The main thing which can help a person to withstand in prison is his firm assurance in his rightness. Assurance that he serves to great and common cause which is possible to sacrifice everything to – freedom, health and the very life. Then nothing can frighten – neither investigators’ menaces nor the cruelest judicial sentences nor guards’ humiliations nor police heelers’ provocations. You remain yourself, “neither believe nor are afraid nor ask” and finally gain the unequal and cruel battle against those who have assigned the right to speak in the name of the law. A shining example is the fate of great “red” Abdullah Ocalan.
For seven years the outstanding theorician and practician of national liberation movement, the leader of Kurdish people, the founder and leader of the Kurdish Workers’ Party has been the only inmate of the prison on Imrali island in the Sea of Marmara. The leader of the forty-million people was seized on February, 15, 1999 in the capital of Kenya Nairobi as a result of the CIA, Mossad and Turkish secret services’ combined operation and carried out to Turkey. Short and unjust trial followed: Abdullah Ocalan was found guilty of “betrayal of Motherland and attempts to split the country” and “death of thirty-seven thousands persons” and sentenced therefore to death penalty. This sentenced was changed to life in prison in 2002 only under pressure of hard-headed humanists from the European Union. As soon as you are alone it is impossible to recover spiritual firmness and find support in money, vodka, women (men) and similar trivial matters. Even fear is not reliable – it may be broken by stronger startle. Only very strong motives can make a man adamant, switch up unexhausting resources of sacrificed hatred, the adrenalin of bright rage at the crucial moment, wake up animal trickery, infernal headpiece, expand conscience boundlessly and help to keep dignity on the hardest razor’s edge. When your comrades, brothers, nearest and dearest, dozens, hundreds and thousands of associates are behind you, their hearts strike in unison with yours, they breathe into step with you – this feeling overwhelms you with unlimited strength. And the person destined to be a victim counterattacks his executors courageously. Abdullah Ocalan’s arrest and unjust trial caused not only incredible wave of protest of the forty-million, the largest in the world “separated” people. The campaign of international solidarity with the “Kurd No.1” has been rising, and the “Kurdish question” appeared to be in the world community’s limelight. For many centuries the Kurdish people had been struggling for creation of their national state. But the imperialist powers which had promised the Kurds wide autonomy and even their own state came to an agreement of dismemberment of Kurdistan territory among Turkey, Iran, Iraq and Syria during the Ottoman Empire dissolution in the 1920es.
Historical futurity as well as the very people’s right for existance is determined not by its arithmetical number but by its energy, its ability to give birth to more and more new heroes, to put forward outstanding persons. Twenty million Kurds who turned out to live in Turkey against their will began their long struggle for independence marked by dozens of armed rebellions sunk in blood by the Turkish. Turkish authorities pursued the policy of creation of a mononational state, it was forbidden to mention Kurds and ordered to call them “Mountain Turkish”. The Kurds were denied not only the right for any cultural autonomy but they were forbidden to speak Kurdish upon penalty of death. The numerous ancient people seemed to be consigned to disappearance until Abdullah Ocalan appeared.
It is not in vain that compatriots compare Abdullah Ocalan to another famous Kurd – the “thunderbolt of cross-bearers” Saladin, the outstanding statesman and warlord who became an “example of valour, honour and fearlessness”. He was born on April, 4, 1949 in a peasants’ family, in the village of Omerli, Shanlyurfa province, studied at the Political Science faculty of the Ankara university in 1971-1974. He spent seven months in the Mamak prison for participation in an anti-Turkish meeting. A revolutionary group created by Abdullah Ocalan formed in 1978 into the Kurdistan Workers’ Party which he headed having got the party nickname Apo – “Uncle”. After the reactionary military coup of 1980 the main body of the party moved to Syria. The Turkish authorities’ unwillingness to start negotiations on the “Kurdish question”, the prohibition to mention it and the cruelest mass repressions against Kurds on the verge of genocide forced the Kurdistan Workers’ Party to start armed resistance in 1984.
Abdullah Ocalan’s personality is a mirror of the great creative potential of the Kurdish people an outstanding son of which he is. Comrade Apo is not only a politician and an organizer but a first-string modern theoretician, the author of brilliant and profound works on problems of the national liberation movement. His books “The problem of personality in Kurdistan. Features of a revolutionary fighter and party life” (1994) and “Socialism and problems of revolution” are true masterpieces of scientific thought and in the same time fascinating compositions. In the words of V.I.Lenin, thousands and thousands of young people influenced by them including those in Russia became revolutionaries, irreconcilable and fearless fighters against oppressors.
Abdullah Ocalan’s lawyers and all the Kurds have to disprove monstrous agglomeration of falsehood defending their rightness. Raids, attacks, ambushes, creation of liberated areas in Turkey performed by armed units of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party were means of necessary defense of Kurdish people from the Turkish troops’ armed genocide. Numerous terrorist acts including recent ones committed by different other Kurd groups complete this organized resistance. But in spite of all this the Turkish authorities still prefer to use the language of force against Kurds as well as during Turkish military agression on Cyprus or menace of invasion to Syria in 1998.
Even behind the bars Abdullah Ocalan remains a sharp-witted and influential politician of global level. On his initiative the Kurdistan Workers’ Party has declared a unilateral moratorium on warfare since October, 1 – the third one during recent years. It is aimed at beginning peace talks not for dismemberment of Turkey but for cultural and language autonomy of Kurds only. But Turkish army denies cessation of arms promising pig-headedly to fight “up to the last terrorist” as before. So, “Red Abdullah’s” decisive combat, his “last battle” is ahead.
