The Newroz celebration organised with the slogan “Rabe, dema azadî û serkeftinê ye” (Stand up, it is time for freedom and success) continues in Amed (Diyarbakır). During the celebration, Kurdish People’s Leader Abdullah Öcalan’s evaluations on Newroz in the past years were read.

The evaluations of Abdullah Öcalan, read by Cengiz Çiçek, co-spokesperson of the Peoples’ Democratic Congress (HDK), are as follows:

“Greetings to the Kurdish people, one of the most ancient of the peoples, who gave meaning to Newroz with freedom, from the foothills of Zagros and Taurus mountains to the Euphrates and Tigris river valleys; from the sacred Mesopotamian and Anatolian lands to the agricultural, village and urban civilisations! Greetings to the travellers of this great path of freedom, guided by freedom and equality!

Kurds and fraternal communities, who have lived and built this great civilisation for thousands of years with different races, religions and sects in brotherly and friendly coexistence, have been intended to be pitted against each other by means of political pressures, external interventions and group interests, and orders that are not based on right, law, equality and freedom have been intended to be built.

The last two hundred years of wars of conquest, imperialist interventions, oppressive and denialist understandings have imprisoned the Arab, Turkish, Persian and Kurdish communities in nation-states and virtual borders; the peoples were intended to be left breathless with artificial problems.

The oppression, annihilation and assimilation policies of the last century based on capitalist modernity express the efforts of a narrow power elite that does not bind the people and denies all history and the law of brotherhood. Creating ethnic and mono-national geographies is an inhuman production sought by capitalist modernity that denies our origin and essence.

But the peoples of the Middle East and Central Asia are now waking up. They are returning to themselves and their origin. They are looking for an alternative modernity and democratic order in line with their own history. They want to be reborn from their roots and stand up shoulder to shoulder.

We sacrificed decades of our lives to prove the existence of the Kurdish people, who were ignored in the name of monism, and we paid a great price for this cause. We have shown our determination to achieve a legal status equal to the historical existence of the Kurdish people. Whatever the outcome, like Hallacı Mansur, we have never given up the search for justice, freedom and the burning truth. None of these sacrifices and struggles have been in vain. Millions of Kurds are today revealing their true self, their essence in the Newroz squares.

On a Newroz day in the 1973s, we set out with the determination to protect the existence of Kurds on the verge of extinction and to ensure their freedom, resurrected the resistance-freedom spirit of Newroz and brought it to this day.

The international conspiracy against my person was also directed against the spirit of freedom of the Kurdish people. The conspiracy imposed on me during the İmralı process, just like the one imposed on my people, was of a kind that did not leave an iota of hope. In the first days I was in İmralı, I had the following thought: ‘How can you keep millions of people in a narrow room! ‘ Indeed, as the Kurdish National Leadership, I had made myself a synthesis of millions of people in the conditions of my imprisonment.

While one cannot bear to be deprived of one’s family and children, how could I endure for long to be separated from the will of millions united to death, never to be reunited again!

I had to have such great reasons so that I could endure isolation, so that I could prove that a great life could be exhibited even in isolation. I was thinking like this; in order for me to desire a free life, the Kurdish society to which I belonged had to be free and have a social status. But the life of the Kurds was no different from a pitch-black dungeon with a wall around it.

For decades, I have been trying to create a Kurdish Mind that takes into account the Kurds’ quest for a free life, free humans and a free society. But we still have not been able to get rid of our shackles. Under these conditions, it is a great mistake for a Kurdish individual to think that he or she is free outside. A life lived under the domination of delusion and lies is a life lost and betrayed. The conclusion I draw from this is that it is possible to live outside only under one condition, and that is to fight for the existence and freedom of the Kurds twenty-four hours a day. For a moral and honourable Kurd, life is only possible by being a fighter for existence and freedom twenty-four hours a day.

In connection with my life in İmralı, a question that our people are curious about is where and how I will live in the event of my release from prison.

I am not a person to be very fanciful. It should be well known that I am the owner of a lifestyle called Revolutionary Realism. I must summarise very briefly that, for me, life is possible as long as it is lived freely. Human life can only be lived socially free, equal and democratic in diversity. Other forms of life are deviations and therefore diseased.

Therefore, in the event of a release from prison, it is natural that wherever I am, at whatever moment I live, I will be in constant struggle with every discourse and action style that is necessary until the end.

Even within the four walls, I defeat and renew myself ten times every day and realise revolutions. I take a single social problem as a reason for ten revolutions. You are the ones who are outside today, the ones who have the opportunity and conditions. I have sent greetings to Amed, Botan and many other places, but it should be known that the important thing is how these greetings are responded to!

For example, if it were me, wherever I travelled, be it my own village, Mount Cudi, the foothills of Mount Cilo, the surroundings of Lake Van, the mountains of Ararat, Munzur and Bingöl, the shores of the Euphrates, Tigris and Zap, the plains of Urfa, Muş and Iğdır, I would behave everywhere as if I had stepped off the ark of Noah after the terrible flood. I would behave as if I had stepped off Noah’s ark after the terrible flood, I would flee from capitalist modernity as Abraham fled from Nimrods, Moses from the Pharaohs, Jesus from Roman emperors and Muhammad from ignorance, and I would set about my work inspired by these historical personalities and social realities.

With these thoughts, I call on you to walk with me physically, spiritually and mentally on the basis of the philosophy of existence, to accompany me with sufficient intensity and will, and to build our Democratic Modernity.

Greetings to those who give power to freedom,

With my unending love and greetings…

Bijî Newroz!

ABDULLAH ÖCALAN.”