Hopi Foundation honored Dr. Alp Ayan of Turkey for his work with torture victims. Dr. Ayan has been imprisoned for his work in Turkey with torture victims and exposing methods of torture and faces more prison time. Hopi torture activists spoke out in Tucson, Ariz., against ongoing torture and US secret prisons worldwide.

Hopi Honor Turkish Doctor, Decry U.S. Secret Prisons and Torture

Brenda Norrell
UN Observer and International Report


TUCSON, Ariz. – Turkish psychiatrist Dr. Alp Ayan, honored by the Hopi Foundation for his treatment of torture survivors, spoke out against the United States for violations of the Geneva Conventions and torture at secret prisons and Guantánamo Bay.

Archbishop Desmond Tutu sent a video address from Cape Town, South Africa, to the Hopi Foundation’s Center for Prevention and Resolution of Violence award ceremony in Tucson.

Tutu urged humanity to offer the hope of healing.

“Torture is an act that defies the boundaries of language”, Tutu told the gathering, urging deep hope and love. “There is love beyond fear.”

Speaking during the Amnesty International USA Western Regional Conference, held concurrently in downtown Tucson, Dr. Ayan said the United States has disregarded the Geneva Conventions and continues to transport persons to secret prisons around the world for the purpose of torture.

“The United States has claimed that the Geneva Conventions can be put aside in the war against terrorism”, Dr. Ayan, of Izmir, Turkey, told the Amnesty gathering on Oct. 14.

Dr. Ayan pointed out that after Sept. 11, 2001, the message from the United States government was, “you are either with us or against us.”

Under the guise of the war on terror, the result has been more violence, he said.

Speaking out against torture, Dr. Ayan said people are now being turned into accomplices by way of ignorance about torture. More than 100 countries still engage in torture. Torture continues to result in death in dozens of countries, he said.

The United States has created the illusion that everything can be controlled by information, he said.

However, the bombardment of accurate and unnecessary information has resulted in placing “humankind in a desperate and manageable state like never before”, he said.

While people are being managed by information and misinformation, Dr. Ayan said he is a physician with a great deal of hope.

“Eventually, humanity shall prevail.”

Dr. Ayan was the 2006 recipient of the Hopi Foundation Barbara Chester Award for Treatment of Torture Survivors. Dr. Barbara Chester founded the Hopi Foundation’s Center for the Prevention and Resolution of Violence in Tucson in 1992.

At the award ceremony, Nobel Prize winner Dr. Peter Agre (2003 Chemistry) who earlier nominated Dr. Ayan, presented the award. The award includes a $10,000 prize, which Dr. Ayan said he would use to continue human rights work in Turkey. He was also presented with a Hopi silver-sculpted feather.

Indigenous youth poets from torture refugee families in the Owl and Panther writing project of the Hopi center, read poetry from their new book during the banquet. Amy Shubitz of Tucson, who died in 2003, was remembered for her efforts with the young poets.

Pioneering clinicians Drs. Inge Genefke of Denmark, Helene Jaffe of France and James Jaranson of the U.S. paid tribute to Dr. Ayan during the award ceremony.

Dr. Ayan was recognized with the award after dedicating his life to the treatment and rehabilitation of torture survivors and advocacy for victims. He has been imprisoned in Turkey and is now facing more charges, which could result in additional years in prison. His work has exposed torture in detention centers and resulted in new methods of documenting torture.

Dr. Ayan helped to establish the Human Rights Foundation of Turkey in 1990. At great personal risk, he has worked at the HRFT’s Treatment and Rehabilitation Center in Izmir.

Harassed by Turkish authorities, he has been subject to over 40 court cases and spent 113 days in prison. He is now appealing guilty verdicts before the Supreme Court in two cases. If the verdicts are upheld, he faces a sentence of 36 months in prison.

Speakers also remembered Dr. Chester and one of her final works, where she pointed out the systematic genocide of American Indians in the United States. Dr. Chester said that in 1492, there were 2.5 million Indigenous peoples living in the United States. By the turn of the century, only 270,000 remained.

At the Hopi center for torture survivors in Tucson, Dr. Chester, a pioneering clinician and psychologist, treated refugees crossing the Mexico-US border, including Indigenous Peoples from Central and South America and Chiapas, Mexico. Torture survivors were treated from Bosnia, Vietnam, Moldavia and other countries.

Dr. Chester died of cancer in 1997, at the age of 47. In the book left unfinished at the time of her death, “Mercy Has a Human Heart”, she wrote of torture: “Torture is an act that defies the boundaries of language. We reserve the thought to express an anguish deeper than pain.”

Dr. Chester said that working with torture survivors taught her “pain beyond pain leaves only the hope of uncovering a calm, healthy, and entire soul within a distressed and devastated body – that if there is pain beyond pain, there is also tranquility beyond reason, faith beyond injustice and love beyond fear.”

Brenda Norrell
U.N. OBSERVER & International Report
 http://www.unobserver.com

e-mail:: brendanorrell@gmail.com homepage:: http://bsnorrell.tripod.com

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