Statement of the Anti-imperialist Camp, Italy
On December 20, 2006, the tribunal of Perugia, Italy, pronounced the sentences against Avni Er and Zeynep Kilic who have been accused of international terrorism according to …§270 bis of the penal code and arrested together with three leaders of the Anti-imperialist Camp on April 1, 2004.
The court ruled that Avni would be a leader of the DHKP-C while it assumed that Zeynep would be member.
In their final statements both remembered that their struggle is directed against the anti-democratic regime which has been set up by the bloody coup d’à©tat of 1980 with support of the West and where the military remains the decisive political power.
Zeynep drew the attention to her personal story. In the beginning of the 90s she had been arrested and tortured several time only because she participated in student mobilisations. She later went to England to study, continued there to struggle for democracy in Turkey and never returned to Turkey because of the persecution she would have to face there.
She attacked the Italian justice which closely followed the accusations by the Turkish police and their notion of terrorism which has become also the one of Italy and Europe: the struggle for social and political rights, including the right to self-determination for the Kurdish people, against the oligarchic military regime is for them simply terrorism. The judge did not find relevant the political character and the origins of the Turkish regime.
Despite the fact that the sentence is not final, that the comrades have been in prison for 34 months and that there is neither a danger of flight (where to?), nor the manipulations of evidence nor the repetition of the offence, they will not be released.
This is the democracy and the justice which the West is exporting by bombs and sanctions all over the world.
Anti-imperialist Camp, Italy
December 20, 2006
(abbreviated)
