On the eve of International Human Rights Day, Anne Sebba meets a victim of the Turkish security forces. How do you say goodbye to a sick husband who may die while you are gone? Or, if he survives, will be so severely damaged mentally and physically that he can never look after himself, but you will be in another country, banned from returning to him. Do the words exist? That is the situation that faced Asiye Guzel Zeybek this summer.

Zeybek, a young Turkish journalist now seeking political asylum in Sweden, last saw her husband, Sardar, in a prison hospital ward. He was scarcely able to talk because of the disastrous effects of a 358-day hunger strike. Zeybek had just been released temporarily after five-and-a-half years’ imprisonment, while her case progressed slowly through the courts. She had been accused of being a member of an illegal organisation -the Marxist-Leninist Communist Party (MLCP) -but had been neither sentenced nor acquitted. She had suffered a brutal mass rape and torture and was in constant pain from a back injury received while incarcerated. The Turkish authorities allowed her special dispensation on humanitarian grounds, a type of bail while she awaited a verdict, to sleep in her husband’s prison for four weeks. During the day 29-year-old Sardar, alive only because of salt water and vitamin drinks, was brought to see her in a wheelchair but was kept behind a partition of thick bars. They were forbidden to touch. Patrolling soldiers, guns at the ready, enforced the rules. “Sardar barely knew who I was. I had such a shock when I first saw him. He was lifeless, very white, just no life in his body or soul or eyes. But I think he could understand me, sometimes. And he could see me.” Zeybek found the strength to say goodbye by convincing herself that she was just going away for a short break. “I’ll be back in a month,” she whispered. She cannot admit, even now, that the asylum process is under way, that she has left behind her country and family permanently. “One day there might be an amnesty,” she says with faint conviction.

Zeybek, 31, fled to Stockholm on Sunday, October 6, with just two small suitcases -enough for a visit, not a life. She chose Sweden because she had been awarded the prestigious $15,000 Tucholsky Prize -previous winners include Salman Rushdie -while in prison and was required to receive it in person. The Tucholsky is given to writers who show courage when their freedom of expression is threatened and is in memory of the German-Jewish refugee writer Kurt Tucholsky, who committed suicide in Sweden in 1936 while waiting for his asylum papers. At a small ceremony on October 14, the Swedish Culture Minister, Marita Ulvskog, presented Zeybek with the cheque. Two days later her lawyer phoned from Istanbul to tell her that, following a final hearing, the authorities had pronounced her guilty in absentia and sentenced her to 12 years. They could have given her 15. With dispensations and allowing for time already served, this meant that she faced a further 3 years in jail.

“My lawyer had urged me to leave the country as soon as I was given a passport in September,” Zeybek explains when we meet in the bright and cheery flat that the Swedish Government has lent her on the outskirts of the capital. Her lawyer understood that the unusually speedy granting of a passport was a signal that his client would finally be found guilty and sentenced. The Turkish authorities, seeing her as an embarrassment in their campaign to convince the West, and particularly the EU, of their changed attitude to human rights, preferred her out of the country rather than in jail where she could become a continuing focus of criticism. When she heard the verdict, in Stockholm, she reacted calmly at first. “A photograph flashed through my mind of my friends and how they would be feeling, so I telephoned and comforted them, telling them that this was the time to be strong, not to collapse.” Later she wept, uncomprehending of her future. Zeybek had been arrested in a raid on her home on February 22, 1997. She was 26, newly married and working as a reporter on a magazine sympathetic to the MLCP, Atilim. “I used to do political interviews and cover conferences and demonstrations, usually workers demanding better pay and conditions. But none of us at Atilim were members of the MLCP,” she states.

She was held at the security police headquarters in Istanbul for 14 days before being brought before a judge; this delay was a violation of the European Convention on Human Rights, to which Turkey is a signatory. It was during this period that the rape and torture took place. In her written account Zeybek recalls how a policeman began listing a number of incriminating objects he claimed had been found in her home. When she denied his allegations, she was slapped in the face. She then asked to see her lawyer and to be allowed to contact her family. The policeman laughed at her request. Instead, she was given paper and pencil and told to “confess”. When she refused, she was taken into another room, stripped naked and told she was about to have a taste of “the gallows”. She was blindfolded, her arms tied behind her back, and in this way hung from the ceiling and left alone. After a while a number of men came back into the room and began to taunt her crudely. They threw her on the floor, still blindfolded, so all she could see was a number of men’s feet. First they kicked her. Then they raped her. For months afterwards she remained in deep shock, severely depressed and unable to talk or eat properly. Her weight dropped to 7 stone (45kg) and she was worried that she might be losing her mind.

But slowly, as she hauled herself back to life, she began writing a diary detailing her torture. The manuscript, smuggled out chapter by chapter, was published in 1999, became a minor bestseller and helped her to recover her sanity. One of the first detailed accounts of state-based sexual violence, it encouraged other women (and some men) to come forward and talk openly about their experience of rape and sexual abuse by police. At the same time, the Turkish feminist lawyer Eren Keskin was compiling a depressingly bulky document, Sexual Violence Perpetrated by State Security Forces. There was a trial of eight policemen at which a document was presented by the Medical Faculty of Istanbul University giving evidence of the trauma that Zeybek had endured. But the policemen were all acquitted on grounds of “lack of proof”.

Zeybek, however, suffered further violence in prison during the disturbances that hit all Turkish prisons in December 2000. Prisoners fiercely rejected government plans to change the prison structure from one of free association to individual cells. Tanks and bulldozers stormed prisons where protests were occurring, and 30 people were killed in the ensuing riots. Zeybek remembers seeing hundreds of heavily armed troops jumping down through the prison roof and hurling gas canisters. “It was impossible to breathe, but when we lost consciousness they hosed us with cold water. I was dragged down some stairs by my hair and ended up in the prison hospital for 25 days. I couldn’t move my legs for ages. I was paralysed.” She still suffers, intermittently, appalling pain in her back as well as nightmares of the rape.

What of the future? At the moment, struggling to take in the immensity of the change in her life, she can do little more than walk around Stockholm and negotiate the local supermarket. She grew up in a close-knit, high-achieving Sunni Muslim family and is desperately sad at the thought that her middle-aged parents, Yasar and Bahar, who struggled for their four children’s education and were so supportive during her prison ordeal, cannot afford to visit her in Sweden. She wants to continue her profession as a journalist covering events in Turkey and human rights internationally. But her major project is a book she began in prison about the death fasts which have already claimed the lives of at least 80 young people. “It is deeply painful. I want to do justice to my friends in jail – especially one who was with me for years but now suffers from Korsakov Syndrome (a total and definitive loss of memory) as a result of fasting.” Is she sometimes angry with her husband for the hunger strike that is destroying his life? After all, she also began a fast, but then decided not to continue. “I try to understand him,” she says simply. He was arrested after her, in 1999, and has not been finally sentenced. “He is accused, like me, of membership of an illegal organisation. But even the head of the university was shocked at his arrest.” Prison has changed Zeybek, she admits. “I feel stronger because it was a school for me, where I learnt to analyse and build a perspective on life.” Before I leave, Zeybek extracts the Stockholm telephone directory from underneath a sofa cushion. Inside are several red roses which she is pressing for her husband. “I cannot send him fresh flowers. So I am hoping these dried ones will be allowed.”

Asiye’s Story: Rape under Torture, translated by Richard McKane, will be published in 2003 by Saqi Books

Anne Sebba is an executive member of the English Centre of International PEN which campaigned for Zeybek’s release