The Hunger Warriors

The window in Fatma Sener's bedroom gives on to a panorama of tumbling hills dotted with houses and mosques and, perhaps a mile below, a narrow stretch of the Bosporus. Until a few months ago, Fatma would stand by the window or sit in the yard outside to watch the constant stream of ships -- tankers, freighters, luxury boats -- pass along the straits.

''I've always loved the sea,'' she says, lying in her bed. ''And the view from here reminds me of my home.'' She smiles. ''And it reminds me of swimming. I used to be a very good swimmer.''

At 22, Fatma is an extraordinarily beautiful woman, with an infectious smile and penetrating brown eyes. More than her beauty, though, there is something in her manner -- serene, ethereal -- that is profoundly arresting. As silly as it sounds, my first thought upon meeting her was that she had the aura of an angel; in the days since, I have discovered that this is precisely the word in Turkish that many others use to describe her as well.

What makes this unsettling, even grotesque, is that Fatma has come to this nondescript house in the Kucuk Armutlu neighborhood of northern Istanbul to kill herself. For the past 250 days, she has existed on a diet of water, tea, salt and sugar. Now, with her weight hovering around 70 pounds, she can no longer walk and can sit up only with assistance, and if she wants to gaze out at the Bosporus, aides must carry her bed out to the yard and prop her up with pillows. Fatma exists at the very precipice of death, and she knows it. On certain days, she can even discuss the end, how it might happen, with a trace of humor.

In a matching single bed a few feet away lies another starving young woman, 28-year-old Yildiz Gemicioglu. Far more than Fatma's, Yildiz's body bears the external signs of advanced malnutrition: her cheeks are blotched with acne-like sores, her slightest gestures are jerky and exaggerated from muscular atrophy and when she smiles it seems to pain her. In other bedrooms of the house are two more hunger strikers. One, a 44-year-old man named Osman Osmanagaoglu, appears the most frail. After 275 days without food, his face is so sunken that it has already taken on the look of a death mask, and he suffers memory lapses that sometimes leave him struggling to recall where he was born or the name of his father. Just down the street are three more ''houses of resistance,'' in which 16 more men and women slowly waste away.

Although virtually unnoticed by the outside world, since last autumn Turkey has been the site of the longest -- and now the deadliest -- hunger strike against a government in modern history. At the time of my first visit to the houses of resistance in Kucuk Armutlu in mid-July, the 29th striker had just perished, and the deaths of at least eight more -- including Fatma, Yildiz and Osman -- were imminent.

But even these numbers don't prepare you for the deluge to come. Most of the dead thus far have been from the first wave, those who began their strike last autumn, and very few strikers from that wave are still alive. But four new teams, comprising some 180 more strikers, have joined the fast since then, which means the dying might continue into next summer or beyond, and the final toll could reach the hundreds.

A hunger strike might seem to be an act of ultimate desperation, a weapon of last resort for the powerless, but the reality is a bit more complex. Politically motivated hunger strikes tend to occur in a very specific kind of society and at a very specific time: namely, in places with a long history of official repression, but where that repression has gradually begun to loosen. If it is the institutionalized nature of abuse that fuels the strikers to such extreme action, it is the cracks of liberalization that lead them to believe that such a course might shame the government into change -- and often they are right. Mahatma Gandhi's hunger strikes against British rule in India helped turn British public opinion and hastened Indian independence. Even the 1980-81 hunger strike by the Irish Republican Army -- abandoned after 10 men died -- could be considered a partial success in that it strengthened a perception of the Thatcher government as callous and swelled I.R.A. recruitment. What is remarkable about the Turkish hunger strike, by contrast, is both the apparent smallness of the issue that sparked it and that it continues despite all evidence that it is and will remain a failure.

While the Armutlu strikers have a number of grievances against the Turkish government, their core demand is for the abandonment of a new generation of modern prisons in which inmates are housed in one- or three-man cells and a return to the dormitory-style prisons of the past. It is for this that by mid-July, 29 people, most current or former inmates serving time for political offenses, had died.

For its part, the Turkish government depicts the strikers, most of whom belong to an outlawed Communist group, as members of the ''lunatic left'' -- either ''terrorists'' bent on undermining the state or, at best, impressionable and misguided youths brainwashed into throwing their lives away in a kind of slow-motion Jonestown. So far, it would seem that the Turkish public has largely accepted the government's view, or is simply indifferent, but this has done nothing to dampen the strikers' ardor.

''This is a death fast,'' explains Resit Sari, 44, a member of the second wave. ''We stay on until we die, and when we do, another group will take our place, and another one after that. It goes on until the government agrees to our demands or all of us are dead.'' To underscore that determination, Resit offers a chilling statistic; according to him, not a single striker has voluntarily quit the death fast since it began.

