Ayla Sukhulesh is almost bleary with frailty. Sitting delicately in a meeting house in the hills overlooking the sprawling metropolis of Istanbul, she says she "will talk for a few minutes". The youngest, and perhaps weakest "death faster" I met this week, she has refused food for the past 101 days - since early June.
Ayla (23), who was working in a textile factory, is fasting in solidarity with the political prisoners of the F-type solitary-confinement prisons in general and in solidarity with her 25-year-old cousin in particular. "He does not remember anything any more." The interpreter says that he has gone almost blind.
The attractive, sallow-skinned woman has seen her weight fall from about nine and a half stone to just over five and a half. Her parchment-like skin appears wrapped tightly over her jawbone. Her sunken, dark-brown eyes either stare motionlessly ahead or move, painfully slowly, towards me. A baggy, black cardigan goes some way towards shielding her tiny arms and legs. Moving like a stiffly-jointed wooden doll, she explains she is protesting against the F-type prisons because "they try to take the humanity from the political prisoners".
In this area - Kucik Armuthus - four houses accommodate about 20 young people who have embarked on the "death fasts". More than 100 armed police, armoured cars and army jeeps are stationed here. The strikers are among an estimated 200 people currently involved in the protest which saw some 865 on hunger strike or death fast in April and May. Some 42 people have died so far.
Though the number of people taking part has fallen (as strikers are released temporarily from jail), further groups are joining. A group of about 100 is to join on September 25th, in an escalation which could see numbers reach 1,000 by the end of the year. "For every one who dies," says one former hunger striker, "three more will go on hunger strike from October".
Ayla says: "Right now, I am very tired. My legs and back hurt." Her family, she says, is "very emotional, of course. My mother cries, but I am lucky. They stand behind me". She is not afraid of what her protest might bring her.
"I know I will not live to see victory. But there is no other way. They have left us no other way. We must give many, many bodies."
The F-type prisons, introduced in 1996, house political prisoners in single cells holding between one and three people and replace the dormitory-style accommodation that had held up to 60 prisoners.
A broad band of about 11 left-wing groups is involved in the anti-F-types campaign, including the Turkish Communist Party, the Revolutionary Peoples' Liberation Party Front, the Turkish Communist Workers' Party and the Revolutionary Way. Though some have violent affiliates, most are not involved in violence. It also includes regionalists such as the Kurds who want an independent Kurdistan and a number of other groups seeking ethnic and religious rights, such as the Alevis and the Anatolians.
Communism is illegal in Turkey. Members of Communist political organisations are subject to draconian anti-terror legislation.
During the five days I and the Irish photographer, Julien Behal, spent investigating the hunger strikes and the human rights situation in Turkey we were with human-rights activists, lawyers, doctors and the publishers of a left-wing newspaper.
Towards the end of our visit we - along with eight left-wing journalists, human rights workers and our interpreter, Austrian Elisabeth Brunner - found ourselves caught up in an apparent "sweep" on the newspaper premises.
I managed to get a call through to The Irish Times newsdesk on my mobile phone - just before it was confiscated - and alerted them to my situation. The Irish Times made contact with the Department of Foreign Affairs and the Irish embassy in Ankara, and immediate efforts began to secure my release.
In the detention centre, we were separated from the Turkish people and held in a room with white fluorescent lighting and blaring music for about 12 hours. Though two of the detectives were quite polite, offering us tea and outlining our rights to us, at no point did anyone tell us why we were being detained. From the floor above, where the Turkish journalists had been taken, we could hear blaring music, shouting and banging.
At about 3 a.m., after one of the detectives told us "you are of little interest to us", we were taken to a hospital for a check-up before being released at about 3 p.m.
It is expected that a number of the others detained will be charged under the anti-terror legislation, though I have been unable to discover what has happened to them.
People in Turkey may be arrested and held for up to several years without trial, accused of "terrorist" activity, for attending left-wing meetings, selling left-wing papers, taking part in left-wing rallies. There are between 11,000 and 12,000 political prisoners in Turkey. About 8,500 are members of the guerrilla group, the PKK(the Kurdistan Workers' Party) while the remaining 2,500-3,000 are members of other left-wing political groups.
The new F-type cells may sound like more attractive accommodation, but protestors complain that prisoners are not allowed to commune with prisoners from other cells. They eat meals in the cells, exercise separately and do not take part in any communal activity such as workshops or library visits.
