Now all of Yavuz’s muscles hurt from
the hours he was kept hung by the wrists, arms tied behind his back. Every one
of his joints aches from hours surviving naked, buried in the snow, and years of
sleeping on concrete cell floors. He was once beaten up so badly that he was
shelved in a morgue. His many marks and scars still bear witness to the days he
spent macerating in a septic tank, the many beatings and burns received, the times
he almost died in a conveniently arranged car crash or fall down an elevator
shaft.
An ethnic Kurd from an aristocratic
Sufi family highly influential in Mesopotamia from the seventh century until
1914, Yavuz is invested with a sense of mission. Early on, he joined a
non-violent organization demanding greater cultural and political rights for
his people, spent some six years in jail during the military dictatorship that
followed the 1980 coup d’état, plus another year under civil rule. They tried repeatedly
to break him down in Turkey’s cruellest “torture laboratories”, the first time
when he was only 12 years old.

After being severely wounded in a
fourth attempted murder in 1994, Yavuz was welcomed to Geneva as a refugee. Yet,
soon after recovering, he could not resist the urge to help fellow torture
survivors whose needs he knows oh-so well. In 1997, he went back to Turkey and
tried to set up an organization for torture victims. The police quickly shut it
down and Yazuz received more death threats. Three years later, he again returned
to his homeland, which to this day perceive him as “enemy”, amidst the struggle
over greater political and cultural rights for Kurds for the past four decades.
It is in the highly polarized political environment of Diyarbakir, in the southeast of the country, the epicentre of the conflict, that Yavuz finally managed – thanks to strong backing from the Swiss Government and his ability to maintain his independence – to found SOHRAM, an ecumenical torture victim rehabilitation centre. In spite of repeated attacks and computer thefts, the organization has during the past 15 years provided psychological counselling to some 2,800 adult and child victims of torture. Yet, Yavuz would like to help more as the scale of the demands for torture rehabilitation he and his colleagues are facing is overwhelming while international support for it lacking.
Yavuz, originally an engineer, later
received training as a psychotherapist to better help himself and other torture
survivors. On top of their physical scars, most torture survivors must face the
additional difficulty of regaining confidence in the world around them and,
above all, in themselves as the main objective of torturers is to break the
victims’ personalities through pain and fear.
“The first thing I tell them is ‘It’s over now; you are safe,’” he says. “Torture victims need someone who respects them, who understands them. You must offer them empathic solidarity. Those tortured for political reasons also need to know that someone is doing something for their people.”
Now that the war in the Syrian Arab Republic has driven some 1.7 million Syrian refugees and asylum seekers (half of them, children) into neighbouring Turkey, SOHRAM has also started providing emergency assistance and educational support to these war victims, promoting interreligious tolerance and dialogue.
Yavuz,
57, does not see his work as slowing down anytime soon. He observes that in the
four months spanning 22 July and 20 September 2015, the Government executed
1,964 “terrorists,” according to the Turkish Ministry of the Interior. According
to the media, some 8,000 people – a quarter of them minors – were in police
custody in southeast Turkey with another 4,500 in jail following a court
ruling.
“There is a high likelihood these people will be tortured,” he said.
It is no surprise that, in spite of his outstanding resilience, Yavuz has completely lost confidence in the Turkish State. Yavuz comes regularly to Geneva to see his wife and children, who were naturalized as Swiss citizens in 2009.
“I trust the Swiss State as it does not consider me an enemy – on the contrary, it listens to me,” he said. “I really understood what it means to be a citizen only here, in Switzerland.”
--
by Lori Brumat (OMCT)
To know more about the "10 December, 10 Defenders" campaign, click here.

OMCT wishes to thank the OAK Foundation, the European Union and the Republic and Canton of Geneva for their support. Its content is the sole responsibility of OMCT and should in no way be interpreted as reflecting the view(s) of the supporting institutions.

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