Esat Oktay Yıldıran (15 February 1949 – 22 October 1988) was a

Turkish military The Turkish Armed Forces (TAF; tr, Türk Silahlı Kuvvetleri, TSK) are the armed forces, military forces of the Turkey, Republic of Turkey. Turkish Armed Forces consist of the General Staff of the Turkish Armed Forces, General Staff, the Turki ...

officer who was appointed governor of the Diyarbakır Prison after the 1980 Turkish coup d'état. Yıldıran became known for his extensive

torture Torture is the deliberate infliction of severe pain or suffering on a person for reasons such as punishment, extracting a confession, interrogational torture, interrogation for information, or intimidating third parties. definitions of tortur ...

PKK The Kurdistan Workers' Party or PKK is a Kurdish militant political organization and armed guerrilla movement, which historically operated throughout Kurdistan, but is now primarily based in the mountainous Kurdish-majority regions of sout ...

aligned

Kurds ug:كۇردلار Kurds ( ku, کورد ,Kurd, italic=yes, rtl=yes) or Kurdish people are an Iranian ethnic group native to the mountainous region of Kurdistan in Western Asia, which spans southeastern Turkey, northwestern Iran, northern Ira ...

in the Diyarbakır Prison. Many inmates either committed suicide or died on hunger strikes in the penitentiary.

Career

After the

Turkish Invasion of Cyprus The Turkish invasion of Cyprus began on 20 July 1974 and progressed in two phases over the following month. Taking place upon a background of intercommunal violence between Greek and Turkish Cypriots, and in response to a Greek junta-s ...

in 1974, Yıldıran was promoted to Major. In 1980, after the military coup which took place the same year, he was sent to the Diyarbakır Prison by Kenan Evren in person. He tortured inmates in the prison with methods that were compared to

Nazi Nazism ( ; german: Nazismus), the common name in English for National Socialism (german: Nationalsozialismus, ), is the far-right totalitarian political ideology and practices associated with Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party (NSDAP) in ...

methods, and he viewed the prison as a school in which inmates would be subjected to

Turkification Turkification, Turkization, or Turkicization ( tr, Türkleştirme) describes a shift whereby populations or places received or adopted Turkic attributes such as culture, language, history, or ethnicity. However, often this term is more narrowly ...

. Yıldıran beat, coerced and tortured the male and female prisoners. Under his force, inmates were forced to eat human excrement, doused in sewer water, tortured with electric shocks and such other torture methods. Yıldıran had a

German shepherd The German Shepherd or Alsatian is a German breed of working dog of medium to large size. The breed was developed by Max von Stephanitz using various traditional German herding dogs from 1899. It was originally bred as a herding dog, for ...

called "Co" ("Joe"), which was trained to bite the genitals of naked prisoners; all inmates were obligated to salute the dog.Welat Zeydanlıoğlu
Torture and Turkification in the Diyarbakır Military Prison
, undated, accessed on 21 May 2011. More information on the author can be found at http://welatzeydanlioglu.wordpress.com/ . Sites to download the report as pdf file include

Assassination

On 22 October 1988, Yıldıran was on a public bus which stopped by at a station, and 2 suspects entered the bus and sat behind him. After the bus halted at another stop, moments later the doors opened one of the two suspects opened fired. He was shot dead on the bus in

Ümraniye Ümraniye () is a district of Istanbul. It was separated from Üsküdar in 1987. It is bordered by Çekmeköy to the northeast, Sancaktepe to the east, Ataşehir to the south, Üsküdar to the west and Beykoz to the northwest. History Ümraniye ...

, Istanbul. According to some reports, his firing assassin yelled "Laz Kemal sends greetings" (referring to one of the inmates, Kemal Pri) before shooting him. He died in front of his wife and two children. On the 26th of October, he was buried and declared a

martyr A martyr (, ''mártys'', "witness", or , ''marturia'', stem , ''martyr-'') is someone who suffers persecution and death for advocating, renouncing, or refusing to renounce or advocate, a religious belief or other cause as demanded by an externa ...

by the government. The PKK took responsibility of the attack, after an unanimous man contacted the Cumhuriyet Gazétte later that day and stated that; “Esat Oktay Yıldıran, who was punished in Kısıklı today, was killed by the PKK. Biji Partiye Karkaren Kurdistan.” As a result the two suspects were identified as members of the PKK, but never fully identified and were never caught.

Aftermath

Yıldıran's torture methods were the subject of the Turkish television series “Bu Kalp Seni Unutur mu?” Various books have also been written about Yıldıran's torture practices. One of the most famous books is Mehdi Zana's "Hell No. 5. Diary from a Turkish Prison". Yıldıran was honored as a hero and martyr by

Turkish nationalists Turkish may refer to: *a Turkic language spoken by the Turks * of or about Turkey ** Turkish language *** Turkish alphabet ** Turkish people, a Turkic ethnic group and nation *** Turkish citizen, a citizen of Turkey *** Turkish communities and ...

. In 2010 the Fatih City Council removed his name from a memorial.Tageszeitung Milliyet vom 1. Oktober 2010
/ref> In 2013, a Turkish court sentenced the journalist

Rasim Ozan Kütahyalı Rasim ( ar, راسِم / ''Rāsim'') is a masculine given name of Arabic origin meaning "planner", "architect". People named Rasim * Rasim Başak, Azerbaijani-Turkish basketballer * Rasim Delić (1949–2010), Bosnian Army general * Rasim Kara, Tur ...

to a suspended prison term of ten months and fined him for writing that Yıldıran was a torturer.

References

Turkish military officers 1949 births 1988 deaths People murdered in Turkey Deaths by firearm in Turkey Turkish military personnel of the Cyprus conflicts Murder in Ümraniye 1988 murders in Turkey {{Turkey-mil-bio-stub