25 years in isolation the leader of the Kurds and he has not bent

On February 15, 1999, shame spread its great veil over many governments of the then flourishing European Union, including that of Athens.

It was the day the Kurdish leader of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), the great Abdullah Ocalan, found himself being flown to Turkey in a private jet, handcuffed and blindfolded.

His personal “Odyssey” had been completed and the Turkish regime was preparing, on his behalf, one of its most isolated cells.

There had been a world conspiracy in favor of the Turks and against the man-symbol of the Kurdish struggle, the man who gave the enslaved Kurdish people the hope of struggle and resistance.

“Apo” left Syria in September 1998, following Turkish and American pressure on Damascus to stop supporting the PKK.

On October 9, a Syrian Airlines plane lands at Hellinikon International Airport and one of its passengers, Abdullah Ocalan, is faced with the refusal of the then Prime Minister of Greece, Costas Simitis, to accept him. One realizes what bills Mr. Simitis owed.

From Athens he leaves for Moscow and from there for Rome. He is arrested by the Italian police but is not extradited to Turkey, because of the dignity of the D’Alema government and the justice of the country.

The great diplomatic crisis does not escalate and following the refusal of the Netherlands and Switzerland, Ocalan moves to Kenya from Belarus, with Greece as an intermediate stop.

In Nairobi, he hides in the residence of the Greek ambassador, together with his companions, but a few days later, in the early hours of February 16, 1999, he is transferred to Turkey.

Abdullah Ocalan is a prisoner on the islet of “Kalolimnos” (Imrali) in the Sea of Marmara, under his guard of about 1000 people.

Although he was sentenced to death by the Turkish judiciary, his sentence was commuted to life in prison after the death penalty was banned in Turkey in 2002. Since then, there have been hundreds of protests for his release, but Turkey is not feeling pressure from any supposedly democratic Western state. ..

Humanity has a duty to demand the release of the Kurdish leader, who is in solitary confinement and has been barred from speaking to relatives or his lawyers for months. Greece and Cyprus must get rid of anti-Semitic or Pagalic “legacies” and shed the shame of 1999, demanding the release of Apo and the deletion of the PKK from the Brussels list (a list usually prepared at the State Department).

Ocalan is not a criminal, but a man who pushed his people into a constant struggle for dignity, a struggle for the benefit, not only of the greater Kurdistan, but of all the peoples tortured by Turkey and its collaborators.

The fight for his release will be a message to Ankara for what it is trying to impose in the region, for the ethnic cleansing, the massacres, the looting. It will be a message in favor of freedom, equality, democracy, in favor of all that framed the “Manifesto” of the PKK and still mobilizes Kurds and Kurdish women in the four corners of the Kurdish horizon.α.