In October 1980, Salih Sezgin was an illiterate seventeen-year-old when he was incarcerated in Diyarbakir prison, Turkey’s most notoriously brutal penitentiary. The military high command had just staged a coup dissolving the government. Many Turks welcomed the army’s intervention due the rising tide of political violence (committed by leftists & rightists) and economic instability that had been plaguing the country for almost a decade.

Two police officers had been found murdered in Diyarbakir; Sezgin was rounded up as part of a crackdown on leftists and Kurdish activists. On scant evidence he was convicted of one of the murders and sentenced to death. (Later, through the intervention of E.U. politicians, his sentence was commuted to twenty years.)

Upon arriving at the prison, Sezgin was asked by the guards “do you want a room with television and shower or a regular room?” He didn’t fall for the ruse, but many of his fellow convicts did. A shower meant a hole in the cell’s ceiling that allowed circulating sewage from the toilets above to constantly pour into the room. To amuse themselves, guards would sometimes order the prisoners to roll around in the shit; if there wasn’t enough excrement on them, they were told to roll around some more. Prisoners would willingly smear more shit on one another to avoid a beating. Evidently, this was the “television” part, albeit for the benefit of guards.

Sezgin introduced himself to me in late October, during one of his rare strolls outside the newspaper office in Istanbul where he now works. I was sitting with his publisher at a sidewalk tea shop. This was in the week following the PKK ambush which killed 12 Turkish soldiers on October 21. Due to the fervour on the streets and the recent spate of violence against Kurdish politicians, journalists, merchants and civilians, he hadn’t been home in five days. He preferred to sleep in the relative security of the office. From his window on the fourth floor it was easier to see who was coming and going.

At the time of his arrest, Sezgin was a Marxist, which was then common among Kurdish activists. In prison he sustained regular beatings, psychological torture and the prospect of being hung. He witnessed many of his friends die from hangings, hunger strikes, suicides, or fatal injuries due to torture. One day he was ordered to clean an area of the prison where guards had stashed a friend’s dead body in the garbage for him to find. But he said he never broke. “The sense of belonging to your people gave me an aim that I wanted to live. In prison they forced us to march to Turkish songs, put pictures of Atatürk in our cells—they try to make you a Turk. But you remain a Kurd. If anything that makes you stronger.”

In prison he taught himself how to read and write. He began work on Hanging Nights, a memoir of his prison life.

Sezgin was released in 1999, thirty-seven-years old. When he had arrived at Diyarbakir prison it was surrounded by open fields; now it was enclosed by a suburb of apartment blocks that had swelled with Kurdish migrants, refugees of the war between the PKK and the Turkish army. And times had changed dramatically. The Cold War was long gone. Now everything was “globalization.”

“At the time we went to jail we were socialists, Marxists. And so when the Soviet Union fell we were sad, because it was something we were fighting for. But it took time to realize that this was better—for everything to be open, for there to be no borders. It should make it easier to talk about everything. The communist countries put severe pressure on their people. Within such a society it would have been no better for the Kurds.”

While the Turkish mainstream is ambivalent about the changes it must make to join the European Union, and increasingly unhappy with its strategic alliance with the U.S. and NATO, the Kurds I spoke with enthusiastically embraced what they call “globalism.” For them it meant the ability to communicate with and receive support from the large Kurdish diaspora in Europe, to envisage a day when freedom of mobility and more permeable borders will make it easier to connect with relatives in northern Iraq, Syria or Iran, it invited the scrutiny of the European Union into human rights abuses, and support for their rights as a minority. In 1999, a former Prime Minister of Turkey, Mesut Yilmaz, conceded that “Turkey’s road to the European Union goes through Diyarbakir.”

When Hanging Nights was published it turned Sezgin into something of a cause célèbre. He was interviewed by Turkish media and featured as the subject of a French documentary. He gets mail every day from current inmates. But in the hysteria that prevailed on the streets in October, Sezgin worried that things were moving backward for the Kurds. During a visit to his newspaper’s offices, I was told that one of his colleagues had been sentenced that day to a year in prison for an article he wrote about Abdullah Öcalan, the imprisoned founder of the PKK. While the young colleague was somewhat relaxed about the prospect of jail, and even joked about it, Sezgin was not so sanguine. “I don’t wish anyone to go through what I did. I don’t want to see Jalal go to prison. Anyone who is sentenced, I tell them to leave the country.”