Though political activists are willing to go to jail for their beliefs, they see the isolation regime as the government's attempt to break them, once they are imprisoned.
Amnesty International has repeatedly raised concerns about the F-type regime with the Turkish government, saying that "the imprisonment of people in solitary confinement or small group isolation may amount to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment".
For its part, the government argues that the prisons comply with EU and UN minimum standards and that they have been approved in principle by the Council of Europe's Committee for the Prevention of Torture (CPT).
Isolation prisons for political prisoners were first mooted in Turkey in 1991, with the enactment of the anti-terror legislation. As set out in Article 16 of the anti-terror law, conditions in these high-security prisons are regulated so that "there shall be no open visits in these institutions. The relationship of the convicts with one another and their communication are prevented".
Four years after the first 11 F-types were opened, one was made available for inspection, in July last year, to a delegation which included Turkish NGOs: the Human Rights Foundation of Turkey (HRFT), the Human Rights Association (HRA) and the Association of Prisoners' Relatives (TIYAD). In its report, the delegation said the spatial arrangements in the cells amounted to a policy of isolation. Further inspections by the Turkish Medical Association and Bar Associations made similar findings.
However, a report by CPT, also last year, was largely favourable as long as the government introduced "a developed programme of activities \for prisoners outside their living cells/units". The government, however, failed to do this. In an atmosphere of increasing uncertainty, October 20th last year saw 865 prisoners in 18 prisons going on hunger strike. Their nine demands included closure of the F-types, the trial of police and prison guards accused of torture and the annulment of the Special Security Courts for political suspects.
The hunger strike in Turkey differs from that which most Irish people - with memories of the 1981 hunger strikes in the H-Blocks - understand. While all food is refused, the strikers do take sugar and salt solutions, as well as vitamin B1 supplements. The vitamin keeps the brain alert while the solutions prolong life. The Turks' argument is that the body is a more effective weapon while the protest lasts longer. In November, about 40 prisoners escalated their hunger strike into a death fast. The dose of sugar and salt was reduced and vitamin B1 was cut out.
In mid-December, as discussions began between the Ministry for Justice and the prisoners, the Minister for Justice announced that plans for more F-types would be "postponed until a societal consensus is reached".
Five days later, however, discussions were halted. The CPT, which had been involved in the talks to try to bring an end to the hunger strikes, left the country, on December 16th.
Three days later, the now notorious "Return To Life Operation" was launched to "protect the terrorists from their own terrorism". Armed police and prison guards stormed 20 prisons across the country at 4.30 a.m. Their aim: to forcibly transfer about 1,000 prisoners to three half-completed F-types. Thirty-two people were killed during the four-day operation, including two soldiers.
According to HRFT, autopsy reports on some of the female prisoners' bodies which had been carbonised indicate that a chemical substance which "caught fire" had been fired on resisting prisoners. Bullet wounds were also found on the corpses of six prisoners, says HRFT. A clamp-down on the Turkish press meant that the autopsy reports were not published and coverage of the operation in the domestic media was all but non-existent.
In what it describes as a bid to save strikers' lives, the government has been releasing protestors whose health has severely deteriorated, for periods of six months. They are then re-imprisoned. Others, however, argue that the authorities simply do not want these people dying in their prisons. Whatever the reasons, some prisoners have been continuing their fasts outside prison while others, arguing that they should not destroy their bodies outside prison - where there are other "weapons of resistance", such as meetings and publicity campaigns - have accepted hospital treatment.
The long-term damage of the hunger-strikes is, in many cases, irreversible, according to Dr Onder Ozkalipi, a physician at HRFT's centre for the rehabilitation of prisoners and victims of torture.
As well as having treated more than 450 victims of the beatings, torture and the woefully inadequate medical treatment - all widely acknowledged as part of Turkish prison life - he has treated many of those who have applied to the centre after their hunger strike. While severe weight loss may be treated with six to eight weeks of oral feeding, he has seen many cases where hunger strikers suffer eye-paralysis, short-term memory loss, brain damage and problems with balance.
All the families I met who had loved ones on hunger strike were fully behind the protest. One mother, known as Gilimez, lost her 30-year-old daughter, Nergin, in April. Nergin, who was a journalist on a left-wing newspaper, had been imprisoned for "membership of an illegal organisation". She had been to a number of meetings of a left-wing political party and was imprisoned without trial.
It is a practice, according to Ankara human rights lawyer, Filiz Kalayci, which is "happening all the time with political people". The authorities argue that some detainees have to wait longer than might be desirable for trial.
