Cape Town - Human rights activist, writer and former Constitutional Court Justice Albie Sachs has joined renewed calls for the release of Kurdish political prisoner, Abdullah Öcalan.
Sachs was the keynote speaker at the two-day International Conference for Freedom for Abdullah Öcalan: Peace and Stability in the World, co-hosted by the Kurdish Human Rights Action Group (KHRAG) and the Syrian Initiative for the Freedom of Abdullah Öcalan.
The conference commenced on Tuesday at the Fountains Hotel, Cape Town city centre, and saw ANC, SACP, Cosatu, and Nehawu members present in solidarity with and support of the 73-year-old’s release.
Öcalan, a writer, activist, and political thinker, is one of the founding members and leaders of the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), leading efforts for Kurdish independence and statehood, outlawed by Türkiye.
He is currently held in solitary confinement in the high security İmralı prison island since 1999, without access to lawyers.
In 1968, an exiled Sachs was sent to Amnesty International’s (AI) annual conference in an attempt to sway a divided conference on whether to consider Nelson Mandela as a prisoner of conscience.
It was there that Sachs met a Kurdish delegate who had informed him of the plight of the Kurds.
“He told me about the massacres, bombing, tortures, and in a physical sense, it was worse than what was happening to us. We had a terrible system of official apartheid, but his story in pure terms of pain was worse than our story. And I felt there's a tragic inequality of response by the world.
“I didn't want them to diminish the response to our Struggle, of course, but I felt there was something unjust in the way that some struggles are picked up, spoken about in the press, and here was a struggle that just wasn't heard by anybody,” Sachs said.
“It's a source of continuing pain, and to this day the situation of Öcalan is not as well known as Mandela’s. It's a kind of reminder if you like of the kind of inequality of the international community's response to human-to-human suffering.”
Even during apartheid, one was not able to put to trial someone who had been brought to court through illegal means, Sachs said.
The chairperson of KHRAG, Mahmoud Patel, said Öcalan was en route to South Africa after Mandela had offered him political asylum, and a welcoming group awaited his arrival. His flight was taken to Kenya, where he was supposed to board another flight to South Africa.
However, he was captured by the ACIA, Israeli secret service Mossad, and the Turkish National Intelligence Agency and taken to Türkiye.
Öcalan’s death sentence was commuted to life imprisonment as the country had abolished the death penalty.
Patel said the conference and solidarity was to place pressure on Türkiye to uphold the rights of political prisoners, and to release them.
“They’re (Kurds) a nation that was split in four after the Sykes-Picot Agreement at the end of World War I, so they too like the Palestinians are victims of colonialism,” Patel said.
ANC Western Cape leader, Cameron Dugmore, said he would write to the Speaker to request that the Western Cape Legislature debate the freedom struggle of the Kurdish people, demand Öcalan’s release, and what the Western Cape can do to support those struggles.