Riad al-Turk

Riad al - Turk (Arabic رياض الترك Riyad at- Turk, born 1930 in Homs, Syria State, Syrian Republic) is a Syrian opposition leader and democracy activist, who is also called " Wise man of the Syrian opposition." He was a political prisoner for over 20 years. From its creation in 1973 until 2005 he was also Secretary General of the Syrian Democratic People's Party.

Life

Turk joined as a student of the Syrian Communist Party. In 1952 he was imprisoned for the first time, after he finished the school of jurisprudence and the military government Adib Chichaklis criticized; He was detained for five months without being charged in court and tortured there. He then wrote articles for the newspaper al- Nour Party and became the leading ideologues of the party. In 1958 he was again imprisoned under Nasser, as he rejected the union of Syria and Egypt into the United Arab Republic - even here he was tortured without trial.

Turk led the faction of the Communist Party, which demanded a more positive view of Arab nationalism, in contrast to the Secretary-General Khalid Bakdasch. After Bakdasch decided in 1972 to join the party in the ruling National Progressive Front, Turk to split off together with the Politburo of the Party and founded in 1973 the Syrian Communist Party Politburo. Georges Sabra also joined Turk.

Turk was arrested again on October 28, 1980 as a dissident and had under difficult conditions for almost 18 years in prison stay. He spent most of his time in solitary confinement and suffered regular torture. For the first thirteen years of prison time he was with the communication, or informing his family and friends prohibited, what was true of his two young daughters. The single cell, which was barely larger than his body, he was only allowed to leave three times a day, to use a shared toilet. His only employment in the period was collecting cereal grains, which he found in the soup which he was only in the evening in order to draw painting in his cell. Turk increasingly suffered from diseases such as diabetes whose treatment was refused. On 30 May 1998 he was released.

As in June 2000, Syrian President Hafez Assad died and his son Bashar succeeded him, an outbreak of political debate and the democratic change that came was called Damascus Spring and in the Riad al - Turk took a leading role. His statement on al -Jazeera in August 2001 that " the dictator died ," in turn sparked new repression by the government, and Turk looked on 1 September 2001 again in court. His indictment before the State Security Court was seen as unfair trial. In June 2002, he was convicted of the alleged ` attempt to change the constitution by illegal means ` to three years in prison - on his poor health no consideration was taken.

Riad al - Turk in 2005 came as a prominent figure in the Damascus Declaration, a pro-democracy Syrian alliance organizations.