Winning a Nobel prize is a huge achievement, but some prize winners are not content to then just to sit on their laurels. They understand that they can use the prize as a platform to get their voice heard on issues of importance: issues such as the freedom of Abdullah Öcalan.
69 Nobel laureates from different fields have come together to send two letters on Öcalan’s behalf.
One was sent to President Erdoğan asking him to “again pursue a path of peace”, as in the Oslo talks (2009-2011) and the Imrali process (2013-2015). It calls on him to send representatives to begin new talks with Öcalan, and to end Öcalan’s isolation.
The other was sent to the international organisations tasked with the protection of human rights: the Committee of Ministers of the Council of Europe, the European Court of Human Rights, and the European Committee for the Prevention of Torture (CPT) in Stasbourg, and the United Nations Human Rights Committee. It calls them out for their lack of action.
Many of the Nobel laureates had signed letters before, at the time of the mass hunger strike against Öcalan’s isolation in 2019. They explain that they have written again because, since the lawyers’ visits that terminated the hunger strike, his isolation has only got worse, and because of “the apparent lack of meaningful efforts taken by the European entities… as well as the UN Human Rights Committee on his behalf.”
After explaining that the CPT has failed to use all the procedures available to make their findings public, and failed to take action in response to Turkey’s non-compliance with their recommendations, the Nobel Laureates ask, “who is the CPT protecting? The state itself or the people whose rights it is the CPT’s duty to defend?”
The letters were written and headed by Jody Williams, who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1997 for her work toward the banning and clearing of anti-personnel mines, and who signed the earlier letter in 2019. She spoke about her involvement to Erem Kansoy for Medya News. She told him “I totally believe that organisations who are supposed to press for human rights should actually do it. And these organisations have failed.” She explained that she doesn’t expect an answer – especially from Erdoğan “who ignores everybody” – but that she is thinking about what they can do next for the campaign, expressing her wish that they could meet with Öcalan directly.
Another of the signatories, Elfriede Jelinek, an Austrian playwright and novelist, who won the 2004 Nobel Prize for Literature, commented, “It is unbearable for me to only ever hear the supposed ‘killer arguments’ of terrorism, insurgency, fighting militias, destroying PKK positions, operation to oust etc. in connection with Kurdistan and the Kurds, as if this Kurdish people, who are only striving for autonomy and freedom, were the super-terrorist of Europe, indeed of the world.”