The European Free Alliance Youth, our pan-European alliance, has recently called for the Kurdistan Workers’ Party to be removed from the EU Terrorist Organisation List. Plaid Cymru Youth fully support and echo these calls.
Recent images of Kurds liberating the city of Kobane and the surrounding villages have given hope to those following the conflict in the North of Syria and Iraq. The Kurds, a historically progressive people in a traditionally conservative region, have been fighting against the Jihadist IS forces in the north of Syria for the past few months. The Party of the Workers of Kurdistan (PKK), an outlawed political force in Turkey, have been fighting alongside YPG forces in Kobane and the surrounding area.
The PKK is listed as a terrorist organization by the EU, USA and NATO (despite the European Court of First Instance ruling that the PKK should be dropped from the EU terror list on 3 April 2008, on the grounds that the EU failed to give a proper justification for listing it in the first place). However, given its role in the fight against IS, and the international support to the Kurdish cause, the voices demanding for PKK’s removal from the list have rapidly grown.
Since 1984, the PKK has been involved in an armed struggle fighting for the right of self-determination for the Kurds in Turkey, who make up between 10% and 25% of the state’s population. The Kurds have been subjected to official repression for decades. The party is banned from running for public office in Turkey, and Turkish electoral law makes it almost impossible for the only legalised Kurdish Party, the Democratic Regions Party, to gain any representation in state legislatures. The PKK’s main leader, Abdullah Öcalan, was arrested in 1999 by CIA agents. He was originally sentenced to death, but this sentence was commuted to life imprisonment. Nowadays, despite repeated calls by Human Rights NGOs, the European Court of Human Rights ruling that his imprisonment violates the European Convention of Human Rights, and the ceasefire between PKK and Turkey in 2013, Öcalan is still in jail.
The PKK has respected the ceasefire with the Turkish State and has played an important role in liberating Kurdistan from IS fighters. It is for this reason that Plaid Cymru Youth calls on the European Union, which is supposedly a bastion of Human Rights and democracy, to remove the PKK from the EU Terrorist Organisations List. We believe that its role in delivering a free, democratic and progressive Kurdistan by fighting against IS militias is to be commended. Finally, we urge the Turkish State, in conjunction with the European Union to take urgent steps to improve the democratic and social rights of the Kurds in Turkey.
Plaid Cymru Youth sends our solidarity to the Kurdish nation in their struggle, and to those forces fighting the horrendous ideology of IS. Cwrdistan Rydd!
