A trial in Germany

Abstract

In the early morning of April 1, 1997, the police in Cologne beat up a young Turkish woman who called seeking help in the middle of the night. Identified in the German press simply as Oeykue, she reported to journalists that she and her sister Irem had called the police hotline a half dozen times in response to an ominous banging on the shutters of her first-floor apartment. The police came once at about 2:30 a.m. and found nothing suspicious. After additional calls, two officers showed up in a patrol car and, by her own admission, Oeykue started screaming at them, Why are you so late? Aren't you here to help people? According to her story, one of the officers called the slightly-built 108-pound Oeykue a little foreign asshole, hit her twice in the face, and then threw her to the ground, stepped on her back, and handcuffed her. Her sister Irem was there to note it all, but that did not inhibit the violence. They told Irem to keep quiet or the same would happen to her. With Oeykue still screaming in the back seat of the patrol car, they drove off. The cop who assaulted her initially was at the wheel, but he managed to turn and slap her a few more times, she claims, apparently to shut her up. What happened at the police station is, according to Oeykue's report, even more remarkable. Sometime between 4:00 and 5:00 a.m., the police locked her in a toiletless cell without booking her. Urine covered the floor and the only refuge was a cement shelf that passed as a bed. Her left wrist was bleeding from the overly tight handcuff. Screaming from other prisoners surrounded her. She could not speak to anyone and she had no way of making a phone call. The remarkable fact is that Irem was able to locate her. And this she could do only because she had the number of a retired German police officer they had met at a New Year's Eve party in a local Turkish restaurant. He made a few calls and let Irem know that Oeykue was locked up at the Waidmark station and would be released the next day at 11:00 a.m. As soon as she could, Oeykue sought medical assistance. At the emergency room of the local hospital, the attending physicians decided that her wounds were sufficiently serious to have her treated as an in-patient. She ended up spending five days in a hospital bed. On April 4, the local Cologne paper ran a story about the incident along with a picture of Oeykue in the hospital.(1) The picture revealed the scar forming on Oeykue's left hand and also showed Irem standing behind her. A curious thing about the story, however, is that it mixed up the two sisters' names. It identified the injured sister as Irem. It also ran the version of the incident that the police spokesman related to them from the police report. When they encountered Oeykue and Irem in the courtyard outside their door, the officers reported, they saw Oeykue carrying a vacuum cleaner and, at the outset, she took the tube and swung it at one of the officers hitting him in the upper right cheek. It was only after being hit, supposedly, that the officer threw Oeykue to the ground and handcuffed her. If you believe the police and you do not ask too many questions about the slaps in the police car, the story looks like a fairly routine case of using force to effectuate an arrest. Like the journalist who wrote the story in the local press, however, the police were not sure until seven days after the incident which sister was which. On April 7, a note on the police blotter indicates that the picture in the local paper was shown to the officer in charge and he identified the woman in the bed as Oeykue rather than Irem. How he was able to do this is entirely unclear, for so far as we know the police had not taken a photograph when they detained her. But clearly, the Cologne police pay attention to the press that they receive. Had they read the Turkish press serving the three million Turks in Germany, they would have been dismayed by the headlines of brutality and terror. …