Kenan Ayaz has been on trial in Hamburg since November. He is accused of organizing demonstrations for the PKK. Could this be terrorism?
An article by Bartholomew von Laffert
The visitors’ room in Holstenglacis remand prison is stuffy and cramped. A man in a blue and green checked shirt, rimless glasses and thinning hair sits behind a pane of glass. The German security authorities think he is a terrorist. He himself says: “I’ve never harmed an ant in my life”. Kenan Ayaz, 49, a Kurd from Turkey, has been in custody in Hamburg for 13 months. If convicted, he faces four and a half years in prison.
Ayaz, who lived in Cyprus as a recognized political refugee, is not accused of any acts of violence. The federal prosecutor’s office has charged him with being involved in the organization of “propaganda events and gatherings” such as demonstrations and festivals, as well as fundraising. In themselves, these are not violations of the law. If it weren’t for the terrorism section 129b of the Criminal Code. Because Ayaz is said to have carried out his activities as a responsible cadre for the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), what is in itself legal behavior becomes an “act of activity” in a terrorist organization.
For the German security authorities, the PKK “with its approximately 14,500 followers in Germany is the terrorist organization with the largest membership on German soil”. The organization was banned by law in Germany in 1993, at a time when the PKK was attacking Turkish institutions, extorting protection money and public order in Germany was seen to be under threat. It ended up on the European terror list in 2002.
Kenan Ayaz
“Murderers are only in solitary confinement for a few days, but as a political prisoner I was there for three months”
But there is another narrative, namely that the PKK’s violence is a reaction to the oppression of Kurds in Turkey. That the PKK has been trying for peace for years, while Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan recently broke off negotiations in 2015. And above all: that the PKK has not committed a terrorist act in Germany since the mid-1990s. Against this background, are the proceedings against Kenan Ayaz proportionate, or are German politicians even reacting to Erdoğan’s wishes?
Not an isolated case
You have to pass through six heavy doors made of iron and bulletproof glass and pass through several security guards to get into the visitors’ room. You are accompanied by a Kurdish interpreter and an officer from the LKA, who will make sure that the conversation does not turn to the trial or the PKK over the next 30 minutes.
Kenan Ayaz puts his hand on the window as a greeting. A friendly nod. “Rojbaş” – “Rojbaş” – “Tu çawa ye?” – “Thank you, good and yourself?” Ayaz smiles, he’s fine, he says. Better than in solitary confinement, where he spent the first few months in Germany, he says. “Murderers or other criminals are only in solitary confinement for a few days, but as a political prisoner I was there for three months,” says Ayaz.
His arrest shows that his case is of particular importance to Germany. On March 15, 2023, he was arrested and detained at Larnaca airport in Cyprus while on his way to visit his family in Sweden. The reason for this was an arrest warrant that was applied for by the Federal Public Prosecutor General in mid-May 2022 and then issued by the Federal Supreme Court. The court is one of the highest legal authorities in Germany. Ayaz is treated like an enemy of the state.
The Ayaz case is not an isolated incident. According to information from the Kurdish news platform ANF, the alleged PKK member Ferit Çelik was extradited from Sweden at the beginning of June. The public prosecutor’s office in Koblenz at least confirms this: The suspect in a preliminary investigation had been arrested in Sweden on the basis of a European arrest warrant and extradited to Germany. The Public Prosecutor General’s Office does not answer whether this is Çelik, referring to data protection.
Another case concerns Mehmet Çakas. On April 10, Çakas was sentenced to two years and ten months in prison at the Higher Regional Court of Celle for “membership of a terrorist organization abroad (PKK)”. The sentence is not yet legally binding. On June 13, Kurdish women’s rights activist Gülhatun Kara was arrested in France following a German extradition request, according to the ANF portal. The public prosecutor’s office in Koblenz confirms the arrest of an accused person in France. For data protection reasons, it remains unclear whether this is Kara.
Torture in Turkish prison
How does it feel for Kenan Ayaz to be in prison again in Germany after being persecuted in Turkey? A smile flits across his face. “Have you looked into my biography?” asks Ayaz. He has told his story in a personal statement to the court.
In 1975, he was born into a Kurdish family in the predominantly Kurdish village of Halaxe, Narli in Turkish, in the province of Mardin, the seventh of eight children. He still remembers the confusion on his first day at school when he couldn’t understand the teachers because, unlike his family and neighbors, they spoke Turkish. “It was the first big shock of my life, perhaps even the first trauma,” Ayaz told the court in Turkish.
When he and the other children spoke Kurdish in the school playground, they were beaten black and blue with a stick by the teachers, Ayaz reports. When clashes between the PKK and the Turkish military became increasingly frequent in the province at the end of the 1980s and his father was repeatedly arbitrarily arrested and interrogated, his parents decided to send him and his younger brother to a school in the tourist resort of Alanya.
