Amendments to Turkey’s laws that were passed with Abdullah Öcalan in mind negatively affect all of the population, lawyer İbrahim Bilmez said in an interview.
“There are no exceptions in law, it applies to all,” Bilmez said. “The laws targeting Öcalan have become a problem for Turkey in general.”
Öcalan has been serving a life sentence in the specially built İmralı Island Prison since his capture and trial in 1999. The founding leader of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) spent the first decade of his sentence as the sole inmate, and since 2009 has been accompanied by at most five others convicted in the PKK trials.
While meetings with his family and lawyers were sporadically hindered throughout the years, the absolute isolation and incommunicado state of the PKK leader has reached its peak after an interrupted phone call with his brother in March 2021, and Öcalan has not had any contact with the outside world for the last 31 months.
“The current isolation and incommunicado state shows that those powers that were involved in the conspiracy for Öcalan’s capture still don’t want a peaceful solution to the Kurdish issue. They want the conflict to continue. If they didn’t, they would have spoken out,” Bilmez said.
“This isolation and the insolubility of the Kurdish issue is a problem for all people living in Turkey,” he added. “The unlawful state in İmralı has seeped into everything.”
Öcalan believes the Kurdish issue should be resolved “among ourselves, without foreign involvement”, Bilmez said. “A peaceful resolution to the Kurdish issue will allow all peoples to win.”
Bilmez said the end to Öcalan’s isolation would also serve Ankara. “Turkey as a state must understand that the insolubility serves the interests of foreign powers,” he said.
