In Forensic Fantasies: Doctors, Documents, and the Limits of Truth in Turkey, Başak Can provides us with a rich ethnography of medical documentation of torture in Turkey. From the notorious 1980 military coup to brutal (and ongoing) repression of anticolonial struggles of Kurdish people, and radical Marxist movements to the recent Gezi Park protests, state torture in the hands of the army and police against dissidents in prisons, streets, and police stations in Turkey has been an endemic problem. Taking the reader across sites such as police stations, forensic medicine clinics, human rights organizations, and streets, Forensic Fantasies analyzes the evolving role of doctors in responding to human rights violations through state violence. At its core, the book argues that although forensic doctors remain invested in “forensic fantasies”—an almost obsessive faith in the power of documents to secure justice against torture—they simultaneously recast political subjects from protesting bodies into medicalized bodies in need of compassion.
One strong example that conveys the book’s key arguments is a simple but notorious stamp that reads “There is no sign of battery and violence” (p. 109). No longer in use today, this stamp was part and parcel of forensic medical work in emergency wards and forensic medicine clinics where the police took prisoners for medical examination to prove that they had not tortured the latter. This stamp shortened for the police the uneasy moments of waiting in clinics where their authority would be challenged by medicine and helped them avoid accusations of torture against detainees. The entire book can be read as an imagined, protracted commotion between doctors and the police, in which the former attempt to wrest the stamp from the hands of the police. As doctors’ detective-like work in uncovering the tortured body’s knowledge improves, the stamp’s single referent (no battery, no violence) proliferates into countless and contested documents about the causes of marks on the bodies of detainees. As Can eloquently demonstrates, the more evidence doctors generate about police violence, the more torture becomes sophisticated and difficult to detect: When police tied the death of a prisoner to a fall from a building, doctors developed techniques to demonstrate the marks of electroshock on the body of the same victim; when police attributed an inmate’s death to hunger strikes, doctors showed that the death occurred due to a torture technique called Palestinian hanging; when police delayed the detention period to allow the body to erase the marks of torture, doctors used bone scintigraphy to detect the marks of violence beyond human tissue; and when police moved torture to the streets, doctors utilized infrared thermal cameras to prove beatings even after the bodily bruises disappeared.
Technique by technique, document after document, case after case, as doctors play on in this long game of verifying how the body speaks against state violence, they have gained greater moral legitimacy and power in the eyes of the state, political organizations, and human rights activists. In other words, forensic fantasies enlisted histories and audiences ranging from bureaucratic institutions to revolutionaries and human rights defenders. The efforts of doctors in Turkey even culminated in global standards of medical documentation of torture under the Istanbul Protocol, a set of guidelines endorsed by the United Nations.
The book’s first chapter focuses on the period of the post–1980 coup milieu, with special attention to how the restructuring of the Council of Forensic Medicine as the ultimate authority in torture cases consolidated a regime of denial attached to state violence. This chapter illustrates that the issue in medical documentation of state violence is not primarily about doctors’ intentions regarding justice, but in the less visible work of scientific assumptions, standards, and procedures in certification. Here, Can explores a forensic curriculum that teaches its students to master certain ways of seeing wounds, the systematic and institutional production of ambiguity, and an attachment to facts devoid of an account of the larger situational factors that inform the causes of wounds they engage with.
Chapter 2 begins with the story of Baki Erdoğan, one of the first cases in which alternative visions of forensic medicine entered court. Accused of being a radical left-wing organization member, Erdoğan was arrested and tortured by the police in 1993. The police claimed Erdoğan died because of a ten-day hunger strike he started to protest police brutality. However, forensic doctors were able to show that he was actually killed by a certain torture technique called Palestinian hanging, and this report later resulted in a court decision ruling that Erdoğan died under torture. Expanding on the exploration of Erdogan’s case and other torture cases, this chapter shows how doctors formed alternative networks to undermine the regime of denial founded after the 1980 military coup.
Chapter 3 shows that reproducing forensic proximities between doctors, state institutions, and political prisoners requires immense labor on the part of doctors, who must keep forensic fantasies alive through daily practices, participation in professional debates, and meetings within medical organizations. Such forms of labor and attachments to forensic facts, Can illustrates, are far from being uniform. Although doctors who are closer to human rights activists place the utmost importance on documents, others take a more indifferent approach to their effects or see documentation as a bureaucratic burden alongside their already strained clinics, which are flooded with a high volume of patients. Yet others collaborate closely with the police, conducting medical examinations through haphazard and collective interviews with detainees confined to police vehicles transporting them to clinics.
Chapter 4 shifts attention from forensic engagements with injuries due to torture to the conditions of prisoners with chronic illnesses. One of them is Wernicke-Korsakoff syndrome (WKS), an irreversible form of brain damage that impacted hundreds of prisoners protesting high-security prisons through hunger strikes in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Although many prisoners were released based on forensic reports that noted the irreversibility and care-dependency of WKS, later reports issued by the same forensic agency overturned those decisions, claiming, without any evidence, that WKS was reversible. This chapter demonstrates that WKS and later struggles around prisoners with chronic illnesses forged new intimacies with the state, political activists, and bureaucratic institutions. The diagnoses, as Can strikingly illustrates, became political slogans and were written on banners carried through Istanbul’s most popular streets.
Chapter 5 brings together many audiences of forensic fantasies in the context of the Gezi Park protests in 2013, when millions of citizens took to the streets to oppose the urban policies and neoliberal authoritarianism of Tayyip Erdoğan’s government. During Gezi, doctors in groups began to treat victims of police violence in makeshift infirmaries and collected evidence of police violence on bodies. When doctors joined millions on the streets to protest, in post-Gezi court trials initiated by the state against them, they justified their participation in terms of medical and ethical principles. This chapter questions the limits of documentation when it abandons the clinics and the authority it derives from the force of law. The book concludes with reflections on the politics of human rights and medical documentation of violence in an age defined by security regimes whose interests lie more in public spectacles of violence than in its concealment.
Rich in its empirical examples and deep in its theoretical innovations, this book will be of interest to scholars of medical anthropology, legal anthropology, science and technology studies, and particularly studies exploring the place of medical humanitarianism in the age of illiberalism. That said, I found myself looking for more detailed narratives in the book from the perspectives of political activists about how forensic imaginations transformed their political positions. A future direction expanding on this research also may be court ethnographies exploring how forensic documents work as part of the collection of documents used in terror and torture trials.