On September 9, 1993, the Turkish police arrested him for the first time together with his 13-year-old brother. He was not charged with any acts of violence. He was accused of having worked for two months in a district committee for the PKK. Ayaz denied this. He was then tortured, he told the court according to ANF. “They gave me electric shocks all over my body, especially on my hands and toes. They splashed me with cold water, I had to lie naked on the wet concrete. They forced me to the ground and hit me many times on the soles of my feet.”
Diyarbakir, 1993: The Turkish army stops a demonstration during the Kurdish New Year celebrations Photo: Michiel de Ruiter
According to his lawyer Antonia von der Behrens, he was sentenced to 15 years in prison on the basis of his confession, of which he served more than 11. In 2009, he was imprisoned again after helping a Kurdish friend in the local election campaign. After six months, he was acquitted of the charge of being a PKK member and released.
A politically motivated trial?
In 2010, he was charged along with 150 others in the so-called main trial against the KCK, a sub-organization of the PKK. He flees to Cyprus, where he is recognized as a political refugee. In the years that followed, he repeatedly traveled through Europe to visit friends and family – and to work for the PKK, as the German public prosecutor’s office accused him of doing.
20 years after his first release, he is now back in court. Not in Turkey, but in Germany. The trial began in Hamburg on November 3, 2023. The allegations are similar to those from Turkey. According to ANF, the defense stated at the start of the trial: “The explanation for the fact that Kurds in Germany continue to be intensively persecuted as alleged members of the PKK as terrorists can only be that these criminal proceedings are not in Germany’s domestic interest, but in its foreign policy interest.”
It is an accusation that could hardly be more serious for a constitutional state: the allegation that the judiciary is not controlled by the law, but by political interests. Could it still be true? To understand why a political fugitive like Ayaz, who is said to have primarily helped organize non-violent protests, is being prosecuted with so much effort, you have to go back more than 30 years.
While the Turkish military’s war against the PKK escalated in Turkey in the early 1990s, thousands of Kurdish villages were forcibly evacuated and tens of thousands of people were killed, the PKK tried to use violence to raise awareness for its cause. According to the Office for the Protection of the Constitution, PKK activists carried out around 60 attacks and arson attacks on Turkish diplomatic missions, banks, travel agencies, restaurants and clubs in various German cities almost simultaneously in June 1993.
One Turkish citizen is killed and several people are injured. In June 1993, suspected PKK supporters take hostages in the Turkish Consulate General and demand a public statement from the then German Chancellor Helmut Kohl: he should condemn the Turkish government’s “acts of war” against the Kurds. Due to the arms exports, the PKK regarded Germany as the “number two opponent of the war”. As a result, the PKK was banned from operating in 1993.
Classification of the PKK not up to date
In the mid-90s, there was a turning point. The PKK leader at the time, Abdullah Öcalan, declared that the organization would take German interests into consideration and would no longer use violence on German soil. Since then, violence has decreased massively. Acts such as murder or manslaughter no longer appear in the reports of the Office for the Protection of the Constitution.
The PKK ban has been the subject of fierce debate in Germany for years. The Left Party parliamentary group in the Bundestag had already requested that the ban be lifted in 2014: “In view of ongoing peace negotiations with the Turkish state and the prominent role of the PKK and its affiliated militias in the fight against the terrorist IS in Iraq and Syria”, the classification of the PKK as a terrorist organization by the EU was “outdated and counterproductive in terms of realpolitik”. Nothing has happened since then.
According to the 2023 report on the protection of the con stitution, the PKK mainly uses Germany to hold large-scale events, propagandize on its own behalf and recruit new supporters. Since June 2013, the Office for the Protection of the Constitution is aware of 370 cases of recruitment. According to the Office for the Protection of the Constitution, the PKK is also said to have collected a total of 16 to 17 million euros in its annual fundraising campaign in 2023. This would be used “primarily for the upkeep of the organization, but also for its extensive propaganda apparatus in Europe.”
Demonstration against the PKK ban in Berlin in 2023 Photo: Florian Boillot
The Office for the Protection of the Constitution also writes: “The PKK continues to have an ambivalent relationship to violence. A military presence in the Turkish-Iraqi or Turkish-Syrian border region contrasts with a fundamentally peaceful approach in Germany and Europe. (…) However, the PKK is still able and willing to use violence in Germany, at least occasionally, and to tolerate acts of violence by its young supporters.”
The organization primarily targets right-wing extremist or nationalist Turks such as supporters of the Grey Wolves, which, unlike the PKK, has not yet been banned as an association in Germany. It is not clear from the report on the protection of the constitution whether the attacks on Turkish institutions close to the state by suspected Kurds were actually planned and carried out by PKK groups.
Erdoğan pleased about criminal trial
Kenan Ayaz is not accused of any of these acts. He is not even directly associated with them. The fact that he is nevertheless being prosecuted in Germany is made possible by Section 129b of the German Criminal Code. According to this, members of so-called criminal and terrorist organizations abroad can also be charged in Germany if part of their activity takes place in Germany or if the perpetrators or victims are German citizens.
