Kurdish clerics on trial

A trial against Kurdish clerics began in Istanbul on Friday that looks more like an Orwellian construct than a court case. Similar to the KCK trials against Kurdish civil society initiated in 2009, the aim is obviously to create a construct by means of which political enemies are to be removed from circulation. This time the target is Ekrem Imamoğlu, head of the Istanbul Municipality. The CHP politician had wrested Turkey’s most important mayoralty from President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s AKP in 2019. The billion-dollar budget of the 16-million-metropolis, from which the AKP had maintained its clientelist network, influences the balance of power throughout the country. The government reacted accordingly to the loss and has since used every opportunity to thwart Imamoğlu and heap problems on his city hall.

Suspicion of terrorism against the municipality

In November, the Istanbul municipality was initially deprived of control over the Princes’ Islands in the Sea of Marmara by presidential decree – in favour of the Ministry of Environment and Development. At the beginning of December, the Turkish president then announced that Istanbul would have to find “its ruler” again in the next election, and that this would be the AKP. Promptly, Interior Minister Süleyman Soylu announced an investigation into suspected terrorism against the Istanbul Municipality. More than 550 of the approximately 33,000 new employees hired in Imamoğlu term were the subject of complaints about alleged links to “terrorist organisations”, 455 alone concerned the PKK. Since then, an office set up in the Interior Ministry on Soylu’s orders has been investigating the “complaints against the suspicious personnel”. The only strange thing is that all new employees have already undergone a security check by the Interior Ministry.

Manoeuvre to appoint a trustee

The opposition agrees that the accusation of terrorism against municipal staff is a manoeuvre aimed at impeaching Imamoğlu and thus installing a trustee administration in Istanbul City Hall. The “Association for Mutual Aid and Solidarity of the Clergy” (DIAYDER), which was founded in Istanbul in 2008 and is mainly made up of people with a Kurdish background, has been designated as the sacrificial lamb for this goal. A total of 23 members of the association are accused, eight of whom have been in pre-trial detention in the notorious high-security Silivri prison since the summer, including DIAYDER chairman Ekrem Baran. The clergymen, aged between 65 and 90, are accused of PKK membership or support. The prosecution is demanding prison sentences ranging from a minimum of three and a half years to a maximum of fifteen years.

DIAYDER established as “parallel presidium for religious affairs”

That the accusations against DIAYDER are more than Kafkaesque can be read in almost every line of the 335-page indictment. The indictment begins with the claim that the association was part of the “KCK structure” and was founded on the “orders” of imprisoned PKK founder Abdullah Öcalan with the declared aim of creating “a parallel presidium for religious affairs” – similar to the state religious authority Diyanet – within the KCK Committee for Minorities and Faith Groups. As alleged evidence against the defendants, pages of absurd explanations are given, which on the one hand cast doubt on the legal competence of the public prosecutor, and on the other hand give an indication of the enemy criminal law, the principle of which is being applied in the trial.

The accusations are based, among other things, on press statements and interviews on religious issues, sermons and prayers delivered in Kurdish, campaigns to distribute Kurdish translations of the Koran, supportive statements for the peace negotiations between the Turkish state and Abdullah Öcalan, washing the dead and attending funerals, solidarity trips to Suruç during the ISIS siege of the town of Kobanê, which lies on the other side of the border, and expressing protest against the government’s support for ISIS.

In connection with the Istanbul Municipality, the defendants are accused of having infiltrated several members of the legal association, criminalised by the prosecution as a “KCK structure”, into the city hall, partly as death washers and as imams, and of having transferred parts of the salary to the PKK under the “guise of membership fees”. In addition, DIAYDER is accused of having embezzled public funds provided by the municipality for religious projects for “terrorist purposes”. Ration cards for the needy issued by the city hall to the association were allegedly not distributed to the destitute as intended, but to relatives of persons killed in the so-called counter-insurgency – meaning those killed in the Kurdish liberation struggle.

“Anonymous witnesses” from the KCK trial of 2009

Lawyer Ayşe Acinikli summarised at the start of the trial that the indictment did not contain any criminal acts by the defendants and that the accusations were contrived. In addition, she said, they were partly based on the testimonies of “anonymous witnesses”, which had already been used in the KCK proceedings in 2009, as well as on transcripts of illegally tapped telephone calls – partly from 2013. Acinikli also pointed out that the investigations against DIAYDER were first initiated directly after the founding of the association fourteen years ago. However, the file has only now been brought out in connection with the criminalisation attempts against the Istanbul municipality. Similar comments were made by the defendants who have spoken so far after the hour-long reading of the indictment.

Defendant Halil Bulut, who was not present in the courtroom but was integrated into the trial via the SEGBIS video conferencing system, collapsed in the booth shortly before giving his testimony. 72-year-old Enver Karabey, who is one of the detained defendants, could hardly stand on his feet due to his COPD disease (chronic obstructive pulmonary disease). The court plans to decide on an application for release from the obligation to appear in person at a later date. It took a lot of strength for the clergymen to get through the attrition process. All of them vigorously rejected the accusations against them and spoke unanimously of an “unprecedented farce of a trial”. The trial will continue next Monday.