The Last Dictator

Because of its indirect contribution to the atmosphere in which the PKK grew and flourished, much has been written and said for years about Diyarbakır Prison. The most important reason the organization could find a social base among Kurds was attributed to an explosion of the resentment fed and grown by the inhuman tortures and pressures carried out in this prison. So much so that these tortures left a person no other choice, ethically or psychologically. Those who lived hell here at the hands of the state would head for the mountains as soon as they left the prison, and in this they were to be regarded as entirely excusable, even justified.

In truth, terror could in no way have an excuse or a justification, and the choice of terror could in no way be seen as a destiny. To see it that way one has to be in serious theoretical and moral weakness. Evil is never a destiny; it is always a choice that requires responsibility.

But that is not our subject now.

In his latest book "Son Diktatör," recently published by Vadi Yayınları, Aytekin Yılmaz demolishes this legend about the relationship between Diyarbakır Prison and the PKK, even the Kurdish question. True, prisons are places where resentment against the state is fed, but the reason for this is not the state's pressure; on the contrary, it is the unbelievable practices of the leftist organizations that turned these places into organizational training camps.

Yılmaz recounts that he entered Bayrampaşa Prison, where he was arrested and placed in 1992, with these perceptions, expectations, even fears, but that he went through a great shock at the sight he saw at the very first moment. Contrary to the things he had constantly heard about the state's pressure and cruelty in Diyarbakır Prison, he experienced a great perceptual shock before an organizational control and domination that could not be seen even in any organizational training camp outside. Of course, at first this shock came about not as a disappointment but perhaps as a demolition of perception.

In the PKK ward where he was placed, a communal life designed almost as a rehearsal of the revolution the PKK was planning to make was being lived. The external control of the prison was with the state, but its internal administration had been left entirely to the organization's administrators, and they tried to carry out the revolutionary communes that could not be implemented outside, with the strictest discipline and practices. This part of it is where, for Yılmaz, the shattering of perception turned into complete disillusionment. Because it turned into an extremely totalitarian life, with intensive training programs filling every minute of the organization's members, and with a repression and enforcement far greater than the state's.

This totalitarian life was sustained in part by a powerful system of sanctions. The penalties for not following the rules were very heavy. Moreover, showing a little laxity could very easily be charged directly as betrayal. The slightest suspicion or rumor about someone opened the way to the harshest punishment by the ward's inhabitants. Thus inside the prison there came to be separate prisons controlled by the organizations. In these prisons, interrogation and torture rooms.

The imprisonment or torture applied to those who, because of what they had done outside or inside, because of their relations, or, for example, because they had talked to the police when arrested, even under torture, revealed entirely the organization's repressive and torturing face, apart from the state. These organizations, whose slogans "human dignity will defeat torture" we have grown used to hearing at every opportunity outside, inflict on their own friends and comrades, for one reason or another, tortures that the state did not dare to carry out. Some of these tortures are for obtaining information, some entirely for punishment. Moreover, many members of the organization are executed by the organization itself.

"What difference is left between you and the state you call fascist and are trying to overthrow in revolt for that reason?" Yılmaz rebels, but he keeps this rebellion inside for a long time, because in fact there is no way of voicing this rebellion from outside either; it would be a trivial matter to be accused of betrayal and executed in a short time. For that reason, even if this contradiction produced an enlightenment in Yılmaz, he is aware of being on a ground where freedom of expression is utterly impossible.

Bayrampaşa Prison is of course no exception in the organizations' control and administration of prisons and in the practice of turning prisons into organizational camps through these administrations. According to Yılmaz's finding, in those days, across all the prisons of Turkey in total, the organization had formed a terrifying field of power in which it ran the administration of about one hundred thousand people.

Those who were brought in, arrested for throwing stones at demonstrations, for aiding and abetting the organization, or for simpler offenses, would pass through every kind of training within a few months, and when they completed their sentences and got out, they went directly to the mountains. Thus the prisons also served as a camp where militants were recruited for the organization in the mountains, completed their initial training and were sent off.

This is also, in fact, the big question that Yılmaz himself did not understand and therefore shares with the reader today. The state could not have not known this, and how did such a strong state overlook for so long its own prisons turning into so open a mechanism for recruiting members for armed organizations? This question is of course one to be pondered and discussed at length.

In his book "Son Diktatör," together with his earlier books, Aytekin Yılmaz produces a tremendous prison literature. His book does not merely reflect the feelings of a former organization militant who has experienced disillusionment with an organization. It also very well shows how organizations claiming revolution can bring to life a dystopia that reverses all their claims in their model practices. Moreover, what he recounts need not be limited to leftist organizations only; they are examples that could very well be seen in DEAŞ-style organizations too. It adds a very rich dimension to the accounts in George Orwell's Animal Farm and 1984, or among the prison narratives of leftist organizations in Turkey, for instance Gün Zileli's Havariler.

There is no artificiality, affectation, strain or blockage in his narration. Historical importance of what is told aside, it is a work well worth reading even as a specimen of an utterly authentic language and tremendous literature set out through these historical events.