B]German Foundations Await Verdict in Turkey Espionage Case [/B]
Representatives of the foundations will be back in court on Tuesday
Members of the four German foundations accused of espionage in Turkey are expected to hear their fate on Tuesday when a court in Ankara delivers its verdict on the case.
A Turkish court will pass judgement on Tuesday on members of four German political foundations and a group of local environmentalists who have been accused of threatening the security of the State of Turkey.
Nine people from the organizations that stand accused - the Friedrich Ebert Stiftung, the Friedrich Naumann Stiftung, the Heinrich Böll Stiftung and the Konrad Adenauer Stiftung - are charged with promoting separatist tendencies in Turkey and supporting a group of environmentalists from the village of Bergama in western Anatolien. The Germans are accused of working with the environmetalists to prevent the extraction of gold from a mine in the province.
The environmentalists, six of whom have also been charged, have long protested against the use of cyanide in gold mines in their region and have caused embarrassing disruptions across the Turkish capital. It is their activity and the alleged partnership with other organizations that the prosecutors feel constitute the charge against the Germans of supporting "state enemies" and "conspiring against the security of Turkey". If found guilty of the charges, the accused could face jail sentences of up to 15 years.
The Turkish prosecutors have also claimed that Mazlumder, an Islamic-leaning rights group, was one of the Germans' chief collaborators. "We have nothing to do with the foundations. We have never received a single penny from them. It's a joke," said Yilmaz Ensaroglu, the organisation's chairman in an interview with the British daily The Independent.
"This trial has been orchestrated by forces which want to poison relations between Turkey and the EU, by those who stand to lose influence if Turkey joins the EU and becomes a more democratic place."
Spying accusations brought to court in December
The court process began in December 2002 when the defendants were officially charged in Ankara. The Turkish prosecutors have since been putting their case, claiming that the nine foundation members and the six accused Bergama environmentalists are guilty of "spying and working to undermine the Turkish State."
It is believed that investigations began into the role of the foundations, which seek to promote civil society and bilateral cooperation, after claims of espionage and coercion surfaced in "The German Foundations and the Bergama Affair", a book by a self-appointed Secret Services expert and Turkish scientist, Necip Hablemitoglu.
Book calls foundations "centers of agitation"
In his book, Hablemitoglu accuses German foundations in Ankara of spying and having close contacts with ecological, Kurdish or fundamentalist Islamic groups. He describes the German foundations as "centers of agitation against Turkey" and said that the foundations were supporting the protests against the use of cyanide "to the advantage of Germany." Hablemitoglu has not been able to support his claims in court as he was assassinated in front of his house in Ankara a week before the case went to court.
Those who have taken part in the prosecution case have been equally damning. The former public prosecutor Nuh Mete Yüksel, who withdrew from the prosecution due to a scandal, said in his indictment in December, "The foundations are the most effective and dependable crutches of German foreign policy. When one observes their activities in Ankara closely, it's clear that there are grave signs that this is a case of espionage."
Yüksel said at the beginning of the trail that the foundations acted against the country's national interests and forged close ties with ethnic and religious groups with the aim of breaking up Turkey, actions he called "legal espionage". He added that they were charged with "creating a secret alliance against Turkey's unity and the secular republic's regime".
Germans dismiss charges as "absurd"
Of course the German government and the foundations have both dismissed the claims. The German ambassador to Turkey, Rudolf Schmidt, has said that the accusations against the foundation members are " baseless, unfounded and even absurd".
Wulf Schönbohm of the Konrad Adenauer Stiftung described the accusations as "rubbish" and "absurd and laughable" in a newspaper interview in October last year before the case went to court. The Konrad Adenauer Stiftung has been working since 1983 to help Turkey get closer to the EU.(source:
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