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LIBRARY EUROPE AND CENTRAL ASIA SOUTH-EAST EUROPE TURKEY

AI Index: EUR 44/022/2001

10 April 2001

URGENT ACTION

Turkey: Death threats/Fear for safety Eren Keskin and Osman Baydemir

PUBLIC AI Index: EUR 44/022/2001

UA 92/01 Death threats/Fear for safety 10 April 2001

TURKEY Eren Keskin (f), 41 ] lawyers and leading human
Osman Baydemir, 30 ] rights defenders


Two leading members of the Human Rights Association (IHD) are receiving death
threats, and Amnesty International believes they are in grave danger.

Eren Keskin, a former IHD vice-president, is now the head of the organization's
Istanbul branch. Osman Baydemir, the current vice-president, is also head of
the Diyarbak2r branch.

Eren Keskin has received telephone death threats, and calls threatening rape.
She is one of the founders of the Legal Aid Project for women raped or sexually
abused in custody. On 9 April she learned that a man arrested in Konya had
confessed that he had intended to kill her.

Osman Baydemir has reportedly been followed and has received telephone death
threats. Plainclothes police officers reportedly came to see him in the
Diyarbak2r branch office in November 2000, and told him: ''We have lost our
patience. There are many people. If we say 'Kill' they will kill''.

In early February 2001 Eren Keskin had been part of a delegation who travelled
to Silopi, in the southeastern province of Ô2rnak, to investigate the
''disappearance'' of two members of a Kurdish political party (see UA 26/01,
EUR 44/007/2001, and follow-ups). Immediately afterwards, the governor of Ô2
rnak reportedly said on TV that ''This woman from the IHD came and stirred
everything up''. After this she received an increased number of telephone death
threats on her mobile, at her law firm's office and at the IHD office. In late
March, after she had been on a second mission to Silopi, she came to work to
find a man waiting for her on each of the three floors of the building as she
climbed the stairs to her office. The men did not speak, but stared at her
menacingly.

A man who introduced himself as ''Sami Demirk2ran'' is reportedly calling her
regularly, sometimes two or three times a day, saying that he is working with
the government and that he wants to see her urgently with nobody else present.
She believes she recognizes his voice as that of the man who had threatened to
kill former IHD president Ak2n Birdal. Ak2n Birdal had asked her to listen when
he received one of the death threats. In May 1998 he was shot in the IHD
headquarters in Ankara and barely survived.

Eren Keskin was tried and imprisoned for her human rights activities in 1995,
and was adopted as a prisoner of conscience by Amnesty International. She has
been receiving death threats for years. These increased when she represented
Abdullah Öcalan, leader of the armed opposition group Kurdistan Workers' Party
(PKK) in court in 1999.

BACKGROUND INFORMATION
The IHD is Turkey's largest human rights organization, with some 19,000
members. At least 10 IHD representatives have been killed since 1991. In most
cases the killers have never been identified, and members of the Turkish
security forces have been strongly implicated in some of the killings.

The Turkish authorities have tried to discredit the IHD, linking them to the
outlawed PKK. Several branches have been closed on various pretexts, and many
senior members have been put on trial. Eren Keskin is currently facing numerous
charges, including insulting the army, for criticizing militarism in Turkey in
an interview with the weekly journal Cuma.

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