“Once we exited the residency door I knew something was wrong,” interpreter Melsa Deniz said. “The last I saw of him was when his jeep turned into a building marked ‘police station.’ I counted five white men. I knew it was over.”

Turkey had finally got its man. Fifteen years after the organisation he founded, the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) announced the beginning of armed struggle, a heavily drugged and blindfolded Abdullah Ocalan was bundled onto a Falcon jet bound for Turkey.

Known as “Black Day” for millions of Kurds, the weeks leading up to the eventual capture of Ocalan in the Kenyan capital Nairobi on February 15 1999 read like a spy thriller involving the intelligence services of the world’s most powerful countries including the US and Israel.

Ocalan had been on something of an odyssey after being forced out of Syria, where he had lived since escaping Turkey ahead of the 1980 military coup. Pressure from the Turkish state — backed by the EU and US — including the threat of war, and the mobilisation of thousands of troops to the border, forced the hand of Damascus.

He first fled to Moscow via Athens where Russian communists had sought to provide the Kurdish leader sanctuary. But he was refused refugee status and five weeks later flew to Rome where he presented himself to police demanding political asylum.

He was supported there by Italian communists and took shelter in a three-storey building where he was protected by Italian security and able to hold press conferences, much to Turkey’s ire.

Italian prime minister Massimo D’Alema’s government turned down Ocalan’s bid to remain in the country but refused to extradite him to Turkey because he would face the death penalty there. He instead proposed sending him to Germany, where he faced charges of murder and terrorism. But chancellor Gerhard Schroder was terrified of putting the PKK leader on trial, fearing the reaction of the country’s sizeable Kurdish community and refused to press for his extradition.

Greece again intervened and Ocalan returned to Athens where he was given a number of options: Algeria, Morocco, Tunisia or Libya. He angrily declined, with his lawyer insisting they were not dealing with a cargo of cigarettes. Ocalan was then taken to Minsk and tried unsuccessfully to enter the Netherlands. 

He returned to Athens before flying to the island of Corfu where the secret service plane refuelled and headed to Nairobi using a false Cypriot passport under the name of Lazarus Mavlos. It was thought to be a temporary stop, no longer than three days, with his final destination expected to be another African nation, possibly South Africa.

But instead he spent 10 days in the home of the Greek ambassador to Kenya George Costoulas before being handed over to Turkish intelligence agents with the collusion of CIA and Mossad, who initially denied involvement, fearful of the backlash that inevitably came.

As the Turkish state celebrated Ocalan’s capture, Kurdish supporters across the world staged angry protests at embassies of the countries involved in the betrayal. Three people were shot dead after they stormed the Israeli embassy in Berlin, while in London Kurds occupied the Greek embassy for three days.

Hundreds of Ocalan’s supporters self-immolated in protest at his capture and at photographs of the Kurdish leader, bound and gagged in front if the Turkish flag, designed not just to humiliate him but the whole Kurdish people.

The protests were not surprising. The jailing of Ocalan is symbolic of the Kurdish people — oppressed, incarcerated and manipulated by imperialist forces to further their own interests. The world had conspired against him, recognising his importance as the leader of a liberation struggle in Nato’s most important ally in the Middle East. His freedom and the liberation of the Kurdish people are inseparable which is partly why he remains behind bars, in Turkey’s very own Robben Island.

But, as I was once asked to my amusement during an interrogation by Turkish intelligence services in Istanbul, who is Abdullah Ocalan? 

Born into a poor, rural family close to Turkey’s border with Syria he moved first to Istanbul and then to Ankara where he studied political science. It was here that he became politically conscious and was first arrested in 1972 during protests against the detention and subsequent execution of the revolutionaries known as “the three saplings”: Deniz Gezmis, Yusuf Aslan and Huseyin Inan.

Their hangings were a serious setback to the development of the left in Turkey, a situation worsened after the death in prison through torture of Ibrahim Kaypakkaya, whose analysis of both Kemalism as a form of fascism and the Kurdish question from a Marxist perspective has borne the test of time.

It was around the time that guerilla movements were leading successful liberation struggles across the world from the Cuban revolutionaries led by Che Guevara and Fidel Castro to the Vietnamese resistance against US imperialism led by Ho Chi Minh — it is said that the PKK was named after the Vietnamese Workers Party.

This, and Ocalan’s experiences with leading figures from Turkey’s Dev-Genc revolutionary youth movement while in prison, laid the ground for a renaissance in Kurdish nationalism and the foundation of the precursor of the PKK, the Kurdistan Revolutionaries.

Officially founded as a Marxist Leninist organisation in the village of Fis in November 1978, just one month before the Maras Massacre which led to the 1980 military coup and the crushing of the left in Turkey, with the jailing of tens of thousands of leftists and trade unionists, the PKK understood the necessity for armed struggle against the Turkish state.

With Ocalan as its leader, the PKK grew from a handful of Kurdish revolutionaries to a movement capable of taking on the might of Nato’s second-largest ground army and putting the struggle for the freedom of the Kurdish people and an awakening of Kurdish identity centre stage.

