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- Article Title: Asiye Guzel Zeybek
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Asiye Guzel Zeybek – a Turkish journalist, editor and author of Rape under Torture (1999) and Our Cakir: The Life of a Revolutionary (2001) – was arrested on 27 February 1997, together with nineteen other colleagues. Zeybek, now thirty-three years old, is an executive board member of the Istanbul Branch of the Progressive Journalists’ Association, and also editor-in-chief of Atilin. She was specifically accused under Article 168 of the Turkish Penal Code, and subsequently convicted for her association with the now banned Marxist-Leninist Communist Party. Zeybek’s legal counsel staunchly rebutted the prosecutor’s allegations of her involvement in any violence.
During her initial trial in October 1997, Zeybek claimed to have been raped during interrogation by eight officers of the Istanbul Security Political Department. The eight policemen were brought to trial in November 1998; two years later, the prosecution was dropped. Zeybek, who was detained for five and a half years, was partially paralysed in December 2000 after being shot in the back during a police raid of her prison. On 5 June 2002 she was released, pending final court hearing. By October 16, when she was sentenced to twelve years in prison, Zeybek had arrived in Sweden to receive the prestigious Tchulovsky Award for persecuted writers, and gained asylum there.
Asiye’s case attracted wide interest, particularly from International PEN’s Writer in Prison Committee and Sweden’s Lawyers without Borders. Extraordinarily, Asiye’s Story: One Woman’s Journey from Torture to Triumph, her account of rape and torture was smuggled out and published while she was still in prison. In 2003 Saqi Books (Pangrave Macmillan) published Asiye’s Story ($23pb, 0 86356 194 2).
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