“We cannot keep busy waiting for Ankara to respond to the demands of the Kurdish people,” said BDP Co-chairperson Gültekin Kışanak in Diyarbakır on Saturday. “The position of the Kurds is politically legitimate. Today no one can deny this. However, there is no legal groundwork. At this stage, the Kurdish people are not in a position to wait for the state to take steps in answering its demands. The Kurdish people desire to reach a solution based on their own will. For that reason, our slogan for this election is ‘Freedom to Identity with Self-Governance’,” said Kışanak, referring to the upcoming local elections to be held next month. Kışanak is the BDP Diyarbakır Municipality mayoral candidate.
The town of Civre, located in the southeastern province of Şırnak near the Iraqi and Syrian borders, saw its third day of protests on Saturday. The town also witnessed fierce clashes between police and masked protesters, 18 of whom were taken into custody. Several locations were raided, and police confiscated hundreds of Molotov cocktails, fireworks and documents pertaining to illegal organizations.
Öcalan was captured in 1999 in the Kenyan capital of Nairobi and is currently serving a life sentence on the island of Imralı near İstanbul, convicted of leading the PKK in an armed struggle against the Turkish military. The PKK has been involved in a 30-year conflict with the Turkish military, much of which took place under the umbrella of a struggle to form an independent Kurdish state. Öcalan declared a cease-fire in 2013 in the course of dialogue with the Turkish government, which unveiled a democratization package later that year that granted Kurds the right to administer private education in their mother tongue. However, many Kurds as well as the PKK considered the package to be insufficient.
Source: TODAY’S ZAMAN