Robert Jarowoy, a longtime friend of the Kurds, passes away

Robert Jarowoy passed away in Hamburg on Monday evening. His death is a great loss for the Kurdish liberation movement, in which he was active for decades.

The left-wing politician and author Robert Jarowoy died of cancer on Monday evening in his apartment in Hamburg-Altona at the age of 68. For the Kurdish liberation movement his death means a great loss.

Jarowoy, born in Gauchsmühle near Nuremberg in 1952, studied philosophy and history. He was arrested as a 20-year-old in connection with the June 2 movement and remained in prison from 1973 to 1979, four years of which he spent in solitary confinement. Since 1980 he lived in Altona, and since 2008 he was a member of the district faction of the party DIE LINKE. In the mid-1990s, for almost ten years he was the managing director of the Stadt-Land-Genossenschaft, a regional supply association of a group of ecologically managed farms.

Since the beginning of the 1990s, Robert Jarowoy and his wife Beate Reiß organized delegation trips to Kurdistan. Through this work hundreds of people have been brought closer to the Kurdish reality. In this context, he and others founded Kurdistanhilfe [Kurdistan Relief] in 1992, which continues to provide successful humanitarian support today. Jarowoy last visited Southern Kurdistan with a travel group from Germany in October 2019. A year ago he traveled to Rojava. In August 2018 he wrote an obituary for ANF for his friend Zekî Şengalî (Ismail Özden), who was killed in a Turkish drone attack in Southern Kurdistan (Northern Iraq).

During the past months he has been tirelessly engaged in passing on his political work and his many projects to others in order to guarantee their continued existence beyond his death and to avoid leaving any gaps.

Robert Jarowoy's wife Beate Reiß passed away in February 2018 after a long illness. When he himself fell ill with cancer and was confronted with his own impending death, he said: "Then I will be with her again.”