Portuguese Communist Party
Note of the Cabinet of the Press of the PCP

18 February 1999

It was with deep indignation that the PCP took knowledge of the kidnapping, sequestration and arrest in the Turkish jails of Abdullah Ocalan, leader of the PKK and the movement of national liberation of the Kurd people of Turkey.

It is an inadmissible act of piracy that must be firmly condemned as an offence against the international law and the more elementary human rights.

The life of Abdullah Ocalan is in danger, it is necessary to urge the respect for its physical integrity and its immediate release.

Who must be judged and condemned are not Ocalan and the movement of liberation of the Kurd people, but the Turkish regiment that has looked to suffocate for terror and violence the legitimate national aspirations of this martyrized people. The regiment of Ankara not only denies the 12 million Kurds who live in Turkish territory the most elementary rights (including the use of the proper language) as has practised an authentic politics of genocide which had already provoked tens of thousands of deaths and the bombing of thousands of settlements where the resistance is more rooted.

Who must be judged and condemned is a dictatorial regiment that illegalize and persecute political forces that are in solidarity with the cause of the Kurd people, keeps the illegal occupation of the north of Cyprus and, with the aid of the U.S.A. and Israel (with whom it keeps an agreement of strategical cooperation) has systematically violated the sovereignty of Iraq and Syria to pursue and to assassinate the Turkish Kurds who take refuge there.

It is time for the allies of Turkey to depart from closing the eyes to this reality. Turkey cannot continue to violate the international law and to provoke the genocide of a people who aspires freedom. It is urgent that Ocalan and the others political Kurd prisoners are freed and to start a process aiming at the pacific solution of the Kurd national problem in Turkey.