The eight hearing of the so-called “KCK (Kurdistan Communities Union) Press Committee” case is being resumed at Istanbul 15th High Criminal Court in Silivri Prison Complex.

46 workers of the Kurdish press, including those for Dicle News Agency (DİHA), Fırat News Agency (ANF), Özgür Gündem, Azadiya Welat, Demokratik Modernite and Fırat Distribution, were arrested in the scope of a KCK operation on 20 December 2011. Twenty among them are under arrest ever since.

The hearing which is also being monitored by many journalists and press workers began on Tuesday with ANF (Fırat News Agency) reporter Zeynep Ceren Kuray's statement of defense.

Explaining the reason why she spoke Kurdish while answering the questions the court directed during previous trials, Kuray said that; “It doesn't matter whether my parents are Turkish or Kurdish, I embrace any language that is denied presence and the right to live. Defending a language's right to live means to me defending the humanistic ethics that has been thought to me since my childhood”.

Describing mother tongue as a person's identity, culture and reason for being, ANF reporter Kuray said this is an undeniable right that cannot be prevented nor denied. Kuray said she protested the provision of translation charges by defendants who speak their mother tongue in KCK trials, and defended that “this is racism”.

I was born in 1978, into a Turkey shaken by the footsteps of the fascistic military coup, Kuray said and noted that her family had to move to France because of the “warrant of murder” issued for her father Sarp Kuray, and the unending threats her mother received.

Kuray said she herself, like all other immigrant families, got her share from racism in France, and added that; “The labelling of a person as a mess and the insults due to his/her identity inflicted a wound inside us at very young age. This wound later gave way to a burst of anger and I learned that there is no need to be an organization in order to object to racism”.