ANKARA, Turkey – A teenage boy was hit in the eye with a rubber bullet and many people were wounded in the Turkish city of Adana this week, after police used bullets and water cannon against demonstrators protesting a planned wall on the border with war-ravaged Syria.
Sahin Kilic, head of the Adana branch of the Human Rights Association (IHD), told Rudaw he had spoken with the teenager after he was wounded on Wednesday. He identified the boy by his initials, B.Y., and said he was 14.
“I spoke with the child at the hospital. He said he was coming back from work when the police bullet hit him. His hands turned yellow when he touched his eye because the plastic bullet is a chemical weapon,” Kilic said, adding that the boy is likely to lose his eye.
As police tried to disperse the crowd with water canons, tear gas and rubber bullets, the protesters scattered into back alleys where they continued to clash with police.
Turkey has started the building of a wall in the Kurdish city of Nusaybin to prevent a possible spillover of the Syrian conflict into its territories.
The case of the wounded teenager is a reminder of 11-year-old Mazlum Akay, who was killed after being hit in the head by police gas cannon during a demonstration in Adana last year.
According to Tugay Bek, Akay’s family lawyer, one year on the court case over Akay’s death is still pending and the prosecutors refuse to investigate two gas cannons found at the scene.
Local human rights activists say that police violence against protesters often goes unheeded by the judicial authorities.
In 2009, in the city of Diyarbakir, 23-year-old university student Aydın Erdem was killed during a demonstration.
Charges were filed against the police, but soon dropped after the Ministry of Justice sent a letter to the court, stating that Erdem “was guilty and committed a gross fault by joining an illegal protest and attacking the police with stones and sticks.”
Last year, Erdem’s former classmates from Dicle University commemorated his death, but they were detained by the police and imprisoned on charges of staging protests on the university campus.
In its report titled “Protesting as a Terrorist Offense” Human Rights Watch (HRW) has documented that “Turkey uses anti-terror laws to prosecute hundreds of Kurdish civilians, violating free expression, association, and assembly.”
“Though these treaties have the force of law in Turkey, no authority -- either the police, prosecutors or the courts -- is taking these legally binding human rights obligations into account when confronting legitimate, public action in opposition to the state’s policies on treatment of the Kurdish minority,” the report said.
