A three-year suspended sentence to six years in prison was requested on Wednesday April 12 against 11 members of the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK), tried before the Paris Criminal Court in particular for extortion and "terrorist financing
"
.
The prosecutor asked for the maintenance, or the sending in detention of several of the defendants, Kurds from Turkey, accused in particular of having collected a
"revolutionary tax"
from traders to finance the PKK in the south-east of France. .
He said he was
"pessimistic"
about the
"dissuasive"
nature of the required sentences - most of them are suspended -
"given the degree of commitment"
of the majority of the defendants.
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 the United States.
Denouncing the
"perfect ambiguity"
of the French state in its relations with the Kurds,
"allies"
when they fight the Islamic State (IS) in Syria but
"terrorists"
when they fight against Turkey, the defense lawyers have insistently contested this characterization since the start of the trial.
The prosecutor Xavier Laurent devoted a large part of his requisitions to this question.
Read also“Financing of terrorism”: the trial of eleven members of the PKK opens in Paris
We are looking for
“a signal from your jurisdiction”
, but
“unsurprisingly, I will not propose a revolution on this”
, he warns.
“It is not a question of knowing who is good and who is bad, it is a question of law”
, he also says, and the court does not have to do
“politics”
.
The
"serious abuses"
committed by the Turkish State against the Kurdish people, and recalled at the hearing, should not cause us to forget that the PKK
"did not lay down its arms"
, has
"operating methods which are always those of a terrorist organization
,” he insists.
At the hearing, the defendants made the choice to deny their membership of the movement against the evidence, while recognizing a
"sympathy"
for an organization "without which the Kurds would all have died", as one of them.
Regarding the accusations of collecting revolutionary taxes, they also
“chosen to reject everything as a whole”
, regrets the prosecutor, recalling the quantity of wiretaps, testimonies and collection registers found in the search, undermining the
“fanciful denials of
the defendants.
The hearing continues Thursday with the defense arguments.
