EC Meeting Papers January 2019

concerns were raised about the state’s gradual poisoning of the leader. In 2012, after a hunger strike that lasted for 52 days in Strasbourg and 68 days in Turkish prisons, the Turkish state was pressured to accept Öcalan’s proposal to end the war and begin a peace process. In 2014, hunger strikes led by activists around the world during the siege of Kobane, alongside thousands of mass protests and direct actions, led to the international media’s reporting of the historic resistance and eventual victory against ISIS.

A last resort

In the apolitical, passive mindset promoted by individualism and consumerism under late capitalism, hunger strikes may be seen as absurd, and in fact be pathologized as irrational self-destructive and ultimately pointless behavior. Why not, one might ask, resort to democratic, legal and civil means to raise demands? As the systematic murder, imprisonment, torture and forced displacement of thousands of Kurdish civilians by NATO member and EU candidate Turkey in the Kurdish regions of Turkey, Syria and Iraq over the last years has shown, the Kurdish people have been systematically deprived of any form of international support or institutional mechanisms that could secure their existence. EU institutions concerned with basic human rights stubbornly refuse to fulfil their most minimal duties in the case of Öcalan, due to their close relations with Turkey. Meanwhile, European governments, especially Germany, invent new authoritarian methods and measures to criminalize even the most peaceful and civic forms in which Kurds in Europe assert their right to organize democratically. They crack down on Kurdish student organizations and raid publishing houses. There was no outcry from such governments when Kurds were being burned alive in the basements of Cizre or older women were shot down by snipers in the streets of Silopi. Likewise, international efforts to resolve the Syrian war have systematically excluded the Kurdish people, due to the interests of the Turkish state. In this environment, apart from resorting to direct action to defend their existence, what more dignified action could there be than the one chosen by Leyla Güven?

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