ANKARA, 1 November 2005 — The brutal treatment of children at an orphanage in eastern Turkey has sparked a nationwide public outcry and put pressure on the prime minister for heads to roll over the sorry state of the country’s social care institutions. Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s government discussed the scandal at a weekly meeting yesterday as a parliamentary commission investigated the orphanage in Malatya city, where children aged up to six were filmed on secret camera being beaten and verbally abused by female staff.
One scene in the footage, broadcast on the private Star TV channel last week, showed an attendant knocking the heads of two boys against each other and pushing them to the ground. In another scene, an employee was seen hitting a toddler with a shoe and, in yet another, splashing hot water on a child among a group waiting naked in line for bath.
The incident, the latest in a series of reports of physical and sexual abuse in state-run care centers for orphans and children of poor families, exposed another dark side of Turkey’s human rights record. The European Union, which Turkey is seeking to join, has long criticized rights violations in the country, but attention has focused mainly on political issues such as the rights of the Kurds and abuses by police and prison officials.
“The orphanage incidents are human rights violations and this is the aspect from which we are investigating it,” said Mehmet Elkatmis, head of the assembly’s human rights commission that will report to parliament on its findings in Malatya. Turkey started long-awaited EU membership talks on Oct. 4 amid warnings from Brussels that it was now coming under closer scrutiny.
“I watched the footage with an aching heart, with indescribable feelings,” Erdogan said in a monthly address to the nation late Sunday. He promised swift action to reform social care institutions, but brushed aside opposition calls to sack State Minister Nimet Cubukcu, who holds the social services portfolio and is the only woman in the Cabinet.
The Cabinet yesterday discussed a draft law to reform the social services system, work on which had begun before the Malatya scandal, and decided to speed up its submission to parliament, Justice Minister Cemil Cicek said after the meeting. “We have to develop a new understanding on children who need protection in line with international norms... New legislation should be adopted as soon as possible,” Cicek said.
Five female employees were arrested after the footage was broadcast and the government suspended the director of the orphanage and the head of the Malatya social services department. Experts say Malatya is not an isolated incident but the result of a flawed system in which severe financial shortcomings and political cronyism have left thousands of children, mentally disabled and elderly people in the hands of personnel with little or no qualification.
Some of the women who beat the children in Malatya, for instance, turned out to be the uneducated employees of a cleaning company, which the orphanage had contracted to make up for insufficient staff. Residents accused the government of poor control, claiming that local authorities failed to act on a bevy of complaints by neighbors who witnessed the children being mistreated.
A homemade bomb ripped through a police station in the mainly Kurdish east of Turkey yesterday, causing material damage but no casualties, local security sources said. The bomb exploded on the ground floor of the station in the city of Van, causing damage to the walls and ceiling and leading to the evacuation of the building, the sources said.
Police suspect the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) to be behind the explosion, but have not yet confirmed this. The PKK, considered a terrorist group by Ankara, the United States and the European Union, is active in the region and has been blamed for similar attacks in the past.
