Kurdish-Australians and their supporters rallied at Sydney Town Hall square on April 15 to call on the Australian government and other world powers to stand up against the isolation of Kurdish leader Abdullah Öcalan, who has been imprisoned by the Turkish state since February 1999.
Australian Federation of Democratic Kurdish Society Co-chair Gulfer Olan said that it was the Kurdish leader’s “democratic, ecological and gender libertarian ideas and paradigm that the Turkish regime and its supporters want to prevent with this isolation”.
Peter Boyle, on behalf of Rojava Solidarity Sydney and Socialist Alliance, said that the unprecedent attempt to silence and erase Öcalan by social media platforms would not stop his ideas from spreading.
He said the Rojava revolution and the global popularity of the slogan “Women, Life, Freedom” — which summed up his idea that the liberation of women was the key to human liberation — showed that this unprecedented censorship had failed.
Ismet Tashtan, the co-chair of the Democratic Kurdish Community Centre (NSW) said that Öcalan was not just a leader to the Kurds but also a “voice for all the voiceless and oppressed”.