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PKK trial in Stuttgart-Stammheim (archive): "True to the motto: If it says terrorism, there is certainly also terrorism inside."
Photo: Fabian Sommer / DPA
At the end, according to the trial participants, there was another applause when Veysel S. and those accused with him entered the court in Stammheim.
Her relatives and supporters came for the last time to this room with the highest security level, in which the Stuttgart Higher Regional Court had been negotiating for two years.
A high-security wing for proceedings against people who are alleged to endanger the state.
For the 3rd Criminal Senate it is clear that Veysel S. is a member of the banned Kurdistan Workers' Party PKK and that the other four defendants, including a woman, support the PKK.
Together they are said to have been involved in the kidnapping of a former cadre.
The court last week sentenced her to anything ranging from a year and a half suspended prison sentence to four years and three months in prison.
It was the end of a tough process that began in April 2019 and took 91 days to negotiate.
Individual witnesses were interrogated, some for days, above all Ridvan Ö., On whose information the federal prosecutor had based their indictment.
That Ö.
lied, it was obvious.
The presiding judge even admitted that in the grounds of the judgment.
He called the key witnesses a "fabulist", "generally unreliable" and "manipulative", whose statements one could only believe if other evidence such as telecommunications surveillance supported them additionally.
New identity, new life
It was about untrue pregnancies, fictitious cancers and the imaginary persecution by the Turkish secret service.
Ö.
partly invented "hair-raising stories", driven by the idea of being able to start a new life with the help of a witness protection program.
Nevertheless, the Senate followed his version, according to which the five defendants lured him to the remote castle ruins in Herrenberg near Stuttgart on April 13, 2018.
As head of the PKK Baden-Württemberg region, Veysel S. planned and directed the kidnapping.
In the restaurant of one of the defendants, he said the kidnapped Ö.
put through the ringer.
It should have been about money from fundraising, around 14,700 euros, the Ridvan Ö.
as head of a PKK department in the Karlsruhe area.
In the opinion of the Senate, Veysel S. wanted to put pressure on Ö with the kidnapping.
exercise to return the money.
After that, Ö.
have been exposed at the train station in Göppingen.
The Senate has no doubts about what happened, said Judge Hartmut Schnelle.
Not even because of the fact that Ö.
had been kidnapped by force and there had been an attempt at predatory extortion.
Although "concrete findings" in this regard were not possible in the taking of evidence.
Did the presiding judge therefore emphasize that the Senate did not pursue politics, but applied the law?
The defense accuses him of the opposite. This procedure is only based on the testimony of the key witness Ridvan Ö. came about, says Antonia von der Behrens, lawyer for one of the defendants. »Ö. has used the German law enforcement authorities for his private interests and the authorities have used him for their interests to portray the PKK in Germany as violent. "Although the court listed Ö.'s lies in the reasoning, it largely based its judgment on him . "In doing so, the court bowed to the political interests behind the proceedings."
The defendants came to Germany from Turkey as politically persecuted; they are Turkish citizens of Kurdish ethnicity. Their life at home was marked by state repression of the Kurdish population. Her client had learned what it meant to live in a country "whose government systematically and racially discriminates, expels, arrests and kills extrajudicially," said defense lawyer Franziska Nedelmann in her plea.
He, too, is observing the political development in Turkey "with concern," stated Richter Schnelle, and praised the life of the accused as a result of the Turkish Kurdish policy as mitigating punishment.
If a section of the population like the Kurds is completely prevented from participating in the political process by persecuting and suppressing the left-wing HDP party in Turkey, the international community must take measures to protect the rights of the Kurdish ethnic group, the judge said.
"This is obviously missing up to now."
Consequences of an indictment
The PKK has been banned in Germany since 1993.
According to the Office for the Protection of the Constitution, it still has more than 14,000 followers nationwide, spread over 31 areas.
In 2010 the Federal Court of Justice designated the PKK as a terrorist organization abroad.
Since then, high-ranking officials in Germany have been sentenced to prison terms, some of them several years, and thousands of preliminary proceedings have been conducted against members, activists or sympathizers of the PKK for individual crimes.
The ban was extended to symbols of previously legal groups in 2017 and has criminalized many politically active Kurds in this country who fled Turkey from persecution and torture.
Naturalizations are rejected, citizenships are revoked, and residence permits are not extended.
Alone the accusation of supporting the PKK was enough for the Federal Office for Migration and Refugees to revoke the refugee recognition of their client, said lawyer Nedelmann. It was not considered necessary to wait for the verdict. "True to the motto: If it says terrorism, there is certainly also terrorism inside."
