In September, a suicide bomb attack by a member of the Revolutionary People’s Liberation Party/Front (DHKP/C) in Istanbul killed Australian tourist Amanda Rigg and two Anti-Riot Squad officers. A fifteen-year-old was killed and three other schoolchildren injured in an attack on the extreme right Idealist Hearth in Istanbul. Official reports claimed the attack was committed by the Turkish Communist Labour Party (TKEP). Asylum seekers were frequently denied proper protection. Under Turkey’s geographical reservation to the 1951 Refugee Convention, non-European asylum seekers were required to register with the police so that the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) could determine whether they were refugees and eligible for resettlement in a third country.
Hundreds of asylum seekers entering the country from Iran and northern Iraq were summarily returned across the borders. Others were arbitrarily refused permission to register or to report weekly to police stations, thereby exposing them to risk of summary return as illegal residents. In July more than two hundred African asylum seekers, including some recognized by UNHCR as refugees, were rounded up in Istanbul.
One female member of the group died in custody, while others reported that gendarmes ill-treated, raped, or otherwise sexual assaulted them before forcing them at gunpoint across the Greek border. Landmines laid by the government along the borders and by both sides in the conflict between the security forces and the PKK, killed at least ten people. In April, however, Turkey declared that it would begin procedures to accede to the Ottawa Convention on the prohibition of production and use of anti-personnel mines.
