from thefreeonline on 9th Feb 2024 by Sh-S at Hawar News /ANHA) and Barış Demir at WSWS
On October 10 of last year, 2023, a global campaign was launched in 74 centers around the world under the slogan “Freedom for Abdullah Ocalan, the political solution to the Kurdish issue.”
In this context, a series of events began in northern Kurdistan and Turkey to support this campaign.
Under the same campaign slogan, a number of activists in Turkish prisons in Turkey and northern Kurdistan began a hunger strike last November 27.
In the cities of Wan, Amed, Merdin, Mersin, Adana, Istanbul and Izmir, justice sit-ins continue under the slogan “We will break isolation for justice, and we will be the voice of prisons for peace,” which were organized by the families of the hunger strikers.
The political prisoners are carrying out a rotational hunger strike, calling for the liberation of Abdullah Öcalan, the leader of the banned Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), and a resolution to the Kurdish predicament.
The hunger strike will end next February 15, according to the strikers. February 15 signifies the day Öcalan was brought to Turkey from Kenya, where he sought refuge after months on the run in 1999.
Öcalan has written a series of works which have directly molded and extended the Kurdish fight against severe repression. He is credited with moving the PKK from Stalinism to a unique horizontally powered communal system called Democratic Confederalism, ending calls for a new state and crucially empowering women at all levels.
Ocalan is lauded as the “Nelson Mandela” of the Kurds, and despite being imprisoned now for 25 years has huge moral support and led the PKK in two long ceasefires and a ‘Kurdish Spring’.
Finally Turkey cracked down on the Kurdish ceasefire, bombing Kurdish cities in Turkey and launching three invasions into Syria, colonizing and ‘ethnic cleansing‘ the Kurdish population of Rojava into internal refugee camps.
The ongoing campaign, mirrored in countries like Germany and France, aims to draw attention to the Kurdish issue, emphasizing the pursuit of a comprehensive solution. (TY/VK)
Rojava is a Beacon of Hope. And so is Abdullah Öcalan
Reyhan Gök presented a report prepared by the Coordination for Monitoring and Follow-up of Hunger Strikes and listed the demands of the hunger strikers as:
‘1) An end to human rights violations in prisons in Turkey; 2) Fixing of the aggravated conditions of execution; 3) An end to the long isolation of Abdullah Öcalan in İmralı High Security Closed Prison, family and lawyer visits; and 4) A democratic solution to the Kurdish question.’
Gök stated that the government of President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan should consider the hunger strikers’ demands before the process reaches a more dangerous point, adding, ‘The political power [Erdoğan government] will be responsible for the sad consequences that will arise regarding the prisoners’ right to health and life.”
Erdogan is presently ordering a devastating drone and bombing campaign against the 100k strong Syrian Defense Forces /SDF) multi ethnic coalition in the AANES, the blockaded autonomous Rojava area of NE Syria.
Erdogan is accused of verbally leading mass resistance to the ongoing Gaza Genocide while inb reality expanding trade and shipments to the Israeli elite.
Öcalan, leader of the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), who is kept in solitary confinement, has not been allowed to meet with his lawyers for four and a half years and with his family for almost three years due to “disciplinary measures” that the authorities have not disclosed.
He has been imprisoned on İmralı Island in the Marmara Sea since 1999, when he was captured in a CIA-backed Turkish operation. Öcalan is considered the only person who can resolve the fierce anti Kurd repression and the PKK resistance.
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Hunger strike in Turkey
a more detailed report
Barış Demir
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2023/12/22/xnwt-d22.html
The Erdoğan government was a key supporter of the CIA-orchestrated regime-change war attempting to overthrow Syrian President Bashar al-Assad in 2011, which killed more than 500,000 people.
At the same time, Erdoğan’s NATO-backed ‘peace process’ with the PKK was collapsed in 2015 when Washington turned the People’s Protection Units (YPG) into its main proxy force in Syria.
The YPG and womens YPJ also recognise Öcalan as their leader and, together with the PKK, is under the umbrella of the Kurdistan Communities Union (KCK).
Although the resistance is anti-separatist Erdogan touts a fear of an potential emergence of a US-backed Kurdish state in Syria could trigger similar sentiments among Kurds in Turkey, but the reality is that the PKK is blocking Turkey’s boasted imperial expansionism in the Middle East..
Kurdish feminist mayor Ayşe Gökkan sentenced to 22.5 yrs jail on blatant false charges
Since 2015, a crackdown and arrests has been launched against legal Kurdish politicians while the Turkish army and police moved to violently crush the YPG in northern Syria and the PKK in Turkey’s Kurdish provinces, occuping in 4 areas, as well as ongoing bombing raids and illegal bases in Iraq.
Nuray Özdoğan and Öztürk Türkdoğan, spokespersons of the Legal and Human Rights Commission of the Kurdish nationalist People’s Equality and Democracy Party (DEM Party, formerly HDP-People’s Democratic Party), released a report on the state crackdown since 2015.
At least 22,818 party members have been detained since 2015 and at least 4,334 people have been arrested, including co-chairs, MPs, provincial and district co-chairs, party officials and ordinary members.
The arrests include two party co-chairs, 24 MPs and 30 members of the party leadership.
The report highlights that 93 mayors elected on March 30 2014 were arrested and ‘trustees’ appointed in 95 municipalities; 43 mayors elected on March 31, 2019 were arrested and trustees appointed in 48 municipalities; and currently 17 mayors, seven MPs and 14 other leaders are in prison.
The report also details acts of violence against the Kurdish movement in 2015. These include the Ankara train station massacre, in which over 100 were killed in bomb attacks, and the Suruç massacre, in which 34 people were killed. In 2015-2016, many Kurdish cities and towns were subjected to curfews and terrorised by state and paramilitary forces.
While these operations, which displaced hundreds of thousands of civilians, are nowhere near the scale of the Israeli genocide in Gaza, the methods of urban warfare are similar.
The Socialist Equality Group (SEG) has well-documented and irreconcilable political differences with the pro-imperialist and pro-NATO Kurdish bourgeois nationalist movements. But these do not in any way diminish our opposition to state repression. The SEG calls on workers and youth to demand in principle the release of all political prisoners, including Kurdish nationalists. This is about basic democratic rights.
This struggle cannot be advanced by appealing to the capitalist political establishment and by negotiations behind closed doors, whether with Erdoğan or with the bourgeois opposition led by the Kemalist Republican People’s Party (CHP).
The crackdown launched by the Erdoğan government in 2015 was carried out with the active support of the CHP. The CHP backed several authorisations for cross-border invasions into Syria and Iraq targeting Kurdish militias.
It also provided the government with crucial votes in the passage of the constitutional amendment to lift the immunity of Kurdish MPs. The Kurdish nationalist movement, which had previously negotiated and cooperated with Erdoğan, nevertheless saw fit to support CHP candidates in both the local elections in 2019 and the presidential elections this year.
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