South Africa’s Kurdish Human Rights Action Group (KHRAG) has launched a campaign, urging people to write to Amnesty International demanding the rights watchdog investigate the continued detention of Kurdish leader Abdullah Öcalan.
“We urge Amnesty International to investigate the appalling conditions of Abdallah Öcalan’s incarceration,” KHRAG write on their website, through which individuals can make their own submission to Amnesty. “Since March 25, 2021, Mr Öcalan has been held incommunicado in detention. This is cruel, degrading and inhumane treatment,” the rights group said, calling on Amnesty to urgently consider Öcalan’s imprisonment conditions.
In particular, KHRAG note, “The Turkish regime has breached all legal standards on political prisoners, including the UN Mandela Rules on the treatment of political prisoners and has disregarded its own laws on the treatment of prisoners.”
The UN’s expanded guidelines for the protection of prisoners are known as the ‘Nelson Mandela laws’, in honour of the celebrated political prisoner. They enshrine crucial rights as to prisoners’ inherent dignity and value, prohibiting torture, ill-treatment, and various forms of degradation and restraint, notably restricting the use of solitary confinement.
As such, the KHRAG campaign sheds light on the commonly-noted parallels between the detention of Mandela and his Kurdish counterpart. The South African leader was permitted one letter and one 30‐minute visit every six months, and denied permission to attend the funeral of his mother, and one of his sons, who died in a car accident. Letters were censored and phone-calls monitored, while Mandela refused government offers of release in exchange for concessions in the conviction that he needed to achieve freedom for all South Africans, not just himself.
Meanwhile, Öcalan’s detention has been marked by similar gross abuses of civil liberties, rule of law and the rights of political detainees. Throughout the past decade he has only been able to meet with his lawyers during one brief period in 2019. Öcalan was entirely alone on his own prison island, İmrali, for many years, until being joined by three other Kurdish political prisoners. These detainees are almost never allowed to socialize at all, with Öcalan subjected to the harshest restrictive measures of any political prisoner in Europe, subject to punitive measures repeatedly and arbitrarily used to keep him confined to his cell without recreation or socialization.
Throughout its campaigning, KHRAG, which was founded in 1997 and is based in Cape Town, has sought to “promote the ideal of human rights for the Kurdish people in Turkey and other countries… and advocate the idea of a peaceful negotiated settlement to the Kurdish question.” In particular, it has fostered links between Mandela’s legal team and supporters in South Africa, and those working on the campaign to bring an end to Öcalan’s treatment.
“We appreciate the active role played by Amnesty International in 1999 advocating against the death penalty following the abduction of Kurdish people’s leader Abdullah Öcalan,” KHRAG write in their template letter. “We are once again appealing to you to address his inhumane and illegal prison conditions.”