Numbering some 40 million people, the Kurds are the world’s largest nation without a state. They have been subjected to massacres, oppression and the banning of their language and culture since the establishment of the modern Turkish state in 1923. For many years even the word Kurd was banned and they were referred to as “Mountain Turks.”

The PKK’s influence spread across Kurdish areas, which are divided into four parts — Basur (Iraq), Bakur (Turkey), Rojhilat (Iran) and Rojava (Syria). Its fighters received training in the Bekka Valley with the first PKK guerilla being martyred in Palestine fighting Israeli occupying forces.

During the 1990s more than 3,000 villages were burned to the ground and Kurds were forced from their homes and into large cities as part of state assimilation operations. An estimated 40,000 people have been killed in a bitter struggle, with Ocalan’s freedom central to a peaceful resolution to the country’s so-called Kurdish question.

His arrest in 1999 undoubtedly dealt a heavy blow to the movement, and was followed soon after by Turkish incursions into Iraqi Kurdistan in an attempt to crush the PKK guerilla bases in the Qandil mountains.

Ocalan subsequently called for a ceasefire and his trial opened on May 31 1999. It was seen as a show trial, a spectacle intended to demoralise the PKK and Kurdish resistance with only one possible outcome. As predicted Ocalan was sentenced to death on June 29, deliberately timed to coincide with the date that leader of the 1925 Dersim rebellion Sheikh Said was hanged.

He has been held on Imrali island in Turkey’s Marmara Sea ever since, with most of his incarceration spent in isolation, and denied access to his family and lawyers for long periods. His death sentence was commuted to life imprisonment as part of Turkey’s bid to join the European Union (EU).

Ocalan’s trial has been ruled unfair by the European Court of Human Rights and his prison conditions judged to be in breach of basic human rights with the Committee to Prevent Torture and others condemning the conditions he is held in.

Despite this he has continued his writings from prison, developing a new ideological paradigm which has seen the PKK break from Marxism, dropping the demands for a separate Kurdish state but instead seeking autonomy within the borders of the respective countries inhabited by Kurds.

Many will be aware of the centrality of women’s liberation, particularly because of the Women’s Protection Units (YPJ) that fought Isis in northern Syria. This ideology, known as jineology, was influenced by leading figures including PKK co-founder Sakine Cansiz who was murdered in a Paris community centre in 2013. Ocalan has led calls for peace with a detailed road map for the democratisation of Turkey being the framework for negotiations that were scrapped by the government in 2015 when they became a perceived electoral liability.

His development of “democratic confederalism,” influenced by the libertarian Murray Bookchin, is said to be being implemented on the ground in Rojava and its principles are followed in the Makhmour Refugee camp in northern Iraq and and by Kurds establishing autonomous governance systems elsewhere.

While recognising that many have embraced his new ideological stance, support for democratic confederalism cannot be made central to the demands for Ocalan’s freedom. This would of course be as mistaken as insisting that supporting communism was a pre-requisite for involvement in any campaign to release Nelson Mandela. 

It would have alienated people and cut off support from the broad masses, and the international campaign that eventually secured his release after 26 years behind bars would never have got off the ground.

But the descriptions of Ocalan as the Mandela of the Middle East are accurate and the similarities between the two are striking. Both have been branded terrorists by the international community and both have given up their liberty for the freedom of their people.

It is no surprise that Mandela recognised the plight of the Kurdish people as a similar struggle to that of black South Africans and the struggle against apartheid. Addressing a conference in 1997 he said: “I am part of the Kurdish struggle. I am one of you.

“We know what it means to be oppressed in your own country. We know the pain of a mother whose child has disappeared. We know what it means to have your nationality and culture insulted.”

Both men were abandoned by Amnesty International which uses a myriad of excuses to deny revolutionaries support – but it was their commitment to armed struggle and their radical politics that was the decisive factor.  

The South African Communist Party (SACP), of which Mandela was at one point a member, recognises the importance of Ocalan as a freedom fighter and the importance of his freedom for Kurds and the Middle East, issuing him a 2017 award for his efforts.

SACP vice-president Solly Mapaila said that like Mandela, Ocalan’s ideas and beliefs will not be broken, describing him as “the master key to the peace process in the Middle East” with his freedom liberating over 55 million people from oppression.

Similarly Cosatu, the trade union confederation representing some South African workers in 21 affiliated unions, spearheaded a campaign last month demanding the United Nations (UN) intervene and support the so-called Mandela principles that govern the treatment of political prisoners.

It called on all trade unions and progressives to back the call for Ocalan’s freedom and send a letter to UN secretary-general Antonio Guterres demanding the global body takes action as it did for Mandela.

Of course Ocalan’s continued imprisonment is tied in to the toxic relations imperialism has with Turkey. Nato, the UN and the EU have facilitated Turkey’s war crimes against Kurds.

It is why international solidarity from the organised working class is vital and the British trade union movement has led the way. In April 2016, at a meeting in the Houses of Parliament, GMB and Unite launched the Freedom For Ocalan campaign. It was a significant step and has seen the campaign adopted by the TUC and others including the CWU, Aslef, TSSA and PCS.

Today, millions of Kurds and supporters across the world will be raising the simple demand: “Freedom for Ocalan.”

To get involved see the campaign and affiliate your trade union branch at www.freedomforocalan.org