However, an additional “authorization from the Federal Ministry of Justice (BMJ)” must be granted in order for the Federal Public Prosecutor General to take up the investigation. It is this provision that makes Ayaz’s story so controversial. In his case, it is not only the judiciary that decides whether criminal investigations may be carried out, but also the politicians: investigations may only be carried out if the Federal Ministry of Justice grants authorization for prosecution. This general authorization to prosecute high-ranking PKK cadres was first issued by the Ministry of Justice in 2011 and has not been revoked since.
The persecution also continued during the peace negotiations between the PKK and Turkey between 2012 and 2015. When asked by taz, the BMJ spokesperson wrote: “The granting or non-granting, withdrawal or retention is not subject to any obligation to give reasons.” In addition, “foreign policy concerns and interests of the Federal Government could and may also play a role in the BMJ’s decision”.
Back in 2016, a few months after the EU had concluded the so-called refugee deal with Erdoğan, the Turkish president said in an interview with ARD that he had sent Angela Merkel 4,000 files of alleged terrorists during a visit. Merkel had assured him that the judicial process would continue. During his visit to Berlin in November 2023, according to FAZ, he was pleased about a criminal trial before the Higher Regional Court in Hamburg against a suspected functionary of the Kurdish PKK, but without explicitly mentioning Kenan Ayaz’s name.
What did Attorney General Frank discuss with Erdoğan?
“It must be a great coincidence that the arrest application against my client was filed just a few days before the 2022 NATO summit after a long period of inactivity in the proceedings,” says lawyer Antonia von der Behrens in an interview with taz. At the summit, at which Finland and Sweden officially negotiated NATO membership for the first time, Erdoğan had demanded that Sweden in particular tighten up its anti-terror legislation.
Since then, collecting donations, organizing meeting places, cooking or providing transport have been punishable by law if they benefit the PKK. “After considerable pressure from Erdoğan, Sweden complied with this obvious interference in its domestic affairs in June 2023 with a very far-reaching amendment to the law,” says von der Behrens.
And there is something else strange about the Ayaz case: from July 5 to 7, 2022, just a few days after the NATO summit, former German Attorney General Peter Frank not only met with the Turkish Attorney General and the President of the Turkish Court of Cassation, one of Turkey’s highest courts. He also met with President Erdoğan. This was revealed by research conducted by the Frankfurter Rundschau.
It is not known why this meeting took place so soon after the NATO summit and during the Turkish government’s ongoing foreign policy efforts to take tougher action against the PKK. Von der Behrens suspects that the proceedings against Kenan Ayaz could have been a reason for the Federal Public Prosecutor General “not to come to Ankara empty-handed”.
When asked by taz, the spokeswoman for the Federal Public Prosecutor’s Office referred to Frank’s answers to a small question from the Left Party in August 2022, which stated that the conversation between Frank and Erdoğan “was about the tasks and work of the respective criminal justice systems”. The federal prosecutor did not discuss any specific criminal proceedings with Erdoğan and “it should also be noted that the German government does not comment in detail on the content of confidential meetings with international interlocutors”.
Criticism of Germany’s dealings with the PKK
Sometimes he finds it difficult to understand the logic behind German policy, says Kenan Ayaz. On the one hand, there is Turkey and President Erdoğan, who are trying to “strengthen radical Islam worldwide” and who have already supported Islamist groups in Syria in the past. On the other side are the PKK and the Kurdish fighting units of the YPG in Syria, who have defeated the Islamic State in Syria and are the only party in the region fighting for a democratic system and for values such as gender equality.
He did not understand why Germany was siding with Turkey and still supporting it with weapons, even though the country was repeatedly breaking international law. He cites the Turkish army’s attack on the Syrian-Kurdish city of Afrin in 2018 as an example: “The Turkish army entered Afrin with German Leopard tanks.” Even the scientific service of the German Bundestag questioned at the time whether Turkey’s attacks were compatible with international law.
We would like to talk to Kenan Ayaz about the accusations made against him, but this is not possible in the presence of the LKA official. Nevertheless, it quickly becomes clear during the conversation that he is not interested in distancing himself from the PKK – but rather in questioning Germany’s proportionality in dealing with the PKK.
“I would like Germany to stop treating the PKK like terrorists,” he says. The LKA officer in the visitors’ room intervenes: “Actually, I should stop here.” Ayaz puts his hand on the window to appease her: “Sorry, sorry,” he says quickly. Was he actually active as a cadre for the PKK? That cannot be clarified.
According to lawyer von der Behrens, the prosecution is relying primarily on recorded text messages and phone calls that Ayaz is said to have written or made. She considers the interpretation of the federal prosecutor’s office, according to which Ayaz, as an allegedly high-ranking and conspiratorial cadre, is also said to have appeared under his first name, to be absurd.
At the end of the 30-minute meeting in the stuffy room, Kenan Ayaz’s forehead is beaded with sweat. He is about to be locked up in his cell again for two weeks without being allowed to receive visitors. His sentence is expected in August. He faces up to four and a half years in prison. Only this much is certain: the verdict will not dissuade Kenan Ayaz from his convictions.