Volume 36, Number 12 · July 20, 1989
Cruel and Usual Punishment
By Jeri Laber
In March of this year, soon after I arrived in Istanbul as a member of a human rights mission for Helsinki Watch,[*] I found myself at a dinner party talking to the director of a liberal study center. He was skeptical about whether we could accomplish anything in Turkey. 'You think that by exposing torture in Turkey you can end it,' he said, 'but you don't understand. It is part of our…our…' He groped for the English word, which I found myself reluctantly supplying: 'Mentality?' I asked. 'That's right,' he concurred. 'Torture is part of the Turkish mentality.'
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