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Press-Release about the kidnapping of Abdullah Ocalan

On February the 15th, the chairman of the Kurdish Workers Party (PKK), Abdullah Ocalan, was kidnapped by a secret-service operation with support of the US-american CIA from the greek embassy in Nairobi, Kenya.

The International Committee for the preparation of the conference

"Pacification or Liberation - Prospects of international Solidarity with the Political Prisoners", taking place in Berlin, Germany at eastern 1999 claims it's solidarity with all struggles for a fundamental social change and liberation. In the preparation of this conference we also work together with the Kurdish Lawyer Assiociation (YHK). We are aware of the situation and struggle of the kurdish political prisoners inside the turkish but also the

german prisons.

Everybody knows: In Turkey violation of human rights and dirty war against the kurdish people and any kind of opposition is daily grind. Even the public is completely informed about that fact since years. The reasons of the war in Kurdistan are neither "terrorism" nor the activities of the turkish state-enemy number 1. As long, as the right of the kurdish people, to determine the organisation of their social life theirselfe is not acknowledged, there will be no real solution for this conflict.

We dispute the legitimacy of Turkey, to keep the PKK chairman Abdullah Ocalan in arrest and to sentence about the kurdish liberation struggle.

Abdullah Ocalan has to be treated as a prisoner of war, just like all other arrested freedom-fighters. But Turkey till now neither has signed the agreements for the protection of prisoners of war as they were fixed in the convention of Geneva, nor it feels commited on this agreements. Torture and extralegal execution of prisoners are reality. We have to assume, that the life and unhurtness of Abdullah Ocalan are acutely threatened.

Our solidarity is also applicable for the Kurds in european exile, who express their protest and resistance with occupations and other actions, in this overstated situation. It is significant, that the new Minister of the Interior, Schily thinks of the same, that his predecessor Manfred Kanther thought of in such situations. More repression and brutal police-force, to order arresting and deportation to the state of torture Turkey.

The systematic violation of human rights in Turkey, the close cooperation in counter insurgency between Turkey and Germany, the deportation of kurdish refugees and the treatment of the political prisoners will be a topic of the conference in Berlin. The international cooperation between solidarity organisations and human right groups is a condition, to commonly organize shelter and help against torture, murder, "disappearance" and death penalty.

The international committee of the conference

h.p. Kartenberg

Berlin, 17.02.1999

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