Continued "Enforced Disappearance" in Turkey raises alarm

Enforced disappearance is a crime against humanity and is a common practice in Turkey. According to the Human Rights Association of Turkey, at least 10 individuals were abducted and threatened by security officials and pressed to become informants and later freed in the first 10 months of 2020.

23-year-old Gokhan Gunes, a construction worker with socialist leanings has been missing from his Istanbul home for the past five days. His family says he was bundled into a car and whisked away to an unknown destination on Jan. 20, most likely by undercover police, after he got off a bus outside his workplace in Istanbul’s Basaksehir neighborhood.

Turkish authorities have turned a deaf ear to the Gunes family’s entreaties to find their son, even after they presented what they say is visual evidence of his abduction captured by security cameras outside the construction site.

Gunes’ family and friends, along with members of opposition parties, have been gathering daily outside the Cagalayan courthouse in Istanbul demanding knowledge of his whereabouts.

Gunes was jailed for eight months in 2018 over a tweet condemning Turkey’s invasion of the Kurdish majority enclave of Afrin in northwestern Syria that same year. He was freed pending trial, and his first hearing was scheduled for March. He was also engaged to be married in April this year.

Gunes’ story chimes with a pattern of forced disappearances of dissidents that has emerged in the wake of the 2016 coup attempt. The bulk of the targets are alleged disciples of Fethullah Gulen, the Pennsylvania-based imam who Ankara accuses of masterminding the putsch.

At least 26 Gulen-linked individuals are thought to have been forcibly disappeared since the coup, allegedly by the national intelligence agency, MIT. Many of the men have since resurfaced emaciated and broken, with authorities claiming they had “found” them here and there. 

The men have been jailed for their alleged role in the failed coup. During their courtroom trials, several mustered the courage to speak of the brutal physical and mental torture to which they say were subjected at the black sites where they were secretly held.

The EU should stop airing concern and use its new human rights sanction regime to hold Turkey accountable for its behavior, including enforced disappearances.