Thread by @gezisavunmasi

The audience has been taken to the courtroom. There are still people waiting at the door to enter.

Security guards say only five international and 20 national reporters will be allowed to enter the courtroom. They said it is the court decision.

There is a limit of three lawyers for the defendants.

Osman Kavala and Yigit Aksakoglu, defendants under arrest, were brought to the court. When they entered the courtroom, the audience stood up and applauded.

Presiding Judge: Our goal is to start the trial immediately. There are people who haven't appeared in court for long time.

Osman Kavala and Yiğit Aksakoğlu, defendants under arrest, and the defendants without arrest Mucella Yapici, Cigdem Mater, Inanc Ekmekci, Ali Hakan Altinay, Mine Ozerden, Can Atalay, Tayfun Kahraman and Yigit Ali Ekmekci are in the courtroom.

Kavala's lawyer Koyuncu: Code of criminal procedure has changed. Until March, we couldn't examine the file because the investigation was confidential. When we reached the file, we saw that there was no judicial decision in the TAPEs.

Osman Kavala: Your honors, the accusation for which I have been imprisoned for the past 20 months is predicated upon a series of claims that have no factual basis and defy logic, claims that have been substantiated by evidence.

Osman Kavala: It was claimed that the events at Gezi were planned and financed by Soros as an attempt to overthrow the government, and that I transferred these funds as the director and organizer of the events at Gezi.

OK: Statements like “it was understood that secret weapons were standing at the ready” are found in the indictment. These are claims that violate dignity.

OK: It would not be possible to forget the torture and oppression of the military during coup of 12 September 1980. At no point in my life, I have supported changing government by any means other than free elections.

OK: Over my entire career, I have supported democracy, and I have taken part in the establishment of civil society organizations.

OK: With these organizations, I have supported values that would enable peace, dialogue, and reconciliation among different social groups.

OK: I wrote articles criticizing the lawlessness in the Ergenekon and Balyoz cases. In activities I have carried out for nearly 40 years, all my statements to the public relayed the truth as it is without distorting it.

OK: I have never conducted activities for a secret structure and I have never had a relationship with any secret organization.

OK: I am not speaking in code. All of my conversations were conducted from the same cell phone and all of my exchanges from the same computer.

OK: It is not possible to understand how the counsel for the prosecution arrived at the notion of a coup.

OK: In my interrogation 20 months ago, the questions regarding economic relationships in the indictment were not directed to me, I had no knowledge of them. The prosecutor did not interrogate me before preparing the fiction in the indictment.

OK: In my interrogation at the police station, it was said that the recording of my telephone conversations were taken after 30 July 2012. But the recordings concerning the Gezi events are from a later time.

OK: There is no proof offered in the indictment to substantiate that I was preparing a plan for such an attempt.

OK: I have no relationship whatsoever with Otpor, and my sole contact with Alabora was two telephone conversations that took place after the Gezi events had already begun. The claim that my time abroad is related to the Gezi events has no foundation.

OK: In the indictment, it is claimed that, in order to execute this plan, I carried out activities with the Open Society Foundation, of which I am a member of the board of directors and which is financed by Soros, and with Anadolu Kültür, of which I am the board president.

OK: There is no proof whatsoever that those who participated in the different activities of different organizations and in collaboration were acting in secret, or that they received their commands from me.

OK: In none of my conversations did I command any actions. The claims are utterly fantastic. The fiction of the indictment has no logical foundation. I know some of the people on trial here from projects that I carried out with Anadolu Kültür.

OK: The claims that the Gezi events were a scheme aiming to overthrow the government, and that this scheme was carried out by people working at different organizations, calls to mind the Ergenekon case.

OK: This is not a coincidence. It is apparent that the prosecutors who asserted this claim were FETÖ/PDY militants. This was specified in the indictment with the claim that “all the evidence must be re-evaluated”

OK: But what is clear is that not just the tapes, but the text of the indictment were prepared by FETÖ/PDY militants

OK: As can be expected, the practice of drafting indictments without evidence based on police reports that used newspaper articles is a practice from the time when the FETÖ organization dominated the courts.

OK: The claim in the indictment that Soros’ financing was criminal was based on the idea that it had become a mode of extortion. But this issue doesn’t overcome the absence of evidence; to the contrary, it highlights it.

OK: It would not be possible for such a financial to take place without leaving traces. There are no resources that were transferred through me to the Gezi events.

OK: All of the funds that we received from the Open Society Foundation were used for cultural projects, exhibitions, etc. All of Anadolu Kültür’s accounts have passed audits. The account activities between Open Society and Anadolu AŞ in 2013 are no different from other years.

OK: It is public knowledge as to which projects were allocated the 2.13 million lira received that year. None of them has any ties to Gezi.

OK: Prosecutor’s claim that Soros funded Gezi, which forms basis of the accusations against me, are not rooted in any evidence. The police statement dated 6 March 2018, which describes the MASAK report, asserts that suspects’ names were not found among those in money transfers

OK: What evidence emerged after my arrest to render the MASAK report insignificant? The argument in the indictment does not square with factual circumstances, it is not supported by the evidence.

OK: On 26 June 2013, Germiyanoğlu calls me and tells me about some activities he is thinking of carrying out. He says, We would like to invite you in order to expand the Gezi forums.

OK: After speaking with me, he relates to Aksakoğlu that I said nothing concrete. It is clear that at no point was I making any kind of command.

