KCK co-chair Besê Hozat spoke about Abdullah Öcalan's historic resistance in Imrali. The first part of this interview can be read here.

The Kurdish People’s Leader Abdullah Öcalan is waging a historic resistance. How has this 25-year resistance in Imrali affected the Kurdish Freedom Movement and the Kurdish people?

Rêber Apo’s unshakable will and strength of endurance, created by his great passion and deep commitment to free life, has dramatically manifested itself in Imrali. Rêber Apo’s transformation of the conditions of torture and imprisonment on Imrali into an arena of struggle against the conspiratorial forces and the genocidal fascist Turkish state for 25 years has given the Kurdish Freedom Movement and our people a great moral strength as well as an invincible will, endurance and resistance power against all kinds of difficulties. Rêber Apo managed to create the power to struggle against difficulties, to overcome and succeed with consciousness, will and organized struggle in the Freedom Movement and our people.

They themselves have thereby created great values by developing great resistance  according to the philosophy of Rêber Apo in the last 25 years. Kurds, under the leadership of the Freedom Movement, created the revolution in Rojava by fighting against the genocidal fascist Turkish state and its ally ISIS. The revolution in Rojava, marked by the basic pillars of women’s liberation and the practiced democratic nation, illuminated the darkness of the Middle East. It turned Kurdish women into the ideological and practical vanguard of the world women’s movement. The paradigm of democratic nation came to life with the revolution in Rojava. And the democratic free unity of the peoples brought forth the strategic alliance of the Kurdish-Arab peoples as a magnificent achievement of the democratic nation paradigm.

The resistance of Kurdish People’s Leader’s Abdullah Öcalan has undoubtedly affected the forces that carried out the conspiracy against him. From this perspective, what kind of an impact did the policies of the regional states and international powers, especially the Turkish state, face as a result of his resistance?

As I stated before, the aim of the conspiracy was to surrender Rêber Apo and liquidate the Kurdish Freedom Movement. This plan of the conspirators clearly failed. The resistance that developed around Rêber Apo and in his political philosophy frustrated all the calculations of the conspirators. Rêber Apo turned the system of Imrali, the system of torture and imprisonment, into a great field of struggle. In the 25 years the struggle has grown a lot. Significant social and political developments and successful results emerged in Northern Kurdistan and Turkey. There was a revolution in Rojava. Inside and outside the country, the Kurdish struggle for freedom opened new channels of relations, multiplied the number of its international friends and developed tactical and strategic alliances. Rêber Apo’s democratic nation paradigm and the democratic confederal system were met with great interest in the global community. The women’s liberation struggle in particular dazzled everyone. The conceptualization of women’s science by Rêber Apo, Jineolojî, has become the center of attention worldwide, bringing the Kurdish women’s movement together with the women’s movements of the world and making it possible to form a universal movement. The ideological, political, organizational and military resistance of Kurdish women in the struggle against ISIS has made Kurdish women and the character of the Kurdistan Freedom Struggle globally recognized. During the ISIS attack on Kobanê, the resistance of the Kurds led by women raised the conscience of humanity. Undoubtedly, all these were very important developments.

The policy of the leadership led the genocidal fascist state to different searches and methods. The ruling AKP has developed a new tactic and turned to liquidation with a modified method of special warfare under the name of dialogue and solution. For years, with this method, it tried to deceive everyone inside and outside, to gather support and to completely dominate the state. It cannot be said that the AKP failed in this regard. Indeed, it succeeded in deceiving many circles and forces and dominated the state, establishing its own kind of state. Especially between 2013 and 2015, it developed a fierce process of special warfare under the name of the ‘solution process’. While waging such a special war against our struggle, they saw that the Freedom Movement was getting stronger on the basis of Rêber Apo’s new paradigm. They launched an all-out war process. For 8 years now, Turkey has been waging an apocalyptic war. The AKP is carrying out a policy of war at home and in the world, taking the MHP and all other remnants of the ‘Committee of Union and Progress’ with it. On the one hand, it wants to reach the borders of Misak-ı Milli [National Pact] through Kurdish genocide, on the other hand, it aims to realize the Turanist policy through a new Armenian genocide, to unite the Turkic states, and to seize the oil and gas of Central Asia and the South Caucasus. Erdoğan wants to do, what Enver Pasha could not do in the early 20th century; he wants to build a Turanist empire through the Kurdish and Armenian genocide. With a neo-Ottomanist approach, the Turkish state invades North-East Syria, Rojava and South Kurdistan [Northern Iraq]. After 25 years of resistance along the lines of the leadership, Turkey has reached a complete dead end.