Gilimez holds a framed photograph of Nergin standing, smiling, wearing jeans and a sweater, her beret failing to cover her long, dark curls.
She had to support her daughter, she says.
"As a mother, it has been very hard to lose my daughter. But what could I do against that strength of belief?" Nergin, who had also been injured in the Operation RTL, had been on death fast for 120 days when she was released to a hospital in Istanbul in April. She died three days later.
Another mother, whose son is in jail on the 122nd day of his death fast, did not know he was interested in left-wing ideas until he was arrested walking home from a political meeting last year. "How can our government do this to our children, try to stop them thinking?"
Of course, there is a bigger picture, for both hunger strikers and the Turkish government. This battle of wits is about more than F-type prisons. The hunger strikes and death fasts have become a focus of resistance by those who campaign against a whole range of repressions imposed by a government determined to mute any dissent.
A country in which human-rights abuses are a long-standing issue, Turkey has been anxious to join the European Union since becoming an associate member in 1964. Although its application for full membership has been shelved since 1987, as the EU concentrated on further harmonisation of its then 12 members' policies, it received €177 million in aid from the EU last year.
One of the most anxiously awaited reports in government circles each year is the EU Commission's Regular Report on Turkey's Progress Towards Accession. The 1999 report, in its chapter, Human Rights and the Protection of Minorities, said: "There are serious shortcomings in terms of human rights . . . Torture is not systematic but is still widespread and freedom of expression is regularly restricted by the authorities." The same chapter in last year's report opens bluntly: "The problems identified in last year's regular report in this area remain largely unchanged".
It recounts obstacles put in the way of detainees having access to lawyers, legislation that violates the European Convention of Human Rights as well as widespread reports of torture by the authorities, "most of which concern persons . . . suspected of acts of terrorism or separatism". Under the Turkish anti-terror law, people who attend meetings, rallies, or who write for newspapers organised by any of the proscribed political groups are regarded as having committed "acts of terrorism".
A lack of progress is noted in numerous areas. In the field of social policy, it says: "much remains to be done in areas such as collective redundancies, the protection of employees . . . health and safety of temporary workers, the organisation of working time and the protection of young people at work".
The press is constrained in what it may report on, with almost 2,000 indictments a year returned by the Special Security Tribunal against "seditious" - typically left-wing or regionalist - publications. The situation was exacerbated by the hunger-strikes campaign last December when the Istanbul Special Security Court issued a ruling in response to a request from the Prosecutions Office.
This led to a ban on "the printed and audio-visual media in connection with the death fast and F-type prisons which give room for propaganda of illegal terror organisations that incite the people to hatred, enmity and commit crimes".
Then there is the US factor. Iraq's invasion of Kuwait in 1990 underlined Turkey's strategic importance to NATO when the government closed, at great cost to the country, a vital pipeline used by Iraq to ship oil out through Turkish territory. The government also provided air-landing facilities to the US at the Incirlik and Diyarbakir air bases. Given the economy's increasing dependence on the IMF and its strategic importance to NATO, the government is obviously anxious to keep the US on side.
The government, say political analysts, faces an enormous dilemma, however. In its public statements, its centrist government describes itself as anxious to comply with the EU's criteria for membership. It argues, however, that political stability is paramount and that among the voices of dissent are terrorist organisations which have assassinated more than 300 people in the past 20 years.
Western commentators have said Turkey is at a political crossroads - with its century-long commitment to the West facing its gravest challenge since the time of the founder of the modern state, the pro-Western Mustafa Kemel Ataturk. There is no question that Turkish politics is changing direction. The question is: what direction will it take?
While public opinion is largely ignorant of the situation, there is growing respect for the hunger strikers in the communities where they live. The hunger strikers I met outlined their determination to end the F-type prisons and many said the government was determined to impose the F-types to "break our spirit".
In another of the "death houses" I met Sabri Diri, aged about 30, on the sixth day of his death fast.
"I was working for a newspaper in Izmir, the Democrat, and I could see how the government was oppressing people," he said. "I have never been a prisoner, but I wanted to resist the government. What is going on in the prisons is going on outside too. There is isolation in prison, but there is isolation outside to. The government wants to isolate people from sharing their humanity. I am part of this because I want to be human.
"We will not accept not living like humans."
A protest in solidarity with the Turkish hunger strikers takes place in Parnell Square, Dublin, at 2.30 p.m. today