Yesterday in the early afternoon, the 7th Criminal Division of the Munich Higher Regional Court announced its verdict in the TKP / ML trial. The ten defendants were sentenced to prison terms ranging from 2 years to 9 months to 6 years and 6 months. Against the farce of this process and its final verdict, hundreds of rally participants took part in yesterday's protests in Munich.
The trial against the 10 activists, who were arrested in several EU countries after the raid on April 15, 2015, and subsequently were put on the stand in the FRG, took more than 4 years and 234 main trial days. They were not accused of having committed a specific crime here, but of being a member of the TKP / ML. It was the first legal trial in Germany to be carried out because of membership in the TKP / ML. It is also the first in which the accused have been convicted of membership in a "foreign terrorist" organization under Section 129b of the Criminal Code, which is not on any international terror list and which is not prohibited in Germany under the Association Act and whose members mostly have received refugee status in Germany.
Accordingly, the politically motivated nature of the legal trial, with the judgment of which the reaction has yet again violated its own laws, is quite obvious. Based on "assessments" and "evidence" of the Turkish state, a state that overwhelms its people with open repression and terror, to accuse revolutionary activists in the FRG as "terrorists" (or their supporters), who have not carried out any specific crimes here, and to condemn them has more to do with fascism's criminal law targeting the political motivation than with anything else. But this was the goal from the start: Even the staged images of the arrests laid the basis for this: With Special Forces, armored vehicles, simultaneous raids and weapons at the ready, the arrests were carried out in a way to stigmatize the ten (unarmed) defendants in advance as "dangerous terrorists", the last of whom was released only yesterday on the day of his conviction, after being in prison for over five years without conviction [sic!].
Proclaimed Prison Sentences:
Müslüm Elma: 6 years 6 months
Deniz Pektas: 5 years
Seyit Ali Uğur: 4 years 6 months
Erhan Aktürk: 4 years 6 months
Sinan Aydın: 3 years 6 months
Banu Büyükavcı: 3 years 6 months
Haydar Bern 3 years 4 months
Musa Demir: 3 years 4 months
Sami Solmaz: 3 years
Mehmet Yeşilçalı: 2 years 9 months
The protest against the conviction of the accused yesterday was correspondingly large and combative, especially since in the closing arguments and statements five of the accused made a clear statement that they will in no way swear off their ideology and the struggle for a world without exploitation and oppression and clarified that the German state had no legitimacy to judge on this question anyway. Nevertheless, the public prosecutor, who obviously wanted to set this process as a precedent, made a clear call in the closing words to add the TKP / ML as a terrorist organization in the future.
Since the day of the pronouncement of judgment also coincided with the International Day of Action in solidarity with the revolutionary prisoners in India, proletarian revolutionaries took part in various ways by carrying slogans for the prisoners there into the rally.
