intelligence concerning PKK positions across the border. Since then, Turkey and Iran have been jointly bombing and shelling Kurdish villages close to their respective boundaries with Iraq.

“When they (Iran) start an operation, we do too,” current Turkish Chief of General Staff Ilker Basbug remarked in 2008. “They carry out an operation from the Iranian side of the border, we from the Turkish side.”

“I do not believe these sorts of raids do serious damage to the PKK — neither in terms of their ability to stage cross-border attacks, maintain themselves in northern Iraq, nor in attracting new recruits,” Aliza Marcus, author of Blood and Belief, a major history of the PKK, tells IPS. “Rebels are rarely killed because the geography is so brutal that it is very hard for Turkish planes to hit them.”

Local villagers and aid agencies active in the area report that current Turkish- Iranian bombings are more intense and happening closer to civilian settlements than they have been in recent years. The escalation may reflect the early stages of a developing larger-scale assault on Kurdish rebel bases in the Qandil mountain area.

The Turkish government recently announced plans to dispatch a new, professionalised ‘special army’ to fight the PKK along the Iraqi border and to build 150 new military outposts in the area. The U.S. has also started opening wider swathes of Iraqi airspace to facilitate Turkish attacks on the PKK.

“We are looking at additional ways that we can provide assistance to Turkey, including weapons platforms,” outgoing U.S. ambassador to Turkey James Jeffrey recently said. “We are basically trying to get as much as possible for Turkey, as quickly as possible.”

The PKK canceled its latest unilateral ceasefire on Jun. 1, and has been periodically attacking Turkish military positions since.

“Since 1993, we’ve announced six unilateral ceasefires and searched for a peaceful, democratic solution to the Kurdish issue within Turkey’s borders,” PKK spokesman Ahmed Deniz tells IPS in an interview near rebel hideouts in Qandil mountain. “The other side doesn’t have such a project, and hasn’t taken any steps yet.

“Turkish military operations have never stopped. In the first month and a half that followed our last ceasefire announcement of Apr. 13 2009, more than 130 of our friends were martyred.”

On Apr. 14 2009, the Turkish government began a series of arrest operations that has led to the imprisonment of between roughly 840 and 1,600 Kurdish political activists, among them elected mayors from the leftist and pro- Kurdish Peace and Democracy Party (BDP), and renowned human rights activists.

“Kurds are under attack in all areas. We can’t tie our hands and wait for our death We have to exercise our right to defend ourselves, because all doors (to a solution) have been closed,” Deniz tells IPS.

“Like all peoples, we want to freely speak our language and develop our culture. We want our most natural rights to be respected — it’s that simple.”

Six years after the ruling Justice and Development Party government declared ‘zero tolerance’ for torture, the practice prevails in Turkey, human rights monitors in the country’s predominantly Kurdish southeastern region say.

As part of its EU membership bid, the Turkish government has expanded legal protections against torture, which is explicitly banned in Turkish law and now carries a mandatory minimum three-year prison sentence.

Detained individuals now have the right to immediately access legal counsel and limits have been placed on the amount of time they can be held in custody without appearing before a judge, though these provisions can be temporarily withheld in the case of terror suspects.

Despite such widely-acclaimed changes, torture is far from being history in Turkey.

According to data provided by the Human Rights Association of Turkey (IHD), documented cases of torture dropped consistently in the years immediately following the announcement of the ‘zero tolerance’ policy, before more than doubling in the year 2008.

Data for 2009 have not been released yet, but data obtained by IPS suggests that they’ll be slightly higher than in 2004, the year after the ruling party’s anti-torture initiative was adopted. That year, IHD recorded 1,040 incidents of torture.

“The biggest problem in Turkey is the problem of mentality,” Necdet Ipekyuz, a physician who administers free medical treatment to torture victims on behalf of the Human Rights Foundation of Turkey (TIHV), told IPS in an interview in Diyarbakir. “[Suspects] are innocent until proven guilty. This mentality hasn’t sunken in enough among security units in Turkey.”

