Abdullah Öcalan, And All the Other Political Prisoners Must Be Released!

Abdullah Öcalan, also known as Apo (“uncle”), is born 4 April 1949, in eastern Turkey. He is a founding member of the militant Marxist-Leninist “Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK)” in 1978, which was based in northern Syria from 1979 to 1998 as a sanctuary, and led part of the Kurdish political movement from there.

During the 1980s, the Turkish state began a program of forced assimilation of its Kurdish population. In protest against this fascist act, the PKK began an armed rebellion against the Turkey, and in connection with it began attacking its military forces.[1]

After the start of an international conspiracy plot and Turkey’s threat of a military attack on Syria to arrest and kill Abdullah Öcalan, he was forced to leave Syria on October 9, 1998. He tried to apply for political asylum first in Russia and later in Italy, Holland, Germany, France and Greece, but none of these states accepted his request, then he had to go to Nairobi in Kenya (East Africa).

Based on the coordination and cooperation of several international security agencies including the United States, Abdullah Öcalan was kidnapped there and handed over to the military security forces of the fascist Turkish state on February 15, 1999. He was initially sentenced to death in a sham trial, accused of “treason”, but later the death sentence was commuted to life imprisonment, as Turkey was about to join the “European Union”. Since then, he has been in Imrali, a small ultra-high security prison island in the south of the Sea of Marmara, within Bursa Province. Due to the freedom- and equal minded world opinion, he was only able to contact his family by phone on April 27, 2020, and March 25, 2021, and since then there is no news whatsoever about his health.

Abdullah Öcalan after some time in prison abandoned his Marxist-Leninist and Stalinist beliefs and changed them by being influenced of the social theorists such as Murray Bookchin, Immanuel Wallerstein and Hannah Arendt. He calls his ideal society the “Democratic Confederalism”.

The slogan “Woman-Life-Freedom” which has shaken the whole world, is one of his political-philosophical ideas that came up around 2013, which has been the driving force of the revolutionary movement in Rojava (north and east of Kurdistan in Syrian) and also in revolutionary popular uprising following the brutal murder of 22-year-old Kurdish woman, Mahsa-Jina Amini (September 16, 2022) by the ruling fascist Shia Islamic State in Iran.

Abdullah Öcalan continues his stubborn resistance in prison and has written more than a hundred volumes of books and articles, of which 72 of his books and articles have been prepared, translated and published in several languages.

[1] Since the start of the PKK’s armed struggle in 1984, around 37,000 people have lost their lives.