Senior trade unionist and co-chair of the Freedom for Öcalan committee, Christine Blower, has written to Margaret Owen OBE to express her solidarity with Margaret’s hunger strike.
Margaret, at time of writing, is on a week-long hunger strike to raise awareness of the wave of irreversible hunger strikes taking place internationally. The hunger strikers are protesting Turkey’s continued and illegal isolation of imprisoned Kurdish leader Abdullah Öcalan who is now in his 20th year of extreme isolation on Imrali Island.
The hunger strikers demands to end Öcalans isolation are humane and a legal requirement under Turkish and international law and in keeping with the UN recognised ‘Mandela rules’ fo the ethical treatment of prisoners.
Margaret Owen has joined three members of the Kurdish community Ali Poyraz, Nahide Zengin and Mehmet Yilmaz at the Kurdish Community Centre in Harringay, London.