Since the day we were founded, we have been exposed to dozens of attacks. Our concerts are forbidden. Our activities, our signing days, were attacked by the police. Our institutions, cultural centres are raided. In our case, dozens of charges have been laid against us. We were taken into custody, we were tortured. We were jailed. Our institutions were sealed up and closed.

Our albums are forbidden, their sale is blocked. Listeners are jailed for listening to Grup Yorum songs, it is considered a crime. Organising Grup Yorum concerts, distributing concert tickets; even going to a concert was considered a crime. There have been people arrested and imprisoned for doing that.

The AKP has stepped up attacks because of its crisis caused by its inability to rule, and even the state of emergency continued for 20 months has not been a remedy. Eleven members of our group were arbitrarily arrested and put in prison without evidence. Our members who were released were again detained, again imprisoned. But despite everything we resist, we produce, we continue to produce and we will continue. The AKP is continuing its attacks, unable to endure us, and this attack uses the basest methods of psychological warfare.

There is a list published by the Ministry of the Interior: “List of wanted terrorists”. Hundreds of people on this list are accused of being “terrorists” when there is no judgment against them, and they are showing their photos, birthdates and birthplaces. They prepared the list in five different categories. Each has a different colour: red, blue, green, orange and grey. The Ministry of Interior says it will give a reward of from 300,000 to 4 million Turkish lira for each “terrorist”.

The grey list includes Grup Yorum members İnan Altin, Selma Altin, Ali Araci, İbrahim Gökcek, Emel Yesilirmak and Ihsan Cibelik. We are sure that if our friends currently in jail were outside, they too would have been put on the list. The AKP line of rhetoric would present us as marginal, terrorist and seek to belittle us in the eyes of the people. You are very wrong and you once again have struck a stone with an axe. If Grup Yorum came in today, if there have been fascist governments, the support of the people has come from solidarity. Every word we say has come from the heart of the people. To say “terrorist” to Grup Yorum is to humiliate the people, to ignore the people. These people will show you what it means to humiliate the people. We were always among the people while you were living in the palace where you ate and there was no limit to your clownishness. Can you go out among the people? You cannot.

Since September, an informer-liar named Berk Ercan has had hundreds of people detained and and nearly 150 people have been jailed in our country. They tried to get people to “confess”, to “inform” when they detained them and jailed those who would not accept this dishonour. But they did not cooperate, so no results were gained from the attack. For this reason, detentions and imprisonment are still ongoing; this time they are trying to buy the people with money. Report them, and we will reward you…

But there is something they do not know; Grup Yorum is the people. Millions attended the Independent Turkey concert. You cannot make us surrender us with rewards, informers, prices on heads. Informing is the most dishonourable business in the world. Our people are honourable. They will not denounce their own children. They hate both the informer and those who get them to inform. They do not say hello, they spit on them if they see them.

We are not witnessing for the first time the Ministry of the Interior targeting those who do not bow down, those who do not surrender to the big lies of the AKP fascists. A few months ago; we know that in the hundreds of days of the hunger strike, Nuriye Gülmen and Semih Özakca were declared by their insitutions to be terrorists in a pamphlet they issued. These lies, full of slander, and worthless text have no legitimacy in the eyes of the people. You cannot undermine the legitimacy of Nuriye and Semih’s resistance; the revolutionaries, the lists of the people you are targeting, the artists of the people. You are trying to make the people surrender, by intimidating the artists of the people; but you are the ones who are really afraid. It is your fear of the people, of the artists of the people. You fear revolutionaries, our thought terrifies you. We will make your fears even greater.

Is it terrorism for millions to sing about a democratic Turkey, or is it terrorism to hand this country to the imperialists, and its collaborators? “To live like a tree, single and free, and to like brothers in a forest”. Is it to kill people in the street, in the middle of the night, in their houses, to bury 301 miners under the ground, and kick and punch the workers’ families, to kill 2,000 workers during the state of emergency?

Is it terrorism to leave behind an honourable future for children; is it every day to create a country where children cannot be menaced with harassment or rape, or is it terrorism to back perverts who rape 15-year-olds, and to declare these perverts innocent?

Is it terrorism to defend and fight for socialism, the alternative to this inhuman system? Or to advocate the continuation of this order and condemn the people to life under the starvation limit, importing meat, wheat, chickpeas, dry beans and garlic, ie. products that we can produce in our soil, to ban theatrical plays and music concerts?

Who is a terrorist? You are the terrorists! Not us. We are patriotic folk artists of this country, because we are like that, Grup Yorum, this is the way we will go on. And we will demand an accounting. We will go back to those squares, the stadiums, and it will not be in the distant future at all. We will add millions to millions.

In summary we ask; who is a terrorist? Grup Yorum, or the the collaborationist fascist rulers, especially the AKP, who are greedy, murderous and who humiliate the people?

Finally; we would like to say that we will expose the lies and slanders of AKP fascism and the Ministry of the Interior with the prices they place on peoples’ heads. With all kinds of legal and legitimate struggle we will expose their lies and slanders everywhere we are, whether inside or outside the country.