Title: Freedom for Öcalan, Political Solution for the Kurdish Question
Publisher: Campaigning committee
Release date: 2024

The international ‘Freedom for Öcalan, A Political Solution for the Kurdish Question’ campaign unites social movements, political parties, municipalities, unions, activists, intellectuals, and millions of Kurds and their friends worldwide around a shared goal: making a just and democratic political solution to Turkey’s century-old Kurdish question possible by enabling Kurdish leader Abdullah Öcalan’s participation in a renewed dialogue. Abdullah Öcalan is a Kurdish political leader seen by millions of Kurds globally as their political representative. In February 1999, he was abducted in an international intelligence operation and sent to Turkey. He has been in prison ever since, barred from all contact with the outside world for years at a time. He has been subjected to torture and other cruel and degrading treatment.

Despite this, the movement Öcalan built and the people inspired by it are at the forefront of Kurdish struggles for self-determination and multi-ethnic, multi-religious movements for democracy in the Middle East. His theories inspire those fighting for self-determination, women’s liberation, and an end to all forms of inequality and exploitation across the globe. Turkey’s unresolved ‘Kurdish question’— the conflicts and political instability deriving from the Turkish Republic’s violent denial of fundamental civil and political rights to 20 million Kurdish citizens—has cost tens of thousands of lives, displaced millions, and empowered hardline nationalists, religious fundamentalists, and autocrats worldwide. It is linked to many of the most serious regional and global challenges impacting the lives and well-being of millions—occupation, racism, the oppression of women, religious intolerance, economic exploitation, and the destruction of the environment.

The campaign is international in part because the Kurdish question is an international problem. Kurdistan is divided between four states: Turkey, Iran, Iraq, and Syria. It was European powers, including Britain and France, who created these divisions a century ago. Turkey’s ability to wage war on Kurds across the Middle East is the result of decades of unconditional support from the United States and other NATO members—and Turkey’s new strategy of playing those powers off of against states, such as Russia and Iran, to extract anti-Kurdish concessions from all sides. It is also international because Öcalan’s solutions are international. His framework for a political solution to the Kurdish question could end a century of war and oppression in Turkey and neighboring countries. The universal theories that provide the framework for his solutions provide a model for people everywhere seeking alternatives to the great crises of our time— from steepening inequality to climate change to the rise of far-right autocrats taking advantage of growing disillusionment with the system.[1]