Political prisoner Selman Gulbahce asked the judge for a translator in Turkish court on Sept. 1. Gulbahce wanted to speak in Kurdish, his mother tongue. However, the judge allegedly got very upset at the request. Based on Gulbahce’s writings after the court session, the judge said, “There is no Kurd. You have been educated in this country’s schools. You are impudent, insolent. Leave my courtroom.”

And according to the reports, it did not end there. Justice Sevval Akkas then turned to the gendarmerie soldiers in the courtroom and said, “They are killing your comrades every day. They are killing the police. As a woman, I am battling them, and you guys are just standing there and watching. They are like the Armenians. If they are not stopped in time, God knows what will happen.”

The alleged statement of the judge can be seen as part of a spine-chilling trend in Turkey.

During the presidential election campaign of August 2014, then-Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, now president, said, “Let the Turk say he is a Turk, and the Kurd say he is a Kurd in Turkey. What is wrong with that? In the past, they spread rumors about me. They said I am a Georgian. Excuse me, but they have said even uglier things. They have called me Armenian.”