14 of the 22 Months in Prison Were Spent in a Single-Person Room
Fact
The period in question is this: on 30 January 2018 an operation was carried out against the Furkan Foundation, Alparslan Kuytul was arrested on 8 February 2018 and released on 5 December 2019. The account below comes from the interview he gave five days after his release, on 10 December 2019.
The detention lasted 22 months. In his own words, when the ten-day period of police custody is also counted, 14 months of that time were spent alone in a three-person room.
The solitude was not a choice. He applied repeatedly for someone to be placed with him, and even wrote to the Ministry. The answer he received from the prison administration was a single sentence: "There is such an instruction from the Ministry regarding you."
At the end of the tenth month, Furkan Foundation Chairman Ali Alagöz was placed in the same room. When Alagöz was released in September 2019, Kuytul was left alone again and remained so until the day of his release.
He himself says how he reads this arrangement:
"In a way, they put me in isolation in order to inflict psychological torture."
What came afterwards, however, he does not tell in the language of complaint: "I had difficulty in the first two or three months, but God accustomed me to isolation, to solitude."
There are two more items on the same period: the three points he himself lists as the reason for his arrest, and the measure of injustice he repeated in his interviews after his release.
Which case, which dates?
Everything on this page belongs to a single period: the Furkan Foundation operation of 30 January 2018, the arrest of 8 February 2018 and the release of 5 December 2019. The source of the account is the interview dated 10 December 2019 given after the release, together with the forum programme held on 13 December 2019.
"Alone in a three-person room"
The detail that shows what isolation meant is the size of the room. Kuytul was held not in a single-person cell but in a three-person room — yet for months he was the only one in that room. When the ten-day period of police custody is also counted, 14 months of the 22-month detention passed this way.
So the solitude was not a necessity arising from lack of space or from the crowding of the prison. There was room; no one was placed there.
The requests and the answer given
Kuytul did not accept this situation in silence. He applied repeatedly to the prison administration for someone to be placed with him, and when he got no result he wrote to the Ministry. The administration's answer also showed where the decision had been taken:
"There is such an instruction from the Ministry regarding you."
This answer says that the isolation was not a routine security measure taken at the level of the prison, but rested on an instruction specific to the person.
The roommate who came after ten months
At the end of the tenth month, Furkan Foundation Chairman Ali Alagöz was placed in the same room. This interval did not last long: when Alagöz was released in September 2019, Kuytul was left alone again and remained so until 5 December 2019.
The total of 14 months comes from this as well: about ten months at the beginning, about four months at the end.
How he tells it is information too
Kuytul describes this arrangement not as an accident but as a method: "In a way, they put me in isolation in order to inflict psychological torture."
Even so, the tone of the account is not one of complaint. In the same interview he speaks of the hardship and of getting used to it with the same plainness: "I had difficulty in the first two or three months, but God accustomed me to isolation, to solitude."
In the same interview he also speaks of the part the struggle outside played in his release, and there he draws attention to a single measure: "A struggle like this without throwing a stone at the police — I do not know of one in the history of Turkey, in the history of the republic." In his own words, the reason for this is the lessons taught for years — "you will seek your right, but you will seek it by legitimate means, you will not cause harm".
What this page says and what it does not say
What is conveyed here is not a court ruling or the finding of a third party; it is Kuytul's own account of the conditions of his detention. The dates and the names were written out plainly so that the reader can follow them.
The page deals only with the 2018–2019 detention. There is today a separate and ongoing judicial process; no information on this page relates to that process.