The 23 communist prisoners who had been imprisoned after attacks on our party and revolutionary socialist organisations on 8-12 September 2006 were taken to court on 5-6 June 2008 for the third time. At this hearing at the 10th Heavy Penalty Court of Besiktas, Istanbul, the prisoners started to hold their defence speeches. At the end of the hearing 3 prisoners were decided to be released. The date for the next hearing was set for 24 October 2008.
While the 10 September Prisoners declared in their defence speeches that they will continue to raise their socialist ideas, they convicted the Turkish bourgeois state and the constitutional system.
In his speech Seyfi Polat of the communist prisoners defended our party MLCP and all its peaceful and violent actions and activities.
We are publishing the shortened version of Seyfi Polat's defence speech. Full version will be published in English soon.

Answer to the indictment
Public Prosecutor of the Republic in Istanbul Ali Cengiz Haciosmanoglu's indictment is 292 pages long, and with all its spirit, it corresponds to the stenographing of the political police.
There is no doubt that being the stenographer of the political police, whose name and history have become identical to damned crimes such as torture, rape, killing through torture, extra-judicial executions, forced disappearances, briefly, all crimes against humanity, does not bring honour to anyone, in the contrary, leads him to shame.
The 292 pages long accusation of the public prosecutor is a document proofing his alienation to the country he lives in, to the workers, peasants, labourers who produce anything consumed in this country as well as to the situation and the pain our people are facing. This alienation makes the public prosecutor who prepared the indictment more royalist than the king in defending the yoke of the imperialists and first of all of US imperialism, the exploitation and plundering of the collaborating capital oligarchy, the injustices and brutality of the fascist regime, while he is evaluating the activities and actions of our party.
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Demagogy of terrorism, violence of the oppressors and the oppressed
Whenever it is inevitable to mention the name of the MLCP in the indictment prepared in the name of the ruling forces of the capitalist exploitation and robbery system, of the fascist oppression and tyranny regime and their imperialist masters, the public prosecutor Haciosmanoglu's first sentence would be "the armed terror organisation called MLCP"!
The ideologists of the imperialist bourgeoisie and leading political spokesmen point out that especially during the period since the 1990ies with the term "terror" they have referred to "violence without any aim" and "violence for the sake of violence". However, what mystery it is, they have been trying to denounce all parties, groups and guerrilla forces who had to make use of means of violence in the struggle with a political-social program aiming at the liberation of the working class and the oppressed or who fought against the imperialist occupiers with arms in their hands as "terrorist organisations". According to them, even states not bowing in front of US imperialism such as Cuba for example are "terrorists"!
If you ask these bourgeois demagogysts, they will say that the oppressed and exploited workers, labourers convicted to poverty and misery, the people under imperialist yoke and the nations living under the colonial slavery yoke do not have the right to put an end to this situation. At the most they can demand partial changes within the system as allowed. However, if they are not content with that and join the struggle for political or national freedom or social revolution and they have to make use of revolutionary violence in this struggle against imperialist bourgeois violence, they will be defined as "terrorists" and their political struggle "terrorism"!
There is no doubt that this is an absurd and dirty lie. It is a cheap demagogy.
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The state in a society with classes means the use of violence organised for the profits of the ruling class. Institutions such as the army, police organisation, judgment, the courts, prisons and bureaucracy are means of the violence organised by the ruling class. The apparatus called state is not an occurrence of itself but the sum of all these.
All states of the exploiters consider the monopoly of violence or force as the requirement of being the state, of state hegemony and authority, and want to have it in their hands. Through laws, they make it have an official legitimation, a legal identity. In this sense, the state is the monopoly of using violence. Because of this reason, any violence by the oppressed, any attack on the state hegemony, apart from what the ruling classes use through the state, does not harmonise with the existence of the state and is considered as "terror" and "terrorism" which is the most popular expression of today.
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The fascist bourgeois convictions of the indictment cannot overshadow the legitimacy of the MLCP
The indictment that does not define the MLCP as a party rejecting the bourgeois system and fascist regime and wanting to overthrow them, but as an "armed terror organisation" has no validity.
