The hunger strikers said that isolation imposed on Kurdish People's Leader Abdullah Öcalan is illegal and they added they are determined to continue their action until it is lifted. 

On the 5th day of the hunger strike, Latif Cebe, one of the hunger strikers, talked to ANF and drew attention to the fact that the paradigm elaborated by Öcalan is of great importance for the Kurdish people and the peoples of the Middle East.

Indicating that the Turkish state and the imperialists had imposed isolation on Öcalan precisely because they know the importance of his thoughts, Cebe said: “We must close around the president. We will achieve success by breaking isolation.”

Another hunger striker, Assyrian-Syriac Yasar Küçükaslan, said that the Turkish government aimed at silencing all opposition groups by isolating Öcalan, but that the Kurdish, Assyrian-Syriac and other oppressed peoples would not allow it.

Drawing attention to the genocide against the Armenian, Assyrian-Syriacs and Pontian Greeks in 1915, Küçükaslan said: “Now the Turkish state is implementing a genocide policy against the Kurds. It is conducting genocide operations in northern Kurdistan to eliminate the achievements of the Kurdish people. In Rojava, the Kurdish, Arab, Assyrian-Syriac and other peoples have established a system in which they live together, and that is what Turkey wants to destroy. The philosophical founder of the system in Rojava is Mr. Ocalan, and for this reason he has been put in isolation.” 

Küçükaslan pointed out that the Turkish state was trying to maintain the denial policy of the Committee of Union and Progress. “The denial and genocidal policy is now imposed on the Kurdish people, women, socialists and all the forces against fascism, which have survived against all attacks. We are on a hunger strike - he added - for this and we want to stress that we will fight until isolation is broken.”