Rights Group: Gays in Turkey Face Climate of Violence
By Dorian Jones
Istanbul
22 May 2008
http://www.voanews.com/english/2008-05-22-voa45.cfmU.S.-based Human Rights Watch this week published a damning report on the treatment of gay people in Turkey. Turkey is one of the few Muslim countries in which homosexuality is legal. But the report said there was a crisis, citing an alarming level of public attacks and police harassment. This comes as the country's gay rights movement has become increasingly stronger, particularly in Turkey's largest city Istanbul, from where Dorian Jones sends us this report.
"There is a systematic pattern of violence by the police and in the communities in the family, gay men face and transgender people face violence at every hand," he said. "There is still vaguely written laws to arrest and harass anyone they chose. In Ankara the capital, there is a special police team called Balios which means hammer, and again and again transgender people told us that they've been beaten, that they've been raped by this police team and it's goal is to clean the center of the city of transgender people. And most conspicuous of all, the government does not intervene to stop it."
The Turkish security forces have strongly denied such charges. But it is not difficult to find accusations of police brutality from the country's transsexual and transvestite community.