In 2008, the Justice Minister at the time announced that 4,719 people complained of torture, maltreatment, and being exposed to excessive force in the years 2006 and 2007 alone.

Sezgin Tanrikulu, a prominent human rights lawyer and former chairman of the Diyarbakir Bar Association, told IPS that the most widely-used methods of torture in contemporary Turkey are physical beatings, forcing detainees to listen to music at extreme volumes, and threats.

“Torture takes place in the street, while people are being detained, in official and unofficial detention centers, and prisons,” Tanrikulu said.

“In the past, people would be detained for 15 – 20 days, subjected to electric shocks, falaka, forced to hang [in awkward physical positions], cigarettes would be extinguished [on their bodies],” Ipekyuz, a former chair of the Diyarbakir chapter of the Turkish Medical Association, told IPS.

“These things still happen, but rarely,” he said, adding that physical beatings and psychological forms of torture, such as threats and insults, are currently the most widespread methods.

The switch to less severe torture methods has been triggered by a de-escalation of the conflict between the Turkish state and PKK guerrillas, legal reforms undertaken with the goal of harmonizing Turkish law with EU regulations, and struggles for change carried out by civil society actors, according to Ipekyuz. Moreover, the purpose of torture has also changed.

“The development of technology has made it easier to watch and follow people, listen to their telephone conversations, read their mail, record their voices from long distances, and collect evidence,” Ipekyuz told IPS. “The goal [of torture] is not to make people speak, but to make them own up to” what police purport to have documented them saying in monitored communication, he noted.

Another important change in Turkey’s torture situation concerns the profile of torture victims. According to Tanrikulu, children are currently tortured more often than they were in previous years.

Ipekyuz, the doctor, noted the same trend. “In the past, few children applied to TIHV for treatment,” he said. “Now, children younger than 15 apply.”

Minors are subjected to torture at demonstrations and verbally threatened and insulted when in police custody, according to Ipekyuz. “The police tell them, ‘we’re going to kill you, disappear you, we won’t let you go to school, you’ll never see your family again, we’ll do certain things to your mother and father, you’re a separatist,’” the physician told IPS.

In a recent report, Amnesty International notes that since 2006, thousands of minors have been arrested and faced prosecution as terrorists for allegedly participating in unauthorized demonstrations in Turkey.

Children are also subjected to beatings in police vehicles and in prison, where minors can be held in pre-trial detention for months, without access to school.

In January, through the agency of their parents, minors being held on terror charges at the Pozanti M Type Children’s Prison in the southern city of Adana claimed that officials there had sprayed them with cold water, beaten them with plastic pipes, and then poured salt in the resulting wounds. “Even the slightest problem can be a justification for torture,” parents quoted their children as saying.

According to Amnesty, children previously held at an adult prison in Adana consistently complained of “severe beatings” during transfer to the facility, suggesting that there’s “systematic ill-treatment.” Meanwhile, minors awaiting relocation from the adult prison to the one for juveniles asserted that they had “spent periods of more than one week in solitary confinement” before being transferred, according to the London-based human rights group.

One thing that has not changed about torture in Turkey, however, is that impunity is all but the rule for alleged perpetrators. “Administrative protection [for torture suspects] actively continues,” Tanrikulu says. “Judges tolerate torture. Prosecutors tolerate torture. Permission isn’t given for investigations,” the Kurdish lawyer told IPS.

Following a spate of particularly deadly demonstrations in southeastern Turkey in March 2006, the Diyarbakir Bar Association filed 76 separate official complaints of torture with relevant public authorities. None of them resulted in lawsuits, according to Tanrikulu, who was the Bar Association chairman at the time.

Impunity is not limited to the Kurdish southeast. An investigation by the human rights commission of the Turkish Grand National Assembly found that only two percent of the 2,140 Istanbul police officials subjected to administrative investigations for carrying out torture and maltreatment between the years 2003 and 2008 received punishment.