If you ever talk with someone who volunteers at a Turkish dog shelter, you might think you are listening to a crime-fighting maverick rather than an animal activist.
Animal shelters in Turkey are some of the shadiest places under state control, according to accounts from various civil society organizations and shelter volunteers. Turkey’s Animal Protection Law No. 5199 calls for a spay/neuter and return policy scientifically proven to be successful, but municipalities do not abide by the law. Hundreds of dogs abandoned by shelters in İstanbul’s forests and countless pictures and hours of video footage have proven this, but the authorities remain blind to the violations.
Civil society groups have increasingly been voicing their suspicions that corruption in shelters is the main cause for the reluctance of municipalities to control the population of stray animals on İstanbul’s streets, given the large amounts of funding they receive. Most municipalities base shelter funding on the number of dogs neutered. Killing dogs once they have been neutered instead of returning them to their streets where they will keep away other dogs means more dogs, which in turn means more operations and more funding coming in over the long run. This is hard to confirm or disprove, but that is because of the unwillingness of municipalities to discuss their budgets for controlling strays.
Only one -- Küçükçekmece -- out of seven municipalities Sunday’s Zaman phoned for information about their budgets bothered to even respond. Küçükçekmece, a rare Turkish municipality where there have been no complaints of any foul play for a long time, allocated TL 400,000 for spaying operations in 2011. The Ministry of Environment responded to our questions, but most of their answers did not match the questions, and some were also misleading. In response to a question as to whether they had ever received any complaints about breeding activities being conducted by a subcontracting company in a shelter, or more correctly, a Rehabilitation Center (RC), they said “no,” even though animal rights group The Animal Rights Federation (HAYTAP) provided official documents showing that in 2009 the ministry actually sent inspectors to look into allegations of breeding in the RC of the Avcılar Municipality, which refused to answer any questions asked by Sunday’s Zaman.
Erhun Bolat, a spokesperson for HAYTAP, says his organization frequently runs into an iron wall of secrecy in municipalities. “Lack of transparency in municipalities remains a huge problem. There are huge amounts involved in providing [neutering]. We have been able to increase the sensitivity of the average man toward animal suffering in recent years through public campaigns, but we have failed to soften the hearts of state officials.”
Bolat says most Turkish municipalities treat working for animal rights as a sign of insanity or a crime. “That’s how the system has been established in Turkey. Nobody knows who they are voting for [in local elections]. Once they are elected, you can’t even knock on their door if you are not after big-dollar deals.”
“Municipalities need to learn to work with civil society groups and be open to inspections. Democratization can only take root when civil society organizations organize against the state and keep it in check. But the elected in our country never want to be inspected.”
Animals behind closed doors
Serious allegations of corruption are frequently raised about almost all RCs. A volunteer who asked to remain unnamed says she caught the vet at her RC selling drugs purchased for shelter dogs out of the RC’s clinic. Many other such reports have been relayed to Sunday’s Zaman, but volunteers are often afraid to talk. It is common for municipalities to simply not allow volunteers into the RC, another sign of their fear of citizen participation in local government.
Esra Y., a former volunteer of the Hasdal RC, which belongs to the İstanbul Metropolitan Municipality, is now not allowed into the shelter after pictures exposing large scale animal abuse in Hasdal were published last year. “I am still doing my best, doing whatever I can from outside. I can’t enter the shelter, but I still pay for the treatment of animals and help with finding them homes.”
Volunteers don’t want to speak to the press, as they are terrified that they might be denied access, although the right of citizens to participate in local governments is guaranteed by the Constitution, Turkish municipal law and international agreements. Some volunteers have also claimed that their families have been threatened with violence if they continue to visit the RC.
Emel Var, an animal activist and a regular volunteer, says: “The Avcılar Municipality, which has two vets, has only spayed or neutered 200 animals, according to Avcılar municipal authorities. The animal population in the area is growing, but the municipality says it doesn’t have a big enough budget.” At least they gave her a response.
Var says she has been unable to get through to the authorities, although she sensed many strange goings-on at the RC. “When the volunteers wanted to donate medicine, they would be told that there was enough medicine. But in most cases, whenever we ask why a dog died, they say they didn’t have enough meds. The situation is so bad they don’t let volunteers in anymore. An average stray animal will die within two weeks in that shelter. … They don’t feed the animals at all on the weekends,” she claimed, echoing volunteers at most other shelters.
She says the RC has continued working with the same subcontractor, saying she only knew their name (Baysan Medical and Cleaning Services). “The price and terms of the contract and the payments made are kept like state secrets. All we know is that this company has been getting the job for the past eight years without its ever having been opened to other bids. Officials say they are very pleased with their services,” Var said.
“There is an immense shroud of mystery around budgets in every municipality. But we know from past experiences that most of the money allocated for the animals is used elsewhere. Whenever you ask, they give you a general answer saying something like ‘our work in this area is in compliance with the law.’ These general and ambiguous explanations also violate citizens’ right to information,” Var said.
“I have seen many an ear-tagged dog have puppies in the shelter,” Var said, repeating a very common complaint from shelter volunteers all across the country. The ear-tag should mean that a dog has been spayed or neutered and vaccinated. In other words, the money for the surgery has been paid, but the surgery never took place.
Nothing works
Activists are disgruntled. Esra Y. says, “Exposing them [the municipalities] doesn’t work, filing complaints doesn’t work, nothing works.” She noted that although after last year’s animal scandal, the Hasdal RC changed personnel, their former employees were given new positions at the Cebeci RC. None of those responsible for causing the deaths of hundreds of dogs were punished.
She says that municipalities are highly distrustful of ordinary citizens helping out. “At least that was the case when I was in Hasdal. For them, dogs are not living beings. They are a business. Municipalities are required to hire ex-cons, and all these ex-cons are assigned to RCs. Any staff member exiled from elsewhere in the municipal government is also sent to the shelter. You do your best as a volunteer, and that person who was forced to work in an RC as a punishment only sees you as a group of crazy women. We are worlds apart.”
A majority of Turkey’s shelters, with the noble exception of Küçükçekmece’s, and perhaps some others, don’t keep track of the locations from which they pick up dogs. “I haven’t seen any shelter that does it. They throw them into the forests of Silivri, Çatalca and Boluca. We have found so many dogs dead on the highway, still with fresh surgery wounds,” Esra Y. says. Actually, a drive around İstanbul forests is sufficient to see her point.
HAYTAP’s Bolat said: “Most RCs don’t let anyone in, and avoid working with volunteers to capture dogs for neutering. This means that their efforts are all in vain, and they are only trying to appear as if they are doing their job.” He says that unless municipalities cooperate with civil society, they will not succeed in controlling Turkey’s stray animal population. “A society that doesn’t allow its animals to live in peace will never be able to find peace itself. History has proven this time and again.”
14 August 2011
Todays Zaman
http://www.todayszaman.com/news-253658-lack-of-democracy-transparency-are-animals-enemies-activists-say.html