In the three months since I first met the hunger strikers in Armutlu, I have found myself pondering a somewhat macabre set of questions. What makes people willing to die for a cause? How do they sustain their zeal when death is not going to be quick, but rather requires intensive planning, weeks and months of waiting as the awful day nears? Not least, how does such a group of prospective martyrs maintain its esprit de mort when it is constantly exposed to the temptations of the outside, ''living'' world? These questions took on even greater resonance after the terror attacks of Sept. 11.

Obviously, it is an imperfect comparison. The Sept. 11 attackers saw themselves as martyrs in the vanguard of a religious jihad, while the strikers in Turkey view their actions in purely political terms, a furtherance of the ''cause.'' And, of course, those in Armutlu have chosen a path that harms no one but themselves.

But today, nearly six weeks after the Sept. 11 attacks, the world is still grappling with a riddle at its heart: what led 19 men -- most of them middle class and college educated, few with any direct personal grievance against the United States -- to perpetrate such an atrocity? In Turkey, I was baffled by a similar riddle in regard to Fatma Sener. She was one of the few in Armutlu who had not spent time in prison. She had no personal narrative of suffering or injustice at the hands of the state and had, in fact, enjoyed a life of relative privilege. What had brought her to that dingy little room to die?

Then I talk with Fatma, she has a tendency to slide herself across her bed to get closer to my chair, to gaze unblinkingly up into my face. It takes me a while to realize that this is not boldness or flirtatiousness on her part but rather a symptom of her failing health. She moves closer because her hearing has grown weak. She stares into visitors' faces because she has difficulty focusing.

''I used to read a lot, but I had to stop, because it hurt my eyes,'' she tells me. ''Now I can only read newspaper headlines, the biggest ones.''

Instead of reading, Fatma spends her days chatting with her roommate, Yildiz, or talking with friends on her cellphone or, increasingly, drifting off into long naps. At this advanced stage of starvation, both nausea and pain are almost constant, but when I ask Fatma if she has ever considered quitting, she gives me a quizzical, amused look.

''It must have crossed your mind,'' I persist. ''When the pain has been especially bad, when a friend has died.''

Fatma gives a slight shake of her head. ''Never. We have to continue on until victory -- and victory is coming.'' She smiles again. ''Maybe not in time for me, but for the next ones, I'm sure. To change the state and how it mistreats the people, we cannot stop now.''

While the government of Turkey has always been a curious hybrid -- a secular, parliamentary democracy in uneasy partnership with an enormously powerful military -- that balance was changed forever in the summer of 1980 when, amid economic turmoil and increasingly violent battles between left and right, the military overthrew the civilian government in a bloodless coup. As well as muzzling the press and temporarily banning all political parties, the military set about arresting anyone it deemed a threat -- some 200,000 people. Most pernicious was what came later; before returning Turkey to civilian rule in 1983, the generals rewrote the constitution to give the military and security forces sweeping new powers to maintain national unity and to make themselves the hidden force behind any elected head of state.

''Since 1980, there are two ways to look at the state,'' explains one prominent Turkish politician, who spoke on condition of anonymity. ''Either it is the world's most imperfect democracy or its most ingenious dictatorship. You have all the language and institutions of democracy while at the same time a vast array of security laws which can be used to crush dissent. Is this dictatorship?'' he asks rhetorically. ''No, because it is all done in the name of preserving democracy.''

And in the name of preserving democracy, some vicious things have been done. With the vast powers granted to the security forces by the revised constitution -- and by the even more draconian 1991 Anti-Terror Law -- they are able to ban most any independent political activity and to arrest those who would defy them. In several particularly notorious cases, children as young as 13 were arrested for participating in illegal demonstrations or writing ''anti-Turkish'' graffiti on a wall. In waging war against the guerrillas of the Kurdistan Workers Party (P.K.K.) in the mid-1990's, the military pursued a ''strategic hamlet'' strategy -- burning down villages and slaughtering livestock that might sustain the guerrillas -- that left as many as one million Kurds internally displaced and destitute. And then there is the torture; Turkey's Human Rights Association estimates that between 1980 and 1995, the era of the worst abuses, one million Turkish citizens were tortured while in police or army custody.

In the late 1990's, however, with the cold war over and the P.K.K. essentially crushed, the iron hand began to ease. One factor was Turkey's increasing eagerness to become a full member of the European Union (it achieved ''candidate'' status in 1999); the E.U. made it clear that would never happen if the government didn't start cleaning up some of its human rights problems.

What has evolved is, if not yet a full-bore democracy, at least a kind of police-state lite. Today, Turkish politicians who threaten the status quo are more likely to be barred from the public arena for a period of years than imprisoned; newspapers are not officially shut down but ordered to ''suspend operations'' for a month or two; dissidents brought up on lesser violations of the Anti-Terror Law tend to be given suspended sentences, with their punishment deferred as long as they don't offend again. (Still, of the estimated 6,000 inmates held under the Anti-Terror Law, fewer than 10 percent have been convicted of a violent offense, and more than half have yet to be convicted of anything at all.) During my stay, the gentler face of authoritarianism was perhaps most evident during the funeral for Sevgi Erdogan, the 29th hunger striker to die. Although security forces made no attempt to interfere with the slogan-chanting procession of 300 mourners -- unthinkable a few years ago -- that show of tolerance was undercut by the presence of some 800 police officers decked out in full riot gear and backed by armored personnel carriers.

It was in 1997, at the dawn of this somewhat less repressive period, that Fatma Sener first moved to Istanbul. For an 18-year-old high-school graduate from a tiny village on the Sea of Marmara, and from a family that had never been politically active, it was a transformative journey; quite quickly, Fatma became involved in human rights issues and left-wing politics.

''Of course, I had heard in school about some of the things happening in Turkey,'' she says, ''but I came from a middle-class family -- not poor -- and it was really when I came to Istanbul that I saw directly how people suffered. Some of my new friends were from the Kurdish areas, and they had been forced from their homes, had seen their families murdered by the army. Others had been arrested and tortured and thrown into prison for no reason at all. Seeing all that changed me.''

What also changed her was witnessing the strong-arm tactics of the security forces firsthand. In 1997, even peaceful human rights demonstrations in Istanbul were routinely broken up by baton-wielding policemen. Increasingly embittered, Fatma began veering toward the more radical of the leftist groups, eventually joining the remnants of the Revolutionary People's Liberation Party/Front, or D.H.K.P./C.

A Marxist-Leninist group that originally advocated armed struggle, the D.H.K.P./C. carried out a string of attacks on the security forces in the early 1990's and was virtually obliterated in response; by 1997, most of its members were either dead or in prison, its leaders reduced to exhorting its few remaining activists from exile in Belgium. In Istanbul, Fatma went to work for its underground newspaper, Revolutionary Youth.

The fact that the D.H.K.P./C. still existed at all in the late 1990's was due in no small part to the actions of the government seeking to destroy it. Since the 1980 coup, tens of thousands of Turks had served time in prison without trial, simply on the suspicion of membership in an illegal political organization. Given the traditional design and management of a Turkish prison -- dormitory-style cellblocks each holding between 50 and 100 inmates into which guards rarely ventured -- it didn't take long for the bona fide radicals among the detainees to transform the cellblocks into recruitment and indoctrination centers. Thus did the state manage to provide its enemies with a never-ending supply of fresh cadres.

In the mid-1990's, the government sought to rectify this situation. It announced the phasing out of the dormitory-style cellblocks in favor of the small-cell prisons that were the norm throughout Western Europe. Though the government portrayed this as ''prison reform,'' political detainees pointed to a little-known provision of the Anti-Terror Law: ''The sentences of those convicted under the provisions of this law will be served in special penal institutions built on a system of cells constructed for one or three people. . . . Convicted prisoners will not be permitted contact or communications with other convicted prisoners.'' And just how do you prevent contact between inmates? The only sure way is to keep them secluded, permanently locked down in their cells. ''What the inmates feared,'' says Onder Ozkalipci, a forensic doctor with the Human Rights Foundation of Turkey, ''was that the state was going to throw them in these small cells and never let them out. And this wasn't paranoia on their part.''

In 1996, as construction of the first of the new small-cell prisons was nearing completion, political detainees initiated a hunger strike in protest. There had been hunger strikes in Turkish prisons in the past, but this one proved especially deadly, with 12 inmates dying before the government finally shelved the plan. At the same time, however, it quietly continued work on a new, even more restrictive generation of prisons: the innocuously named F-type.

When the first F-type was unveiled in the summer of 2000, outside monitors were aghast. The individual cells were pleasant enough; each three-man unit had a kitchen and a small enclosed patio. But the prison was clearly designed to keep the inmates in isolation if the authorities desired -- and both the Anti-Terror Law and recent history suggested that this was exactly what they desired. (In 1998, the government opened the Kartal Special Type Prison for political detainees in Istanbul, and inmates coming out of there reported being kept incommunicado for months at a time.)

After touring the F prototype, representatives from the Turkish medical, architectural and bar associations all declared the facility inhumane. When Justice Minister Hikmet Sami Turk ignored their protests and announced last October that the prisons would open on schedule in early 2001, 205 political detainees belonging to four different leftist groups, including the D.H.K.P./C., went on hunger strike.

''I'm sure that among the leadership of these groups, there was an element of political calculation,'' says Murat Paker, a Turkish psychologist. ''But on an individual level, I think many of the strikers simply felt this was the last straw. Most of them had been arrested on trivial offenses, nearly all of them had been tortured and now they were being sent into isolation cells. How much more could the state take from them?''

Faced with a rebellion in the prisons and a potentially huge body count, the justice minister eventually agreed to negotiate and turned to the same group of mediators -- including Turkey's most famous novelist, Yasar Kemal -- who had brought an end to the 1996 strike. When those talks collapsed, the government chose to solve the problem in abrupt fashion; early on the morning of Dec. 19, 2000, some 10,000 police officers stormed 20 prisons throughout Turkey. The ostensible purpose of the raids -- code-named Operation Return to Life -- was to save the lives of the hunger strikers, but before it was over, 30 inmates and 2 policemen had been killed. That same day, the transfers into the F prisons began, and one of the leftist groups, the D.H.K.P./C., announced that its hunger strike had now become a fast to the death. Joining the death fast outside prison was a small group of D.H.K.P./C. supporters, including Fatma Sener.

''The choice seemed very clear to me,'' she says. ''I don't want to quit life. I want to live very much, but I also came to see that I had to make a stand for what I believed in, to fight for the kind of life I want to live. To accept what was happening, to watch friends going into isolation, no -- I had to make a stand.''

Fatma's decision to start her fast was in fact not a spontaneous one. Over the previous few months, she and a number of other party members had undergone a feast-and-famine regimen -- fasting for one week, then eating heavily the next -- to condition their bodies. As if in perverse emulation of an athlete in training, by the time the call went out to begin the death fast, Fatma was ideally suited for the rigors of slow starvation.

Kucuk Armutlu is a gecekondu, or ''overnight town,'' one of the scores of such working-class neighborhoods that have sprung up on the periphery of Istanbul in the past 15 years and have made the city, with a population variously estimated at 9 to 12 million, one of the largest in Europe. Sprawling over several hills, Armutlu is a maze of winding, rutted streets and small cinder-block homes, with children playing everywhere. The neighborhood has the reputation of being a leftist enclave, but what the residents actually make of the drama being played out in their midst is not altogether clear; when walking by one of the houses of resistance, some stop to visit, but others assiduously stare at the ground and continue on.

To differentiate between the four houses of resistance, I give them nicknames. There is Fatma's House, Boys' Town (home to six young men), Girls' Town (five women) and the Headquarters (four women and a man), so named because it is where visitors usually congregate and where the ''wall of martyrs'' is maintained, a rather ghastly array of color photographs spread across the entrance wall of the 29 who have already died.

I also keep a mental list of the eight strikers who are closest to dying -- in addition to Fatma, Yildiz and Osman, there are two women at Headquarters, three more at Girls' Town -- and it is with these eight that I spend most of my time. I'm not sure why this is; I think that on some level I hope to find a last-minute doubt somewhere within them, a crack in their ardor.

When the death fast started late last year, there were only seven strikers in Kucuk Armutlu, occupying a single house. While six of those original seven are now dead, the number of Armutlu strikers has steadily grown, so that it -- and not the prisons -- is now the de facto headquarters of the movement. One big reason for the influx is a government policy of granting medical leave to imprisoned strikers in hopes that freedom will make them quit; instead, most of the released try to make their way to Armutlu to continue their fasts. The attraction is obvious. This is both a slow and terribly painful way to die, and in Armutlu the strikers have assistants to comfort and care for them, a steady stream of visitors to distract and embolden them.

There is no medical literature to describe the journey the strikers are making; they are pioneers in the field of human starvation. Before the death fasts in Turkey, the record for surviving on a hunger strike was 72 days. The Armutlu strikers, by preparing their bodies ahead of time through the feast-and-famine regimen, and then by taking carefully calibrated daily doses of sugar and salt, have managed to last up to four times as long.

''They learned a lot by studying the 1996 hunger strike,'' explains Ozkalipci, the forensic doctor at the Human Rights Foundation of Turkey, who has treated a number of strikers. ''They take a lot of liquids because that slows down the muscular atrophy. They've discovered that potassium chloride is better than sodium chloride'' -- the former a compound salt; the latter table salt -- and that crude sugar is better than refined. In 1996, the strikers took only one spoonful of salt and sugar a day, and their daily weight loss was about 400 grams. This group, by taking a lot more salt and sugar, has brought that way down.''

Which, of course, is another way of saying that they suffer exponentially more, because now the most painful stages of starvation -- the initial intense hunger, followed by the excruciating ache of limbs as muscles deteriorate and constrict, followed by the internal bleeding as visceral organs are destroyed -- endure for that much longer. It is a situation that torments Ozkalipci.

''As a physician, it poses a great moral dilemma because I am trained to save people's lives, not help them suffer,'' he says. ''In the early days, every time I saw one of them, it was like we were reciting lines from a play. I would say, 'Please, don't do this, please stop.' And then they would say their line.'' He gives a sad smile.

I recall Resit Sari's statement that no striker had ever voluntarily quit the death fast, a claim I still find hard to believe, and I ask Ozkalipci if he has succeeded in changing the minds of any of his patients.

''Not one,'' he replies.

Another medical professional who has worked with the strikers is Sahika Yuksel, a clinical psychiatrist. To her, what is taking place in Armutlu is a dark lesson in the power of group dynamics.

''It's a kind of cult,'' she says. ''You have this tight community where the rhetoric of martyrdom is constant and where there is this constant flow of visitors who look to the strikers as heroes. And what is the background of the strikers? Most are from very poor backgrounds, they're uneducated, they have no real future -- and that's especially true for the ones who have been locked away for years. They come to this group, and it becomes their identity; they go on death strike, and now they're somebody.''

Yuksel sees another, more prosaic, element at work as well. ''There's an anorectic aspect to it, especially among the women,'' she says. ''They have this morbid fascination with watching their bodies deteriorate. And just as with normal anorexics, they reach a point where they cannot think straight, where they literally cannot see how bad off they are.''

Some of Yuksel's assessments ring true. Most of the Armutlu strikers do come from modest backgrounds, and some -- and especially the women -- do tend to look upon their wasting bodies with a kind of satisfied pride. On the other hand, group dynamics wouldn't appear to explain fully those who have stayed on strike while in prison, usually in either solitary confinement or small-group isolation. As for political zeal, what I have most noticed during my time in Armutlu is a singular lack of it.

If not brainwashed in any traditional sense, neither are the strikers ''forced'' to continue, as the government likes to suggest. No one is in Armutlu against her will, there are no armed guards a la Jonestown and there is minimal concern about destabilizing outside influences; certainly, I never have a problem when asking to talk with a striker in private. Instead, what seems to bind these people together is a much subtler form of coercion, one rooted in personal loyalty and shared experience that in many ways resembles the dynamics of a family. After spending months lying in a room next to someone suffering like yourself, how do you get up and leave her there? After so many friends have died, how do you admit it was for nothing?

This resoluteness from within is fortified by the visitors to Armutlu -- and the greatest encouragement comes from a remarkable source. Although most strikers tell me that their families support their action, it's another claim I find hard to believe -- until I actually speak with some of

''When she first told me she wanted to go on death fast, I said, 'No, don't do it,''' recalls Yuksel Gemicioglu, Yildiz's mother, a stout peasant woman in her 50's kneeling at the foot of her daughter's bed. ''But when she said it was for the F prisons, I understood and said O.K. It's very hard to see her like this, getting worse day by day, but it is for a good reason. I don't want her to die, but I am proud of her.''

Perhaps what binds the Armutlu strikers most is their shared narrative of loss at the hands of the state -- and to hear the personal tale of any one of them is to grasp the depths of their bitterness.

On most days, Umus Sahingoz, 32, a first-wave striker, lies on a daybed on the porch of the Headquarters house, floating in a fugue state between life and death. In March 1997, Umus was arrested for being a member of the D.H.K.P./C. and, though never formally tried, spent the next four years in prison. Released on a six-month medical leave a few months ago, she would probably be returned to prison if she ended her fast, as the 1997 charge against her is still pending. ''So what do I have to live for?'' she asks. ''If I stop, it means the same kind of slow death as before.''

In the main bedroom of the Headquarters, Resit Sari continues to keep up with a daily flood of e-mail messages on his computer, even though his eyesight, too, has begun to fail. A former sea captain, Resit was arrested in July 1993 for being a member of a neighborhood activist group and claims that he was tortured for 15 days in a police detention center.

''They wanted me to sign a confession that I was a member of the D.H.K.P./C.,'' he says, ''but I wasn't involved with any political group at that time, so I refused.''

After spending five months in prison, Resit was acquitted and released -- except that in Turkey the prosecution can appeal acquittals, which it did in his case. By 1999, he had put his life back together, when the police showed up at his boat-leasing company with the news that he was going back to prison for 12 1/2 years on the 1993 charge. In mid-December 2000, the Supreme Court again ordered his release, but by then Resit had become a member of the D.H.K.P./C. and joined the death fast.

''At this point, it is all I care about,'' he says. ''The state took my life and destroyed it for no reason.''

All of which makes Fatma Sener something of an anomaly at Armutlu, a latecomer to political activism, a woman who grew up in a peaceful town far removed from her nation's turmoils. In one of our talks, she mentions something that further sets her apart from most of her comrades. ''My family is opposed to the death fast,'' she says with a hint of adolescent derision, as if what is being discussed is her choice in clothes. ''Always, they are asking me to stop.''

rdek is a town of perhaps 400 perched over an inlet of the Sea of Marmara. Until recently, Istanbul was a four-hour boat ride away, but a new high-speed ferry out of Bandirma, just down the road, has cut that journey in half. Yet the town and city remain separated by a gulf in time; in Erdek, the outdoor cafe is crowded at all hours with men playing cards, women sit in the small plaza to chat and the slow rhythm of life seems much as it might have been centuries ago.

Just up the hill from the cafe is a small, tidy house surrounded by mandarin and lemon trees that is the home of Fatma's parents, Mehmet and Yurdanur Sener. They are a handsome middle-aged couple, and they are joined on the porch of their house by their elder daughter, 28-year-old Bahriye, along with her 3-year-old daughter, Selin. Fatma's parents were reluctant to talk with a journalist -- it was Bahriye who engineered this meeting -- and the conversation starts awkwardly, taken up with stiff pleasantries. I try to break the ice by asking about Fatma as a child.

''She was my angel,'' her father says in a voice already beginning to quaver. ''So sweet and loving, always smiling. I love all my children, but Fatma was the best.''

I glance at Bahriye. ''It's true,'' she nods. ''She was the best.''

Mehmet abruptly rises from the porch couch and leans over to the branch of a mandarin tree. ''I planted these the same year Fatma was born,'' he says. ''They grew up with her. Every mandarin that drops, I pick it up and hold it and hope that my daughter will come home to eat it.'' He wheels to me, his face starting to crumple. ''She promised to come home when the grapes were ready, but she didn't. Now the mandarins are out and ready. Where is she? She keeps saying this will end soon, that she will come home, but it is eight months now, and still we are waiting.''

At this, the tears burst forth and Mehmet rushes into the house; it is the first of at least 15 times during the conversation when he is overcome with emotion and has to flee.

According to her parents and sister, Fatma's growing up was perfectly normal; she had lots of friends, was good in school, enjoyed music and swimming. The change came when she went to Istanbul. ''That is where she came into contact with this terrorist group,'' Yurdanur says, refusing to even mention the D.H.K.P./C. by name. ''She would always deny that she was involved with politics, but we knew, and we had arguments about it. We were worried, but we never thought it would go this far.''

I ask if, considering their opposition, they had ever thought of grabbing Fatma, just hauling her from the house.

''Yes,'' Mehmet replies softly, ''one time. One time I was there, and I picked her up in my arms -- she was so light -- but she saw in my eyes what I was thinking. She said, 'No, Papa, I belong here.' Well, how can I break her heart? She's already finished. So I set her back down.''

He again flees inside. His wife watches him go, then turns to me. ''I am the strong one of the family,'' she says matter-of-factly. ''My husband has a heart condition. If Fatma dies, he will die, too.''

wo days later, Mehmet goes to Istanbul to see his daughter. While I actively encouraged this visit, I'm now apprehensive, worried that given his heart condition it might actually make things worse. Sure enough, Mehmet is agitated, chain-smoking cigarettes, when he comes off the boat.

My interpreter has bought several small heart-shaped pillows for the strikers, and during the taxi ride to Armutlu she hands one to Mehmet to give to Fatma. He thanks her, cradles it in his lap for a moment, but then hands it back. ''No,'' he says. ''I swore that I would not give her anything until she quits.''

At the house, the assistants appear to be a bit nervous at the sight of Fatma's father but quickly stand aside as he heads to her room. Their reunion is tender, Mehmet sitting on the edge of the bed to embrace his daughter, the two of them talking in soft whispers, but after 10 minutes he can't take it anymore and abruptly bolts for the door.

''She's mocking me,'' he says outside, angrily puffing on another cigarette. ''I cry, and she smiles. I tell her to come home, and she smiles. How do I reach her?''

After a while, he goes back inside, but this visit is even shorter than the first, and he emerges cursing under his breath. ''I told her this was the last time. I know I always say that, but this is the last time I come here.''

As he storms toward the waiting taxi, one of the female assistants rushes out to give him a framed photograph. It is of Fatma, and the look on Mehmet's face is one of such stricken despair that I half expect his heart to explode right there.

With her father gone, I go into the house to talk with Fatma. I want to ask her about the visit, but as I approach her bed I see she is smiling at me. All at once I find that smile repellent, and without saying a word I turn around and leave.

The day after Mehmet's visit, there is a party at the Armutlu houses. It is July 28, the fifth anniversary of the end of the 1996 hunger strike, and to mark the occasion the D.H.K.P./C. has called for a ''Henna Night.'' In the Turkish countryside, girls paint their hands with henna when they're about to marry, and the Armutlu strikers have adopted the practice to show that they, too, have entered a kind of marriage -- with death. A Henna Night means more volunteers are joining the strike. There has been a little bubble of excitement around the houses recently, whispers that two new strikers will join the fast tonight, but their identities have been kept secret until the ceremony.

The celebration is held at Fatma's House just before sunset. A long red-draped table is set on the lawn for the strikers who will attend -- those who can walk or be safely carried from the other houses -- and plastic chairs are arranged in the street for spectators. I spot one of the new strikers immediately. It is Nurgul, a cheery, energetic woman who has been an assistant at Girls' Town; tonight, she has donned the red T-shirt that marks her as one of the martyrs. She is beaming, almost ecstatic, as she mingles with the other strikers at the table.

With the festivities about to start, Osman and Yildiz are brought out in their beds and placed on the grass before the table. A young girl dashes up to her mother, sitting near me in the spectator gallery. ''They're bringing Fatma out!'' she whispers excitedly, as if Fatma were the local role model, what little girls here want to grow up to be.

When Fatma finally makes her entrance, her bed carried out by two men, the change in her is astonishing. Just yesterday, when her father visited, she was vibrant and animated; now she is sallow and obviously in pain, having difficulty even flashing her trademark smile to those who gather around her.

The ceremony begins with a few revolutionary songs and speeches, and then a great tray of henna is brought out to be applied to the hands of the strikers and anyone in the audience who wishes to show solidarity. I go up to the lawn and say hello to Osman and Yildiz, then step to the foot of Fatma's bed. She is gazing around vacantly, apparently unable to focus on her surroundings. There is pain in her eyes, but along with it something new: fear.

In the quest to assign blame for the hunger strike, no one has been more vilified than the Turkish justice minister, Hikmet Sami Turk. In person, he doesn't much look the part. He is soft-spoken and bespectacled, appears older than his 65 years and has the thoughtful manner of the college professor that, in fact, he once was. For close to two hours, we sit at a couch-and-coffee-table arrangement in his office in Ankara, as he explains the F-prison and death-fast saga from the government's point of view.

It is not so much an interview as a tutorial, and just as with the strikers' rendition certain details have been deleted. In discussing the disastrous Operation Return to Life, for example, the minister stresses that 2 policemen were among the 32 killed, proof that the inmates were armed, but fails to mention an official forensic report, which concluded that at least one of those officers was killed by ''friendly fire.'' Similarly, in explaining the rationale for that operation, Turk points out that the hunger strike was then approaching its 60th day and that ''the Turkish Medical Association had warned us this was the critical point at which the strikers would start to die'' -- never mind that the medical association strenuously opposed any armed intervention. Most fundamental of all, his discussion of the need to keep imprisoned ''terrorists'' under control and separated from one another leaves out the troublesome fact that at least half of those in F prisons have yet to be convicted of anything, let alone a violent offense.

''But this is not just about the F prisons, you know,'' Turk says. ''The strikers have a long list of demands, including abolition of the Anti-Terror Law.'' He gives an incredulous laugh. ''Well, what government in the world would give in to such a thing, 'Change this law or we will kill ourselves'? It is a kind of blackmail, and it's not going to work.''

It is also a straw dog, because abolition of the Anti-Terror Law -- while certainly on the strikers' wish list -- has never been a precondition for ending the fast. In fact, before going to Ankara, I asked the Armutlu strikers for a list of the absolute minimum concessions the government could make that would cause them to stop, and they repeated the same two demands that have been at the heart of the issue all along: an end to the isolation cells and international monitoring to ensure compliance. When I tell Turk this, he shakes his head. There will be no end to the cells.

''We are in the process of establishing independent prison-monitoring boards in each province, and these boards will take care of any problems that arise,'' he says. ''I'm also prepared to hold a comprehensive review of the entire prison system, a conference where all concerned parties can come together and discuss everything -- the F prisons, the monitoring process, whatever they like. But before that happens, the death fast has to end. That is our precondition, and we will not be blackmailed.''

As our meeting extends, I'm struck by a remarkable current running through the justice minister's words; call it refreshing frankness or coldblooded obduracy. Government officials everywhere try to finesse journalists when discussing a controversial topic, but with Turk there is none of that. Even when I pose a softball question tailored to elicit a conciliatory response -- I ask if, at some point in the future, he might consider asking mediators to try again to end the crisis -- he instead gives a dismissive shrug. ''No. What's the point?''

At the end of our meeting, I try a more direct tack; I ask the minister if he would like me to deliver a personal message to the strikers. ''I'm thinking of one young woman in particular,'' I explain. ''She is very close to death, but she keeps telling her family that this will end soon, that they will win.''

''Fatma Sener?'' Turk asks.

