ISTANBUL — The jailed leader of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) has penned a letter to the Turkish-Armenian weekly Agos, calling on the Armenian community to support the demands of Kurds in Turkey.
“The Kurdish people’s fight for freedom and the cure for the Armenian people’s sorrows have overlapped in the fight to [be able to] live in this land as citizens who share the same rights,” Abdullah Öcalan said in the letter, published Jan. 30, the Hurriyet Daily News reports.
He also said the killing of former Agos editor Hrant Dink was perpetrated with the same logic. “The true friend of the people Hrant Dink was massacred by the representatives of this dirty mentality, to serve the purpose that I have attempted to describe above,” Öcalan wrote, urging the Armenian community to stand against such networks.
In the letter, the jailed PKK leader also urged the Turkish state to reckon with its past “regarding the Armenian genocide.”
“In our time, it is necessary that the whole world recognizes the Armenian people’s tragedy, paving the way for the mourning of their sorrows. It is inevitable that the Turkish Republic will approach the matter with such maturity and reckon with this bitter history,” Öcalan said.
