Esat Oktay Yıldıran

Esat Oktay Yıldıran
Born	(1949-02-15)15 February 1949
Died	22 October 1988(1988-10-22) (aged 39) Istanbul, Turkey
Allegiance	Turkey
Service / branch	Turkish Land Forces
Rank	Major
Battles / wars	Turkish invasion of Cyprus

Esat Oktay Yıldıran (15 February 1949 – 22 October 1988) was a Turkish military officer who was appointed governor of the Diyarbakır Prison after the 1980 Turkish coup d'état.^[1] Yıldıran became known for his extensive torture of PKK aligned Kurds in the Diyarbakır Prison.^[2][3] Many inmates either committed suicide or died on hunger strikes in the penitentiary.

Career

After taking part in the Turkish invasion of Cyprus in 1974, Yıldıran was promoted to major. In 1980, after the military coup which took place the same year, he was sent to the Diyarbakır Prison by Kenan Evren in person. He tortured inmates in the prison^[4][5][6] with methods that were comparable to Nazi. Moreover, he viewed prison as a school in which inmates would be subjected to Turkification.^[7] Yıldıran beat, coerced and tortured the male and female prisoners. Under his force, inmates were forced to eat human excrement, doused in sewer water, tortured with electric shocks and such other torture methods.^[8] Yıldıran had a German shepherd called "Co" ("Joe"), which was trained to bite the genitals of naked prisoners;^[6] all inmates were obligated to salute the dog.^[9]

Assassination

Esat Oktay Yıldıran's grave with the inscription: "The courageous, good-doer, Kemalist, Turkish and heroic officer who was martyred on October 22nd, 1988 by anarchists who wanted to split the indivisible Turkish motherland."

On 22 October 1988, Yıldıran was on a public bus which stopped by at a station, and 2 suspects entered the bus and sat behind him. After the bus halted at another stop, moments later the doors opened one of the two suspects opened fired. He was shot dead on the bus in Ümraniye, Istanbul.^[10]

According to some reports, his firing assassin yelled "Laz Kemal sends his greetings" (referring to one of the inmates, Kemal Pir) before shooting him. He died in front of his wife and two children.^[11][12] On the 26th of October, he was buried and declared a martyr by the government.^[12]

The PKK took responsibility of the attack, after a anonymous man contacted the Cumhuriyet Gazétte later that day and stated that; “Esat Oktay Yıldıran, who was punished in Kısıklı today, was killed by the PKK. Bijî Partiya Karkerên Kurdistanê! (Long live the Kurdistan Worker‘s Party!)”^[13]

As a result, the two suspects were identified as members of the PKK, but never fully identified and were never caught.

Aftermath

Yıldıran's torture methods were the subject of the Turkish television series “Bu Kalp Seni Unutur mu?” Various books have also been written about Yıldıran's torture practices. One of the most famous books is Mehdi Zana's "Hell No. 5. Diary from a Turkish Prison". Yıldıran was honored as a hero and martyr by Turkish nationalists. In 2010 the Fatih City Council removed his name from a memorial.^[14]

In 2013, a Turkish court sentenced the journalist Rasim Ozan Kütahyalı to a suspended prison term of ten months and fined him for writing that Yıldıran was a torturer.^[6]

References

1. "Rasim Ozan - Esat Oktay Yıldıran ve PKK". takvim.com.tr (in Turkish). Retrieved 2020-11-02.
2. Tremblay, Pinar (2020-07-08). "Complaints of torture on rise in Turkey's Kurdish southeast". Al-Monitor. Retrieved 2021-02-06.
3. "BDP MP gives details of torture tragedy in prison - Turkey News". Hürriyet Daily News. Retrieved 2021-02-06.
4. Olsen, William C.; Csordas, Thomas J. (2019-05-03). Engaging Evil: A Moral Anthropology. Berghahn Books. p. 282. ISBN 978-1-78920-214-4.
5. "Diyarbakır Cezaevi'ndeki işkencenin adı: "Beni Öp Haydar"". CNN Türk (in Turkish). Retrieved 2020-11-02.
6. "How Turkish 'justice' works". Hürriyet Daily News. Retrieved 2021-02-06.
7. Gambetti, Zeynep; Jongerden, Joost (2015-04-10). The Kurdish Issue in Turkey: A Spatial Perspective. Routledge. p. 71. ISBN 978-1-317-58152-9.
8. Interview mit Ahmet Türk vom 12. August 2010
9. Welat Zeydanlıoğlu: Torture and Turkification in the Diyarbakır Military Prison Archived August 29, 2009, at the Wayback Machine, undated, accessed on 21 May 2011. More information on the author can be found at http://welatzeydanlioglu.wordpress.com/ Archived 2013-08-05 at the Wayback Machine. Sites to download the report as pdf file include "Archived copy". Archived from the original on 2016-03-05. Retrieved 2011-11-08.
10. "Grand National Assembly- Report on the assassination" (PDF). Archived from the original (PDF) on 2021-06-02. Retrieved 2022-08-03.
11. HAKAN, Ahmet. "'Co'nun kulübesinde 6 ay işkence gördüm'". www.hurriyet.com.tr (in Turkish). Retrieved 2020-11-02.
12. Erzeren, Ömer (1988-10-27). "Chronik eines angekündigten Todes". Die Tageszeitung (in German). p. 6. ISSN 0931-9085. Retrieved 2021-02-06.
13. "Gazete Oku". 2021-09-24. Archived from the original on 2021-09-24. Retrieved 2022-08-03.
14. Tageszeitung Milliyet vom 1. Oktober 2010