Re: Oproep ondersteuning hongerstaking Koerden
" Het doel van de massale staking is voornamelijk gericht om het recht op verdediging in de Koerdische moedertaal te institutionaliseren en de eenzame opsluiting van Abdullah Öcalan, de gevangen Koerdische leider, op te heffen."
CNN:
"They want two things," said Gulcin Isbert, a member of the Peace and Democracy Party (BDP), which is Turkey's largest and best-organized Kurdish nationalist party. "The right to education and defense in court in their native language, and for the leader of the Kurds, Abdullah Ocalan, to have health, security and freedom."
For decades, the Kurdish language was banned in Turkey despite the fact the Kurds make up the country's largest ethnic minority. Those restrictions have been relaxed over the past decade by the government of prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, which introduced a state Kurdish-language television station.
But Kurdish partisans want to expand those linguistic freedoms.
The demand for the release of Ocalan is much more problematic. He is the founder of the Kurdistan Workers Party, or PKK, a group that Turkey, the U.S. and the European Union label as a 'terrorist organization.'