Acknowledging the serious problems at the facility for which he is responsible, Chief Türedi argues that Ankara has denied Edirne the resources needed to run a more efficient—and consequently a more humane—operation. He has a staff of 35 in a region of the country where 18,400 undocumented migrants were apprehended last year; in contrast, he said, about half that number of undocumented migrants, 9,250, were apprehended in Istanbul last year, where the Passport and Foreigners Department is almost nine times larger, with a staff of 300. “We work with double the number of aliens with 10 percent of the staff of Istanbul,” he said.126 Chief Türedi told Human Rights Watch that the prison for common criminals in Edirne has 70 guards for 300 prisoners, but that Tunca only has four guards each shift responsible for 700 detainees (703 on the first day of the Human Rights Watch visit). He said that Tunca has a capacity for 200, but held 1,030 detainees at one point in the summer of 2007. Türedi also contrasted Tunca’s staffing with the Kırklareli detention center for foreigners. Kırklareli has a capacity for 2,500, a staff of 30 or 40, and a nurse on duty. Edirne has no nurse and hardly any capacity even to use the four guards on duty to transport sick or injured detainees to the hospital for emergency treatment. The consequences of few guards and many detainees crammed into a small space are as ominous as they are predictable. The guards at Tunca have no presence within the closed rooms. Control inside the rooms (or lack thereof) is entirely in the hands of the detainees themselves. One guard expressed to Human Rights Watch his sense of the impossibility of his job: “I wake up every morning not knowing what I’m going to face that day and just hoping nothing happens, that a riot doesn’t break out. It’s a very stressful situation for us working here.”127 The obvious question is why there were only 174 detainees at Kırklareli, a relatively open facility with large grounds and a capacity to hold 2,500 on the same day that the Tunca facility at Edirne with a capacity for 200 was holding 703 people. When Human Rights Watch posed this question to Chief Türedi, he answered, “That’s a good question.”128 126 Human Rights Watch interview with Türedi, Security Directorate, June 11, 2008. 127 Human Rights Watch interview with guard, Edirne, June 11, 2008. 128 Human Rights Watch interview with Türedi, Security Directorate, June 11, 2008. 57 Human Rights Watch November 2008