By Orsola Casagrande, Il Manifesto.
Imrali is not that far!
Imrali is not that far. And lots of people share Abdullah Ocalan’s fate. It has never been that evident as in the latest weeks.
Shut up in a prison-island, Ocalan’s isolation is of his own, of the only man, detained for 11 years, until a few months ago.
But it also dramatically belongs to million Kurds living in Turkey. Surrounded by a bubble wall hard to penetrate. Isolation is also the condition the Kurds experience in Europe.
Hundreds of thousands of people, neighbours.
Alone.
Invisible. It is almost embarrassing. Because we immediately feel our bad conscience pushing from inside, from the pit of the stomach.
In these days, this isolation has materialized. It is tangible.
Dozens of young people, activists, legal organizations leaders, have been arrested in Italy, France, Belgium.
The latest has been the operation run by three hundred agents of the Belgian antiterrorism against the Kurd satellite TV, RojTv, which is regularly licensed in Denmark.
The allegation is tortuous, the PKK is mentioned, the Kurdistan Workers Party, Europe carefully included in the terrorist organizations list (On USA and Turkey's orders).
The police raided RojTv studios at 5 am. They frisked and arrested several people, some of them journalists, then released.
Every day RojTv (Med TV at first, then Medya TV: it changed its name not out of vice, but because it was persecuted and outlawed as the Kurd political parties in Turkey) broadcasts programmes of all kinds: from news to investigations, from talk shows to children TV programmes.
Everything is transparent: you just have to switch it on and watch. The people who speak on RojTv candidly say what they think. They denounce the Kurdistan situation (in its four parts: Iran, Irak, Syria and Turkey). They inform, discuss, debate. Openly. And above all, they propose.
Before the Belgian operation, there was the Italy- France joined operation. Dismantled an “ideological training” camp in Tuscany, the agencies report, prompted by the police headquarters. In short, according to the allege (270 bis the article at issue), the Pkk recruited young men to fight in Kurdistan.
In Italy, the Kurd party took care of ideological indoctrination only. No weapons have been found. There is no trace of any military training, the Public Prosecution’s office of Venice states precisely. “Ideology” alone was taught in the alleged youth camp.
Who knows why Frattocchie, the PCI (Communist Party of Italy) school, always crosses everyone’s mind. But the parishes as well… “Ideological indoctrination” is the post-9/11 definition which labels political meetings, that could be compared with the school staff or the catechism. Someone will object that no guerrilla videos were showed.
At home, all comrades jealously conserved “Guerrilla Warfare” by Che Guevara and similaria…
Dozens of arrests, hundreds of thousands of kurds. Alone.
Every year, on March 21st, they demonstrate at Newroz, the Kurd New Year’s day, in lots of European cities and nobody sees them. 40 thousand people in Germany, 20 thousand in London, 5 thousand in Paris. But nobody sees them.
The Kurds are invisible when they take to the streets. Europe is a party to this isolation. Turkey is too important as a business partner (at the end Ankara will turn its back on EU, chosing the Middle East).
But the left is a party, too. Italy? After Ocalan’s event, it could not hope to make up ground again. Even if Rifondazione Comunista (which somehow convinced Ocalan the “Bel Paese” was a political friend) ruled the Country and it could at least say and do something. And the rest of Europe? It has chosen not to see many of its citizens.
But the worst thing is that it has chosen not to see the Kurds, even when they offer a negotiated solution of the conflict that has been carried out in Turkey since 1984. Because today the Pkk is promoting solution ideas. Incidentally, the Pkk has been in a unilateral cease-fire state since march 2009. Turkey has been, but the Turkish army has not.
And they keep on murdering and bombing. By now it is easier to tell how many Kurd politicians are out of jail…In Turkey and in Europe, too. Who talks about peace is supposed to shut up. Even better, we have now reached the paradox that it is forbidden to talk about peace.
Moreover, it is worth saying that while dozens of Kurd people are under arrest, in the Basque Country, the independent left talks about peace, it suggests a peace path and is being silenced. Peace is not a business, but war is.
Arnaldo Otegi, tha Basque left leader, said that in a video transmitted at the peace conference held in Venice last November (peace both in Turkey and in Spain was the main issue, and nobody got it).
A video because - better twist of fate – he had been arrested in the meantime (because he was talking about peace). Remembering Arafat’s historic speech at UN thirty years ago, Otegi said that the Basque left (it is also true for the Pkk) presents itself to the world with an olive branch in its hand.
The message: nobody will drop this olive branch.
But right now, the olive branch is falling to the ground!