OK: I understood the thoughts he expressed about broadening and deepening the movement quite naturally as the deepening and popularization of the ideas at the forums.

OK: Despite this, the claims about “the deepening and broadening of the Gezi protests” are written as though they’ve come from my own mouth.

OK: When Özerden called me he discussed buying gas masks for young people. I told him that if a bank account was opened, I would provide support. In the indictment, it is claimed that I opened a couple of bank accounts through Özerden and gathered up money.

OK: It is clear that whoever wrote the denunciation letter was someone who listened to my conversation with Özerden. Because no such account was opened. In the audits of the Open Society Foundation, as well, it is clear that absolutely no funds were used for that purpose.

OK: These are not the only manipulations in the indictment. I likewise had no knowledge of meetings at Garaj Istanbul or Anadolu Cam. On what grounds is it believed that this could have been done through Anadolu Kültür AŞ?

OK: The documentary film production referenced in the indictment did not take place. Even if it had, it would offer no foundation to the indictment. Anadolu Kültür AŞ supports art projects, not agitation; it encourages viewers to look at social issues with a new perspective.

OK: A film project on the Gezi events was not conceived as a vehicle for popularizing Gezi but as a film to be shown at international festivals.

OK: It is impossible to draw a relationship between my support for the establishment of a prospective media organ with what is claimed in the indictment. The goal in this project was to create an environment for journalists who had lost their jobs.

I conducted a few interviews on this project. An interview concerning a collaboration with The Guardian illuminates just what kind of media organ was envisioned.

OK: None of these examples demonstrates that I, or Anadolu Kültür, transferred finances to the Gezi events. This claim relies on a number of newspaper articles that suggest Soros supported Gezi.

OK: This claim was first made by some political actors, and then the press made it need. But there is no objective reality to any of the news stories on this claim.

OK: In order to bolster his argument, the prosecutor makes the baseless claim that Soros was active in Egypt and Tunisia and that he was an important actor in their revolutionary processes.

OK: Not only is there no concrete basis to claim that Soros was active in these places, it also ignores the popular movements in those countries. These revolutions all took place by internal dynamics.

OK: Soros’ name appears [in the SETA report] as one of the external actors regarding the coup against Morsi. But while it examines the popular movements in Tunisia and Egypt, it pays no heed to the fact that there had not previously been free elections in those countries.

OK: Mass protests in countries where the institutions of democracy work and where free elections take place do not cause shifts in power. The Gezi events have been the topic of many national and international academic works.

OK: Gezi events have been characterized as the reaction of a people who thought they did not have the right to speak on topics affecting their daily lives, and who felt the deficit of their representation.

OK: This approach drew attention to the reactions to the projects that restricted public space and commodified city space, as well as the reaction to the neoliberal approaches that emerged at the same time.

OK: In one research project that examined the contents and usage of twitter messages, it was shown that these messages were used primarily for sharing information, and that there were very few messages intending to manipulate.

OK: The common point of these articles is that the Gezi events emerged spontaneously, without a plan, that the protests were not tied horizontally to a center and had no leader.

OK: None of the research done up until now has claimed that the Gezi events were a previously planned project intended to overthrow the government.

OK: Parks in city centers have great significance for the residents of the city, and in contemporary democracies, such parks are inviolable. Gezi Park, too, was a very valuable space.

OK: The definition of the Gezi events offered in the indictment is different from the one offered in previous evaluations, scientific research, and the report of the Human Rights Center of Turkey.

OK: The first protest in Gezi Park began when the tents where some young people were staying were torn down and the wall across from the Divan Hotel was set on fire.

OK: In the self-defense that the government sent to the European Court of Human Rights, they claimed that the Gezi Park protests were peaceful at first, but were later abused.

OK: The most important aspect mentioned in the Turkey Human Rights Report was the police intervention. Despite the fact that Ministry of the Interior declared that tear gas should not be fired directly at people, the canisters were fired directly at people and many were wounded.

OK: The means of using force, such as tear gas, were used disproportionately and affected the peaceable demonstrators participating in the protests as well as those who had no connection to the demonstration. (These are all claims from the report by Human Rights Center of Turkey)

OK: The fact that police intervention was such an important element in the growth of the protests is a sign that the Gezi events were not planned beforehand. On the contrary, it shows that the police must have played a role in the scheme.

OK: There can be different interpretations of the aims of the demonstrations regarding what played a role in all the different activities during the Gezi events. Defining Gezi as a planned attempt by a center, against the objective facts, ignores all of these differences.

OK: It is unacceptable that the counsel for the prosecution, while it makes accusations about a coup, is recognizing such an intangible evaluation as the basis for the accusations, just as in the Ergenekon cases.

OK: The conspicuously strange thing about the indictment is that it does not include George Soros among its suspects claimed to have organized against the government with me, nor does it include his statement.

OK: This situation shows that the indictment is trying to find an excuse for my incarceration-turned-punishment, and to delegitimization the movements of the people who participated in the Gezi events.

OK: I believe that our activities are legitimate civil society activities that strengthen democracy. Maintaining Gezi Park as a park up to the present is in keeping with the government’s policy of increasing the number of parks and gardens.

OK: I am no different from the hundreds of thousands of people who took part in Gezi, and I demand my release and exoneration.
—end of Osman Kavala’s testimony—