SINN Fein sent a message of solidarity to hundreds of Kurdish hunger strikers on the 185th day of their protest over the treatment of jailed Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) leader Abdullah Ocalan today.

The party’s foreign affairs and defence spokesman John Brady urged the Turkish government to meet the demands of the six-month-long hunger strike which has seen rolling action in hundreds of prisons.

The hunger strikes started in November 2020 on the anniversary of the foundation of the PKK. 

They are demanding an end to the isolation of Mr Ocalan, which has been deemed a form of torture and violation of international law by a number of bodies, including the Committee to Prevent Torture.

The PKK leader has been held on Imrali island in Turkey’s Marmara Sea since his kidnapping and arrest in 1999.

The protests have spread to hundreds of Turkish prisons, with solidarity actions also taking place in the Makhmour refugee camp in northern Iraq and the Lavrio camp in Greece, where one person has died.

But instead of listening to the requests of the prisoners, authorities have clamped down and held many of those engaging in the protest in isolation to separate them from other inmates.

Mr Brady, who moved the motion in the Dail last week that saw Ireland become the first European Union member state to condemn Israel’s “de facto annexation of Palestine,” said the action was something familiar to the people of Ireland as a legitimate form of protest.

“Hunger strike is the weaponising of the human body. It is the last weapon to be employed against the oppressor by the powerless, the dispossessed, by those who have been robbed of everything else,” he told the Morning Star.

“Throughout the 20th century Irish patriots were forced at various occasions to resort to hunger strike against the oppression of the British government. Most famously in 1981, when 10 republicans died in hunger strike in protest against attempts by the British to criminalise the republican struggle,” the Wicklow parliamentarian said.

Hunger strikes last swept Turkish prisons in 2018 and 2019, led by former Peoples’ Democratic Party MP Leyla Guven who was herself jailed for more than 23 years last December.

She forged a friendship with then Sinn Fein MEP Martina Anderson, a former political prisoner, who visited Ms Guven in her Diyarbakir home during the protest.

That action was called off by Mr Ocalan in May 2019 after he was granted access to his lawyers for the first time in nearly nine years. 

However this was during an election campaign and since then, other than a few brief phone calls, subsequent visit requests have been denied.

“Irish republicans stand with the Kurdish hunger strikers,” Mr Brady said. “We call upon the Turkish government to meet their demands.”