Our party gets its legitimacy from the struggle for the liberation of the working class and oppressed from exploitation and political tyranny. Not considering legitimate the longings, profits and demands of the working class, labourers of the cities and labouring peasantry belonging to their class, social, national and gender identity, who are the creators of all wealth produced on this soil and present the great majority of the population, could only be the expression of the political dominance of the exploitation and of a bunch of parasites on our people. But this is exactly what is not legitimate in front of labouring manhood. And can it be said that anything legal is always legitimate?
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Therefore, anything illegal can't be labelled as "illegitimate".
The MLCP is an illegal, but a thoroughly legitimate revolutionary party. Yes, it was not founded according to the laws of the system, and it did not make itself fit into the borders and moulds of these reactionary-fascist laws. Because of this reason, the defenders of the exploitation and oppression system can persecute the party in the name of the ruling forces, but leaving on the side that they manage to put an end to the legitimacy of our party, they will not manage even to overshadow it a little bit. A party can be legal or illegal. The criterion for being a party is not legality, but some objective criterions.
Every party has a program, a statute/internal functioning, cadres and organs, members, criterions/rules for membership, strategy, basic tactics and approaches, current tactics. Parties are organisations that have a united will and action
The MLCP has all these characteristics. With its uninterrupted, consistent and active political work, with its organisation that spread in Turkey and up to Northern Kurdistan, its steadily working organisations and organs, its rules, publications, its congresses and conferences, our party is among those respected parties fighting for freedom and socialism.
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The illegality of the MLCP and its organisation on a clandestine basis are based not on any fetish but on the need of ensuring the freedom of struggle for the emancipation of the working class from being wage slaves and the oppressed from the political yoke and injustice.
If our party were not illegal and organised on a clandestine basis, capital and fascism would not have any difficulties to make the MLCP inactive -if the party does not deviate from its program, strategy and political line- and annihilate it physically by using any violence, provocation and conspiracy such as done to all active revolutionary parties fighting against the ruling power. What makes them hinder to reach this dirty aim are illegality and clandestine acting. Nevertheless, they have made use of all methods of tyranny and violence against our party for years such as seen in the example of Mustafa Suphi , the revolutionary movement of '71 and its leaders on behalf of it and since then until now, and they have committed crimes against humanity. However, in vain! The MLCP will continue to be illegal and clandestine in order to protect its freedom of struggle against the wage slavery system, exploitation, social, national and injustices and fascism and imperialism.
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For the MLCP, Marxism-Leninism is the basis. Marxism-Leninism is not a dogma or a crowd of frozen dead formulations but a scientific guide. Because of that, the MLCP puts the historical and dialectical materialist method before anything. It acts with the conscious that otherwise one cannot be a Marxist and give Marxist-Leninist answers to questions and problems of the period the world and society are living in.
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With the victory of the revolution, the MLCP aims at starting the process of socialization of the means of production, extinguishing any kind of exploitation of and domination on human by human as well as the bourgeois ideologists' influences, dependent on the conscious, will and preparation of the working class as well as on the determination and success of the working class to lead the poor in the cities and countryside; in other words, starting the period of socialism.
Our party's final aim is, dependently on the socialist achievements in the world and under the conditions of abundance created by using all science and technology for society, to achieve a world with an unlimited brotherhood of humanity, where the enslaving subordination of the individual to the division of labor is over, the antithesis between mental and physical labor, between city and countryside, has vanished, where culture becomes the common property of everyone, labor has become a delight and life's prime want, where people do not rule people but things, total freedom is won for humanity, where the classes, the state and national fences do not exist anymore; scientific expression of which is called a communist society.
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You can kill the militants of the MLCP, you can imprison them and weaken their activities for some time at a particular level because of this or that reason, but you cannot stop the MLCP that is the flag of freedom and socialism, of the demands, longings and dreams of the working class and the oppressed, that is against capitalist exploitation, fascism, the yoke of denial and colonization, the patriarchal chains on the women, social injustices and the imperialist yoke.
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The ruling forces of the exploiting system and fascist regime behind the indictment and their imperialist masters will not save themselves from dreaming of the MLCP nightmare.
The laws of class struggle are continuing to function. The struggle continues. The victory will be those who raise the flag of freedom, justice and equality for the people, the working class and the oppressed will win.