It is the first time he has referred to any striker by name, the first indication that he even knows any of their names.

''Tell her she's wrong,'' the minister says. ''Tell her she's not going to win, that if she continues, she will die.'' He seems to soften. ''Tell them all that. These are our children, and we want them to live.''

When I return to Istanbul that evening, I call Bahriye, Fatma's sister, to tell her of my meeting with Turk. Because of the way Fatma looked on Henna Night, I'm blunt: the government has no intention of negotiating; her sister is going to die. Bahriye calmly thanks me and hangs up.

The reason for her calmness becomes evident 36 hours later. Whether caused by her father's last visit or her own suddenly rapid decline, Fatma has quietly let her family know she is ready to come home. Early on a Friday morning, Mehmet arrives in Armutlu and, after thanking the household staff for tending to his daughter all these months, lifts Fatma from her bed and carries her out to a waiting van. After a quick visit to Erdek to see her gathered relatives, Fatma is taken to the intensive-care unit of a hospital there.

''The doctors say she will make a full recovery,'' Mehmet roars with delight when I talk with him the next day. ''Her hearing, her eyes, everything will be fine.''

To pay for Fatma's hospitalization, the entire Sener clan has chipped in. Mehmet is negotiating to sell his olive orchard. ''So now I am poor,'' he laughs, ''I have lost everything, but I am the happiest man in the world.''

I ask Mehmet what he feels finally changed his daughter's mind.

''I think most of all it was Selin,'' he says, referring to Fatma's 3-year-old niece. ''They've always loved each other very much, and all this time Fatma was telling Selin that she would be coming home soon. I think she finally saw this wasn't true, that she was lying to this little girl.''

When the two were reunited in Erdek, Selin stayed nestled in Fatma's arms until it was time for her aunt to be taken to the hospital.

In my last evening in Istanbul, I go out to the Armutlu houses to say goodbye. I've come to know many of the strikers quite well over the past month, and whether encouraged by Fatma's departure or simply to salve my own conscience, I resolve to meet with each one and try to persuade them to come off the fast. I will do this by bluntly telling them what the justice minister so bluntly told me: that there will be no concessions, that there is no hope.

This may sound like a simple exercise, but I suspect that there's a limit to how much disappointment a person can take in such a situation; by the time I reach Armutlu, I have already trimmed my list to the seven remaining strikers who are closest to the end, and even this list I begin to amend.

I start out at what used to be Fatma's House. Osman is on his back, his eyes open and staring at the door, but his body is so still I think he might already be dead. I give a little wave. He waves back, two fingers slightly raised from his chest, but there's nothing on his face to suggest that he recognizes me. I've talked with Osman enough to know that he will never come off the fast, and it now seems cruel to disturb him in his last days.

I go next door to Yildiz. She has badly deteriorated since Fatma left and is now clearly in some kind of crisis, an aide on the floor beside her, holding her hand and crying. I look at the vacant bed across the room and decide that if watching her roommate of the past 10 months go out the door hasn't led Yildiz to stop, nothing I can say will. I wish her courage and luck, the only things she would seem to have left.

It is at Girls' Town, with the three weakest strikers gathered in the sitting room, that I finally say all I have wanted to. The justice minister's words don't surprise any of them but instead spark a long, animated tirade from Gulay Kavak, the frailest of the three.

I must appear very tired or sad, because after about five minutes Gulay abruptly stops her speech and looks to me with a slight tilt of her head, the way a mother does when consoling a child. ''You shouldn't take this so hard,'' she says softly. ''This is a war, and there is nothing you can do.'' She gives me a smile that at one time must have been very pretty. ''Be calm,'' she whispers.

On Sept. 8, the 324th day of her hunger strike, Gulay Kavak died. As of this writing, 10 other hunger strikers have died, including Umus Sahingoz and Osman Osmanagaoglu. The one bit of news I was pleased to hear concerned Yildiz Gemicioglu, Fatma's former roommate. In mid-August, with her condition deteriorating rapidly, Yildiz was forcibly removed from Armutlu by her father and is now recovering in an Istanbul hospital.

In ways impossible to foresee, the attacks of Sept. 11 have altered political landscapes and fortunes around the globe; among the great losers of this changed world are the hunger strikers of Kucuk Armutlu. With Turkey seen as a vital diplomatic and military ally of the United States in the region, as well as an unwavering supporter of the military actions in Afghanistan, it is going to be a very long time before its government faces outside pressure to resolve the hunger-strike issue. Indeed, since Sept. 11, Turkish authorities appear to have simply hardened their stance; a police raid in Kucuk Armutlu led to the arrest of 20 D.H.K.P./C. supporters. That this hardening will break the strikers' will is doubtful: this month, 38 new volunteers joined the death fast.