Abdullah Öcalan was born on April 4, 1949,
in the village of Emara, in the town of Khalfi in the Urfa (Roha) region. .
He was one of seven children in a poor, hard-working family. He completed his primary education in the Armenian village of Cebin, adjacent to his village, and completed his secondary education in the town of Nizip, Gaziantep. In 1968, he graduated from the Anatolian Vocational School of Surveying in Ankara.
He enrolled in the Faculty of Law at Istanbul University in 1970, but later enrolled in the Faculty of Political Science at Ankara University in 1971 after being influenced by the Turkish left movement.
He participated in numerous political activities during his university years. His first political
activity was with the Turkish revolutionary left, which took a positive stance regarding the Kurdish people’s right to self-determination in 1970. He was arrested in April 1972 after holding a demonstration protesting the killing of Mahir Çayan and his nine comrades.
On Newroz in 1973, he formed a six-member intellectual group under the slogan “Kurdistan is a colony, and it demands freedom.” In 1975, he became the chairman of the Higher Democratic Culture and Education Association in Ankara.
Ocalan and twenty-three of his comrades founded the Kurdistan Workers’ Party
(PKK) on November 27, 1978, in the village of Fis in Diyarbakır. On July 2, 1979, he entered Kobani after the Turkish state committed massacres against the Kurdish people and arrested PKK cadres. The leader predicted a military coup in Turkey, which occurred. He began diplomatic work and worked to prepare the party for the next revolutionary phase.
At the invitation of a group of European parliamentarians specifically Greek parliamentarians he went to Greece out of a desire to resolve the Kurdish issue through peaceful means with Europe having role in it.
As a first step, he was forced to leave Syria through an international conspiracy on October 9, 1998. On February 15, 1999, he was kidnapped in Nairobi, Kenya, and handed over to the Turkish state
On April 28, 1999, he was brought to a mock trial before the Turkish state on charges of high treason against Turkey, under Article 125 of the Turkish Penal Code. He was sentenced to death on June
29, 1999, on charges of establishing and managing an armed terrorist organization, despite its lack of jurisdiction, as established by international law.
Since that time, and to this day, Leader Öcalan has been held in solitary confinement on Imrali Island, in strict isolation. With his unwavering intellect and boundless wisdom, he succeeded in thwarting the conspiracy from achieving its goal. He transformed the infamous Imrali Prison into a beacon of free thought, from which the light of the philosophy of democratic civilization and the theory of the democratic nation radiated. At the same time, he proposed democratic confederalism as a solution and a concept that contradicts the concept of the nation-state. By adopting it, every group, ethnicity, culture, religious
community, intellectual movement, and semi-independent economic unit could express itself. As a lofty goal and the greatest virtue that can be achieved for a society, it is to lead him to a free, democratic, ecological, ethical, and political society in which the sexes are equal. Hence the great importance of his legal pleadings and volumes of thought and philosophy, including, but not limited to, The Manifesto of Democratic Nation.
By Suleiman Ramo
