THE Kurdistan Communist Party-Iraq called today for the immediate release of jailed Kurdish leader Abdullah Ocalan as events to mark his 73rd birthday took place worldwide. 

It condemned the so-called international conspiracy that led to the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) leader’s abduction in the Kenyan capital Nairobi in 1999, his return to Turkey and subsequent imprisonment. 

After being forced out of Syria in 1998, Mr Ocalan went on something of an odyssey, heading to Italy after first being refused refugee status in Moscow, where Russian communists sought to provide him with sanctuary.

Italian communists also gave him support before he moved on to Athens and then Kenya, where he was captured in an operation involving US and Israeli security forces. 

“Each one of those states and powers that participated in this plot had different political and economic interests, but all of them wanted to destroy the will of Kurdistan and its freedom movement,” said a joint statement by the communists and eight other Iraqi Kurdish parties. 

They called for the release of the Kurdish political prisoner, seeing his continued incarceration as a crime against the Kurdish people. 

While the communists disagree with the democratic confederalist political line of the PKK, they have good relations with the organisation, accepting it as an integral part of the Kurdish liberation movement. 

“The struggle of Mr Ocalan and the PKK freedom movement is a defensive struggle aimed at solving the Kurdish question,” the statement added, insisting that there could be no peace until it was resolved. 

Signatories condemned the “abusive” treatment of Mr Ocalan, who has spent long periods of his imprisonment in isolation, in conditions described as torture by the Committee to Prevent Torture.

He has not been allowed family visits or access to his legal team for more than two years on the grounds of consecutive “disciplinary punishments.”

Mr Ocalan’s brother was allowed a brief phone call in March last year, but it was abruptly ended by the authorities.

Applications by his lawyers to visit their client have been declined on at least 10 occasions since 2018. 

Trees were planted in Mr Ocalan’s home town of Amara in Turkey’s southern province of Urfa, representing new life and emphasising the importance of the environment for the PKK, which describes itself as an ecological movement.