Dino Frisullo was commemorated in his grave in Rome on the 19th anniversary of his death. The activist, politician and journalist who co-founded Kurdistan solidarity was known as ‘Heval Dino’. His full name was Damiano Giovanni Frisullo. He died on 5 June 2003 in Perugia of cancer.

Family members, friends and activists of the Kurdish liberation movement came together to visit the grave at the Verano cemetery. Speakers paid tribute to the life of Dino Frisullo, his personality, his work for Kurdish society and talked about shared memories. "Dino's commitment to our people will ensure his constant and grateful memory," said a Kurdish activist.

Dino Frisullo was already active within left-wing structures as a teenager. As a student he was involved in pacifist and environmental groups and organized peace marches against the military infrastructure in Italy. He was a consultant for the Democratic Party, was one of the co-founders of the anti-racist organizations "Rete Antirazzista" and "Senza Confine" and worked as a migration consultant for the city council of Rome. When around 15,000 Kurdish refugees from Turkey, Iraq and Iran were stranded on the southern coast of Italy in 1997, he got on the frontline to help.

From that moment, Dino Frisullo was considered a champion for the defense of the rights of Kurds. He has also repeatedly combined his professional activities with his political commitment. In 1997 he founded the association "Kurdistan Azad". In the same year he took part in the "European peace train Musa Anter". The initiative was brought into being by the "Hannover Appeal" in order to "enforce the process of democratization in Turkey and the indispensable respect for human rights" and to protest against the war in North Kurdistan. He took part in delegation trips to Kurdistan several times, including Newroz in 1998. On 21 March of that year, he was arrested in Amed.

He ended up in one of the notorious maximum security prisons in Amed, held in isolation and tortured. The arrest warrant was lifted after forty days, but Frisullo was still not allowed to leave the country. It was not until 16 June 1998, when he was sentenced to a year on appeal, that he was expelled from the country.

When Abdullah Öcalan had to leave Syria in October 1998 and embarked on a months-long odyssey through Europe - at the end of which he was kidnapped in Kenya and deported to Turkey - he stayed in Italy for a while. It was 12 November 1998 when Öcalan landed in Rome. The first groups of Kurds in exile arrived there on the same day and settled down for a vigil in front of the military hospital. It didn't take long for them to grow into a huge crowd that sat out in the square for months in wintry temperatures demanding political status for Öcalan. Dino Frisullo was also among them. At the time, he was taking part in a hunger strike demanding freedom for Abdullah Öcalan and a solution to the Kurdish question. He was also the one who initiated the renaming of the square as "Piazza Kurdistan".

In 2002, Dino Frisullo helped found the Rome-based association "Ararat" and became its chairman. Shortly thereafter, he said goodbye to public events because he was getting ill.