Kurdish hostility has plunged Turkey into a blind war. With its own hand, it is bombing the basic power dynamics that make Turkey exist. By wallowing in the illusion of ‘I am winning, I am achieving great success’, it is moving step by step towards a point that eliminates its raison d’être. Turkey is stuck between bottomless abysses on all four sides. It thinks that teetering on the edge of the abyss is ascension. It fails to see that it is putting its entire future in danger. Will a new Turkish century be created with a militarized, racist, nationalist delusional mob, an army that drops bombs on the Kurdish geography every other day and drools like rabid dogs? Will a country whose courtrooms and prisons are filled with Kurds, women, patriots, socialists and democrats rise or sink? What we know is that at the end of the day, fascist genocide will lose in the face of struggle and the peoples will win. Kurds will be liberated, and Turkey will be democratized.

In 25 years, there have been very serious developments in the region. The nation states of Iraq and Syria have disintegrated. In the face of popular resistance based on the idea of freedom and democracy, which has developed under the influence of the paradigm of the leadership and our freedom struggle, fascist nation-state systems will gradually dissolve and disintegrate in years and decades. The freedom demands of peoples and women will change the Middle East. The effects of this are already visible today. The repressive, prohibitive, denialist, monist-centralist fascist nation-states will eventually either have to change or collapse. The times of darkness are the closest to dawn. This is precisely the period of time that the region is currently experiencing. The states of the region, which are part of the International Conspiracy, are no longer as powerful as they once were. They have lost their dominance in the face of the demands of the peoples, women and youth for freedom and democracy. Increasing repression and violence will not stop this dissolution and disintegration. Conspiring against the Kurds and the peoples or taking part in conspiracy plans will not serve anything beyond accelerating their dissolution.

The conspiratorial forces continued to provide support to the genocidal Turkish state for the liquidation of the Movement for 25 years, even though they did not achieve their goals. The system of torture and isolation on Imrali is a system established by the conspiratorial forces. And the international powers played a major role in the establishment and maintenance of it. Although these powers are forced to form conjunctural alliances with the Kurdish resistance on the basis of their political and economic interests in the region, this does not change the real intentions and aims of these powers. As a matter of fact, their role in the continuation of the Imrali isolation and their support to the Turkish state in its invasion operations are obvious. These relations of the international conspiratorial powers with the Turkish state have revealed and exposed their true faces and brought about their weakening in the face of the peoples. Every year they will pay more and more for the crimes they committed against the Kurdish people in the conspiracy and their guilt will be exposed in all its dimensions before all humanity.

The resistance on Imrali has many dimensions; what are its ideological, paradigmatic, vital and physical dimensions?

Rêber Apo’s Imrali resistance is an ideological, political and social resistance. He was handed over to the Turkish state by an international conspiracy because he defended the free and democratic life of the Kurdish people and fought a great struggle for this cause. The reason why Rêber Apo was taken to Imrali is because of the values of freedom, equality, justice and democracy that he defends. His longing to create a new Middle East based on the brotherhood of peoples in the Middle East. He is being held under the torture and isolation system because he defends human values. Rêber Apo is defending the rights of peoples, women and all oppressed identities with a strong will under the torture conditions on Imrali and under all the methods of the special warfare. He is paving the way for the Middle East to break its dark fate and become a geography worthy of its history. Rêber Apo has been resisting with an extraordinary will for 25 years under conditions that even the most physically healthy person cannot endure for a few months. It is his great passion for a free people and free humanity that brings out this extraordinary resistance and resilience. It is the love of free life.

Rêber Apo is the theoretician and founder of the democratic socialist ideology. He is the ideologist, theoretician and practitioner of the democratic nation paradigm and the democratic confederal system. Rêber Apo brought a new interpretation and depth to socialist ideology. He created a paradigm and system of a non-power-state social system. Today, he became the new leader of socialism with his paradigm and ideology. He put forward the ideology and paradigm that societies can live by establishing their own democratic socialist self-governments outside the power-state, and this has been proven in the concrete of the revolution in Rojava. In this sense, he overcame the power-state handicap of all left-socialist movements struggling against the capitalist-imperialist system and the system of domination that reached its peak with its modernity, and revealed the correct perspective of free life and social system. Rêber Apo revealed the ideological, theoretical and practical fallacy of associating socialism with the phenomenon of power-state. He showed that there cannot be a socialist state and that those who advocate this thesis cannot create a successful socialist revolution, as seen in world examples. The paradigm put forward by Rêber Apo has brought a correct view of socialism, and today it is an agenda for discussion on a universal level and is being embraced by the world at large.