Johannesburg – A Turkish delegation visiting South-Africa was shocked by a comparison between the imprisoned PKK-leader Abdullah Öcalan and the South-African leader Nelson Mandela reports the Turkish daily Aksam.
A delegation lead by Turkish Foreign Trade Minister Zafer Çağlayan and several MPS visited South-Africa to improve trade relations. When the MPS spoke with 10 South-African MPS, the South-African mps criticized the situation of Kurds in Turkey and compared the situation of the imprisoned PKK-leader, with the imprisonment of ex-president Nelson Mandela.
AKP MP Dengir Mir Mehmet Firat was shocked and said that he was a Kurd and that another MP Gülşen Orhan was also Kurdish. Firat said that the discrimination of Kurds wasn’t so bad as it was during the apartheid regime in South-Africa.
The pro-Kurdish DTP party often compared Öcalan and Mandela. In the early 1990s there were relations between some members of the Kurdistan Workers Party and the ANC (African National Congress) and there was a South-African arms embargo on Turkey in 1995.
Also Mandela declined the Ataturk Peace Prize in 1992 for infringement of human rights for Kurds in Turkey, but in 1999 he accepted the award and the relations between South-Africa and Turkey improved.
© Rudaw
