Kurdish activists collect signatures in London for delisting the PKK

Kurdish activists led by Female Students from Kurdistan (Jinên Xwendekar ên Kurdistan, JXK) collected signatures on Thursday in London as part of the campaign for delisting the PKK as a terrorist organisation.

The JXK activists also organized a panel where developments in Kurdistan were discussed.

Panellists emphasized the importance of Kurdish leader Abdullah Öcalan’s Democratic Modernity Paradigm in the revolutionary struggle.

“We defy the PKK ban that has been in place in Europe for 28 years and we state that we will not stop until this ban is lifted. As Öcalan once said, ‘society cannot be freed without the freedom of women’. Since the male-dominated governments know this very well, they create a slave society to break the will of women. However, we are aware of these dirty policies, and we state that we will not stop until Öcalan is freed,” the young women said during the panel.

After the panel, which lasted about 2 hours, London TCŞ and TekoJIN activists called for participation in the ‘Freedom for Öcalan March’ on March 13.

The internationally-led campaign was launched last November by the Justice for Kurds initiative and calls on the Council of the European Union “in the interest of peace, democracy and human rights” to remove the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) from the EU terrorist list. In the campaign, the initiative highlights that the classification of the PKK as a terrorist organisation serves as a justification for attacks on Kurds and as a reason for war, and leads to “endemic inequalities being overlooked and social problems not being addressed”. The peace initiative is supported by internationally known personalities from politics, civil law, art and culture, including Austrian writer Elfriede Jelinek, Afghan women’s rights activist Selay Ghaffar, German international law expert Norman Paech and Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek.