Prison Management Destroyed Unpublished Manuscript

International PEN condemned the prison management of the prison in Sincan (Ankara) for the seizure and the destruction of a work of writer Halil Gündoğan. The announcement was signed by Halil İbrahim Özcan, President of the Committee for Writers in Prison. It read, "We strongly condemn the management of the Sincan No.1 F Type Prison for considering the 200-page work of convicted writer Halil Gündoğan a 'letter' and destroying it. We emphasize once more our wish to live in a country that is not afraid of books. We invite the responsible people to leave behind the attitude of 12 September".

The Turkish Writers Union had previously issued a statement criticizing the seizure of Gündoğan's unpublished book by the prison management. "Judging an idea before it was put into action is not a democratic but a fascist method", the union said.

Unpublished book penalized

Writer Gündoğan wrote the second volume of his book entitled "A Fugitive's Story from Metris to Munzur" while he was in prison. The first volume was published in 2005. He gave the second part to the prison management in order to have it handed to his visitors.

However, the work was never given to Gündoğan's relatives. The prison management seized the yet unpublished work and decided to destroy it because it supposedly "contained objectionable expressions that praised a terrorist organization and the illegal activities of its members". Gündoğan appealed the decision but his objection was dismissed. The writer's lawyer applied to court and requested the return of the one and only copy and the reversal of the decision. This request was declined as well.

The manuscript given to the prison management by Gündoğan comprised 200 handwritten pages and was the only existing version of the book. Gündoğan's family and his lawyer deemed the decision "arbitrary" and criticized the management for the destruction of the book.

Gündoğan was taken into custody after the coup d'état in 1980. He was facing death penalty in the trial regarding the clandestine communist organization Turkey Communist Party/Marxist-Leninist (TKP/ML) - TİKKO, the armed faction of the TKP/ML (Turkish Workers' Peasants' Liberation Army). In 1988, he fled from Metris prison (Istanbul) together with 28 convicts by digging a tunnel. He was arrested again in 1995 and handed down an aggravated life sentence.

In the first volume of the book entitled "A Fugitive's Story from Metris to Munzur", the writer described in detail his escape from Metris Prison. The book was printed in a second edition. (YY/VK)