Eleven members of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) were sentenced on Friday April 14 by the Paris Criminal Court to sentences ranging from three years suspended to five years’ imprisonment, one of which was suspended. Two of the defendants were tried in absentia. This trial was the first for similar facts for a decade. From the assassination, on January 9, 2013, of three leading executives of the movement by a presumed infiltrated Turkish agent, the anti-terrorist prosecutor’s office had put a soft pedal on the prosecution for financing targeting the PKK.
This funding, nicknamed “kampanya”, is the PKK’s main source of income and takes the form of a revolutionary and forced tax, levied on members of the Kurdish community living abroad, particularly in France. In addition to the financing, the defendants were prosecuted for “extortion” and “terrorist criminal association” because of their alleged membership of the PKK, registered since 2002 on the European list of terrorist organizations.
From the start of the trial, the defense lawyers challenged the terrorist qualification used during the investigation and at the time of the referral for trial. Me Raphaël Kempf requested, on behalf of all of his colleagues, the cancellation of the order for reference. The court returned the response to this request for final deliberation.
dialogue of the deaf
The hearing then quickly turned into a dialogue of the deaf between a president, Murielle Desheraud, taking care to stick only to the file and nothing but the file and the defendants denying the facts en bloc, including the obvious confirmed by listening. Just as they denied their membership of the PKK by arguing that the movement is in Kurdistan, ” in the mountains “.
That was not the point of this trial, which dealt with known and recurring facts. A defendant, Gokhan B., summarized the issues well: “You can consider me an activist. You would have done the exact same thing I did for my people if you had my background. (…) In these cases you only look at the scales of justice from one angle, try to look both ways. »
Can the PKK be treated the same as it was a decade ago as Turkey descends into dictatorship? Can the Kurdish movement be called terrorist when it has made a decisive contribution to the war against the Islamic State organization (IS), which it fought on the ground in Syria and Iraq with the support of the international coalition of which France is a member? Isn’t there one “schizophrenia” to give asylum to Kurds from Turkey for their membership of the PKK and to prosecute them for the same facts, as pointed out by Mre David Andic ?
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