EC Meeting Papers January 2019

The ongoing hungerstrike in Strasbourg. Photo via hungerstrikes.eu

Young Kurdish activist Imam Sis has entered the 29th day of his hunger strike in Wales, while Nasir Yagiz in Hewlêr (Erbil), Southern Kurdistan (Iraq) reached day 55. Other hunger strikes are being led in the autonomous Kurdish refugee camp Makhmour, as well as in different places in majority Kurdish areas of Syria, Iraq and Iran, as well as in Lebanon and Armenia. On top of that, there are many more people on rotating, temporary hunger strikes both in the Kurdish regions and abroad. An international call has been issued to demand an immediate end to the solitary confinement of Öcalan and other political prisoners in Turkey. Among the first signatories are well-known personalities like Immanuel Wallerstein and David Graeber, as well as activists, thinkers, trade unionists, feminist writers, MPs, MEPs, senators, researchers, journalists, historians and artists from around the world. South African lawyers and political figures, including spokespersons for the National Assembly, who have actively participated in the campaign to free Nelson Mandela, have drawn parallels between Mandela’s anti-apartheid struggle and imprisonment, and the role played by Öcalan for peace in the Middle East. The Kurdish freedom movement has a decades-old history of hunger strikes and death fasts that goes back to the early days of the PKK’s uprising, starting in the late 1970s, when many thousands of Kurdish activists were jailed in Turkish prisons. Hunger strikes are taken up as a last resort, a way in which people take direct action to pressure the state by showing their seriousness and determination about their demands. The systematic refusal of the state to give in to this radical form of protest has often led to the death of prisoners, such as during the prison resistance in the 1980s . But at other times, hunger strikes have brought about historic victories. In 2007, after weeks of refusing to acknowledge the hunger strike led by Kurdish activists, the CPT agreed to visit Imrali Prison to undertake a physical examination of Öcalan’s condition after serious Between Death and Victory