Turkish Inmates Agree to End Hunger Strike

Leftist inmates struck a deal Saturday with Turkey’s government, ending a 69-day hunger strike that claimed 11 prisoners’ lives and triggered riots across Turkey.

Mediators said they brokered an agreement with about 900 inmates at Istanbul’s Bayrampasa prison who were considered the ringleaders of the roughly 2,000-inmate hunger strike at prisons across Turkey.

Another 4,000 Kurdish inmates recently joined the fast, begun to protest recent inmate transfers and new prison rules.

Three fasting inmates died Saturday before the deal was reached, and 100 others were in critical condition--some of them past the point of saving, said human rights workers who recently visited the prisoners.

After holding firm against the inmates’ demands for more than two months, government leaders finally agreed to send 102 political prisoners to jails closer to the site of their trials, negotiators said.

Fasting inmates across the country quickly agreed to the deal.

Hospitals throughout Istanbul were put on alert for treatment of hundreds of strikers who might need immediate attention.

Medical staff entered the Bayrampasa prison, treating the most critically ill prisoners. All the strikers there were put on intravenous feeding, one negotiator said.

The government had said Friday that it was prepared to raid Bayrampasa prison if inmates did not abandon their hunger strike, but then suggested that it would try to avoid that, fearing bloodshed.

The hunger strikers are either on trial or have been convicted of membership in outlawed leftist groups or the country’s Kurdish uprising. Some have been involved in murders or bombings.

Their protest seemed to garner little public sympathy in Turkey, where people are weary of two decades of terrorism. But leftist supporters of the inmates rioted almost daily after the first fasting inmate died July 21, attacking police and burning vehicles.