“Law”, rather than “politics”. A six-year prison sentence was requested for 11 members of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), tried in Paris in particular for “financing terrorism”.
This file has a “symbolic” dimension, that of the “well-founded or not” of the terrorist qualification retained, immediately recognizes the anti-terrorism prosecutor at the start of his requisitions. Defense lawyers dispute it, and have imposed it at the heart of the debates since the start of the trial last week.
The PKK, engaged since 1984 in an armed struggle for an independent Kurdistan, is the sworn enemy of Turkey, which classifies it as a “terrorist” organization, like the European Union and therefore France. The defendants are mainly accused of having collected from the Kurdish diaspora in the south-east of France, the “kampanya”, the revolutionary tax used to finance the PKK.
From 24 to 64 years old
“It is not a question of knowing who is good and who is bad, it is a question of law”, warns the prosecutor Xavier Laurent. Faced with the “caricatures” sometimes put forward by the defense, which mocked France’s attitude towards the Kurds – “allies” when they fight the Islamic State (IS) in Syria but “terrorists” when they fight against Turkey –, the court does not have to do “politics”, insists the magistrate.
During the hearing, the defendants, Kurds from Turkey aged 24 to 64, chose to deny against all likelihood that they belonged to the PKK, while acknowledging a “sympathy” for the organization.
Several of them could not help but recount at the bar or from the box the “massacres”, the “rapes”, the “persecution” of their people by the Turkish state. “The injustices they denounce deserve to be heard, not to issue a blank check, but to understand,” said the prosecutor.
Inadmissibility
But the “serious abuses” against the Kurdish people must not make us forget that “the PKK has not laid down its arms”, has “operating methods which are always those of a terrorist organization”, and commits “acts of terrorism in a third state” – Turkey, he insists.
“If the conviction of acting for a good cause was absolutory in matters of terrorism, you won’t have many people to judge,” he grits. Even if “obviously”, when the men on trial stood “in front of the flags of IS or al-Qaeda, it considerably simplifies the debate”.
“All defend a cause that they will judge just. The Kurdish cause cannot be an exception because it is Kurdish,” and “the PKK must be considered a terrorist organization,” he concludes.
Proof however of the complexity of the debate, by stating the required sentences, the magistrate does not ask for the prohibition of French territory, usual in terrorist cases. Most of the defendants received asylum in France, and “the danger they faced” in Turkey is proven, he acknowledges.
Defense pleadings this Thursday
In this file which allows a “dive” into the reality of the “rear bases” of the PKK in Europe, extortion and the financing of terrorism are, according to him, proven. On the bench of the defendants or from the box where we listen to him attentively via the interpreters, there are not only “activists”, who would have “only demonstrated or signed petitions”, continues the magistrate.
For the south-east of France where they reside, the annual amount of the “kampanya”, the revolutionary tax used to finance the PKK, amounts to “hundreds of thousands of euros”, obtained at least by “harassment” of members of the diaspora, sometimes under the threat of violence, he says.
It is the “collectors” who “impose themselves, under the pretext of drinking tea or coffee” among members of the Kurdish community. They too who set the amounts, according to “real, supposed or future income for those who have just opened a case”, recalls the prosecutor.
Despite the dozens of wiretappings, testimonies and material evidence, the defendants have also “chosen to reject everything as a whole”, regrets the prosecutor. The trial continues Thursday with closing arguments.