On Friday April 16, Australian groups participating in the  on the international campaign for the Freedom of Abdullah Öcalan held an important webinar with guest speakers Clare Baker from the Unite Union in the UK, former Icelandic MP Ögmundur Jonasson, Australian historian John Tully & Kurdish-Australian journalist and former trade union organiser Mansour Razaghi.

The webinar was introduced and chaired by Sarah Hathway, an organiser with the health workers union Victorian Allied Health Professionals Association (VAHPA).

Peter Boyle, Rojava Solidarity Sydney, wrote about the webinar  that it opened with a short video of the highlights of the campaign in Australia so far, which has included rallies, a car cavalcade and even a “Free Öcalan” sky banner pulled by a plane over the city of Perth in Western Australia.

"We should always take a long view of history," John Tully told the webinar and added: “If we look at how the African National Congress and the South West Africa People's Organisation were once classified by Reagan and Thatcher as ‘terrorist’, now it is 30 years since the fall of Apartheid.

Apartheid once seemed an impregnable fortress backing the road to freedom and democracy. Many of its leaders were in exile or in prison. Nelson Mandela, who was the venerated leader of millions of people in South Africa, spent 18 years in prison on Robben Island.

I think there is a stark parallel with Abdullah Öcalan, the acknowledged leader of millions of Kurds, is locked up on Imrali Island for 22 years and the time has come for him to be released from that imprisonment."

Boyle continued his report as follows: "Clare Baker, who was part of the 2021 International Peace Delegation to Imrali, described how the successful #FreeÖcalan campaign of the UK trade unions culminated in hundred of delegates of the 2019 Trade Union Congress (TUC) national conference holding up placards with the image of Öcalan and the words “Freedom for Öcalan”.

Baker said she would be happy to help bring the Australian trade union movement into the campaign.

Speaking of the Imrali delegation’s findings, she added that Erdogan’s war against the Kurds had become "an attack against all progressive forces" in Turkey and become a “war on all who oppose him and stand up for human and worker rights."

Ögmundur Jonasson, who has been part of four Imrali delegations, said the situation is getting worse. “One of our interlocutors told us that what we are seeing in Turkey is a regime of impunity. This means that whatever the authorities do there are no consequences. They can do whatever they like without consequences, domestically and internationally, and i is this that is getting worse.”

Jonasson posted to Abdullah Öcalan’s 2019 call for a “deep social reconciliation in this process we are experiencing and the urgent need for democratic negotiations, away form all forms of polarisation and the culture of conflict and the solution of problems. We can solve the problems in Turkey and even in the region, first and foremost the war, with soft power, that is with intelligence, political and cultural power instead of tools of physical violence.”

Mansour Razaghi shared his own family's experiences of oppression and humiliation as Kurds by the Iraqi and Iranian regimes. He said that these were the daily experiences of most Kurds in the region.

"Abdullah Öcalan is a leader for millions of Kurds and in 1999 he was abducted and kidnapped in a multi-state conspiracy and since then he has been in jail. This is an inhuman and brutal sentence that has been imposed on him and we cannot be silenced.”

The groups that organised this webinar were Australians For Kurdistan, Rojava Solidarity - Sydney, Solidarity With Rojava Network (WA) and Federation of Democratic Kurdish Society (Australia).