A Kurdish woman holds a poster of Abdullah Ocalan at a protest in Silopi in Turkey Kurdistan, November 2007. Photo: AFP
ISTANBUL,— The Kurdish leader of Turkey’s militant Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), Abdullah Ocalan, has met his lawyers for the first time in eight years, one of them said on Monday.
“This is the first meeting with the lawyers since 2011. The meeting lasted approximately one hour,” on May 2, Rezan Sarica told an Istanbul press conference.
Some 3,000 Kurdish prisoners have been holding hunger strikes since November 2018 to protest his isolation, and eight have killed themselves over the issue, according to the pro-Kurdish Peoples’ Democratic Party.
Nevroz Uysal, another of Ocalan’s lawyers, said he was conveying a message from the imprisoned leader for the hunger strikers to limit their protests.
“We respect the resistance of our friends inside and outside prisons but want them not to carry this to a dimension that will threaten their health or result in death,” Uysal said.
Turkey captured Ocalan, public number enemy one, in February 1999 and imprisoned him on the heavily fortified island of Imrali off Istanbul where he has been kept for 20 years.
“It is not yet clear if the meetings with lawyers will continue periodically,” added Sarica, who met Ocalan with Uysal.
“Only two lawyers were allowed to meet him although four lawyers applied,” he added.
A large Kurdish community in Turkey and worldwide openly sympathise with PKK rebels and Abdullah Ocalan, who founded the PKK group in 1974 and currently serving a life sentence in Turkey, has a high symbolic value for most Kurds in Turkey and worldwide according to observers.
Ocalan, who was arrested 20 years ago, is serving a life sentence on Imrali island, close to Istanbul. Ocalan was caught in Kenya outside the Greek embassy in Nairobi on February 15, 1999 by Turkish secret service agents after attempting to seek asylum in Europe.
Kurds see Ocalan, called “leader of the Kurdish people” by his followers and “head of the PKK terrorist organisation and separatist leader” by Turkish officials and media, as a living symbol of the Kurdish cause in Turkey.
The PKK took up arms in 1984 against the Turkish state, which still denies the constitutional existence of Kurds, to push for greater autonomy in Turkish Kurdistan for the Kurdish minority who make up around 22.5 million of the country’s 79-million population. More than 40,000 Turkish soldiers and Kurdish rebels, have been killed in the conflict.
President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has hardened his rhetoric towards Kurdish rebels since the last ceasefire broke down in 2015, reducing the odds of a political solution to the long-running conflict.
Ocalan’s brother, Mehmet, was permitted to visit him in prison in January for the first time since 2016.
The rebel leader was born into a poor peasant family in the village of Omerli in Turkey Kurdistan in the country’s southeast. His official birthdate is April 4, 1949.
He was sentenced to death for treason after his capture by Turkish agents in Kenya, but this was commuted to life imprisonment when Turkey abolished capital punishment in 2002 at a time when it appeared close to securing membership of the European Union.
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