Tag: pkk anti terrorists

300 on Hunger Strike – How Ocalan Transformed the PKK into Anti-Terrorists

Right now over 300 people, mostly Kurdish prisoners in Turkey , are on indefinite hunger strike, and many of them are reaching the stage of permanent health damage and death.
They are striking not to protest their obvious innocence or the shocking conditions, but for the right of their leader, Ocalan, to have contact with the outside world.
That seems a strange thing to die for, but Ocalan in the past has declared ceasefires with the Turkish State which have lasted years and sparked a promising peace process.
Ocalan above all is responsible for rejecting terrorism, stalinism and the fight for a new state in favour of ‘municipal anarchist’ communal ideas and feminist emancipation which have swept through the 15 million Kurdish population.
So when the hunger strikers demand Ocalan be allowed to speak they are demanding the first step in a new peace process, and the end of the ongoing anti Kurdish pogrom in Turkey and the north of Syria.
But because the PKK is branded as terrorist by the US they get little international support.Turkey is the real terrorist, it certainly has a poor human rights record, with documented massacres or mass killings of Kurds in 1930, 1978, 1987, 2009, 2011, and 2016.
It has repressed and discriminated for decades against its Kurdish population, including by trying to destroy its separate culture. Continue reading “300 on Hunger Strike – How Ocalan Transformed the PKK into Anti-Terrorists”