Kurdistan Communities Union Executive Council co-chair Cemil Bayık said it is the role of guardian that has fallen on Turkey’s shoulders, in a system devised by the “forces of capitalist modernity” for the imprisonment of Abdullah Öcalan.
“The real powers holding Leader Apo in İmralı are the powers of capitalist modernity,” Bayık told ANF in an interview, referring to Öcalan with a diminutive form of his first name. “As such, İmralı is the site of a system of genocide. At the same time it hosts an incredible resistance and fight against the genocide.”
Öcalan, the founding leader of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) who has been serving a life sentence in the İmralı Island Prison in northwestern Turkey since his capture and trial in 1999, has used his imprisonment as an opportunity to develop his theories, Bayık said. “Leader Apo’s style includes perpetual innovation and solution. Whatever conditions there may be, he creates a new situation and an alternative solution – it is a fundamental trait of his.”
Bayık cited Öcalan as saying he “achieved important developments in the İmralı process from the abstract to the concrete, from dogmatism to realism, from desensitisation to sensibility, from nation-stateism to democratism, from economism to capitalist modernity, from capitalist modernity to democratic modernity, from idealist historianism to scientific philosophical historianism” in his 24 years behind bars.
The KCK co-chair repeated concerns over Öcalan not being allowed any contact with the outside world for almost two years under a strict isolation regime, proving that “the law has never been in force in İmralı”.
The Committee for the Prevention of Torture (CPT) under the Council of Europe has become “an accomplice in the Turkish National Policy on İmralı”, Bayık said.
In the process leading to Öcalan’s capture, the PKK leader “sought to bring the Kurdish issue to the European agenda and achieve a democratic solution”, Bayık said. “But Europe closed all its doors and declared Leader Apo persona non grata, determined to play its role in what ended up being the İmralı process.”
The plan to remove Öcalan, which Kurdish groups call the international conspiracy, “was completed by the United States and Britain”, Bayık said. “‘I still can’t understand why they gave us Apo,’ Ecevit [then-Turkish Prime Minister Bülent Ecevit] said at the time .”
Turkey has employed “conspiracy-like policies towards the Kurdish people since its inception”, Bayık continued. “Due to their experience of state tradition, and the countless invasions, occupations and genocides under their belt, they thought they could easily defeat the Kurds. They destroyed so many even of their own viziers and others overnight], imagine what they wouldn’t do when it came to the Kurds.”
“For the first time in [Turkey’s] history they failed to achieve results, against Leader Apo, who said that let alone eliminating him as in examples of previous uprisings, İmralı was for him ‘another rebirth’.”
