A mob of youths attacked the permanent Vigil for Öcalan held in front of the Council of Europe (CoE) in Strasbourg, France on Sunday. This marks the second attack, as the young Turks vandalised placards at the demonstration for the release of Kurdish leader Abdullah Öcalan last week.
The vigil organisers said the mob attack was part of a “long-established pattern of Turkish young men and boys being encouraged to attack Kurds”, to sabotage peaceful Kurdish activism and smear the Kurdish community at home and abroad as being associated with violence and civil unrest.
Such provocations have been linked to the Grey Wolves, a fascist group active in Europe and closely aligned to the Turkish government’s allied party, the Nationalist Movement Party (MHP).
Backing the vigil, the Freedom for Öcalan campaign posted on X: “For years, Turkey has been trying to put a stop to the Vigil for Öcalan .. Their official diplomats have exhausted all legal routes, and now it seems that they are resorting to teenage hooliganism.”
The Kurdish Democratic Council in France (CDK-F) also strongly denounced the attack against the permanent vigil:
“These repeated attacks reveal a deliberate desire by the Turkish state to transpose its repression and threats towards Kurds demonstrating peacefully in Europe. The intention of the Turkish state is obvious: to sow chaos around this permanent vigil to criminalise it.”
The vigil has been held every day since 2012 outside the CoE, each week a group represents Kurdish diaspora from various countries, with dignitaries and leading international politicians joining the sit-in. The practice of absolute isolation imposed on Öcalan at Turkey’s İmralı prison has been condemned internationally as torture, with lawyers and family forbidden contact for the last three years of the prisoner’s solitary confinement on the high-security island since 1999.
Yet, the Council of Europe’s Committee for the Prevention of Torture and Inhuman or Degrading Treatment (CPT) has failed to protect Öcalan’s rights or pressurise Turkey, a CoE member, to put a stop to the torturous conditions. International institutions, such as the CPT, responsible for holding governments to account for international human rights law, have been widely criticised for failing to uphold their statutes.
The broader campaign, ‘Freedom for Öcalan, a political solution to the Kurdish Question’, was launched late last year, in a renewed effort to bolster outreach worldwide, provide educational forums and encourage information sharing, press for accountability, and demand action from relevant institutions and governments.
Öcalan’s isolated and prolonged detention has immediate implications on the domestic civil and political liberties in all four parts of the region known as Kurdistan, spread across Turkish, Syrian, Iraqi and Iranian territories. Isolation tactics enacted against the Kurdish leader are viewed by supporters as setting a base-level treatment of political prisoners in Turkey. Moreover, the Turkish authorities’ unprecedented isolation of Öcalan and gagging of the CPT over its inspection reports to the prison, represents the decades-long stifling of the Kurdish people and their right to self-determination.
Furthermore, Turkey’s isolation policy is viewed by the pro-Kurdish opposition as a deliberate attempt to prevent a democratic resolution to the Kurdish issue in Turkey. Freedom for Öcalan, leader of the militant Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), is hailed by supporters as the key to renewed peace talks between the Turkish government and the Kurdish movement.
The official vigil website provides a comprehensive overview of the cause, Öcalan’s philosophy, and a history of the Kurdish struggle.
