The hunger strike campaign led by the co-chair of the DTK and HDP MP, Leyla Guven, to demand an end to the isolation of the Kurdish people’s leader Abdullah Ocalan, is spreading. Şiyar Xelîl, a Kurdish activist in the German city of Nuremberg today launched an indefinite and non-alternating hunger strike at the Medya House of People.

A press statement was issued in the Medya House of People to announce the hunger strike action with the participation of many Kurdish citizens.

Şiyar Xelîl’s statement is as follows: “Our leader was imprisoned in Imrali as a result of an international conspiracy. For almost 20 years now, he is held in a solitary confinement, and the international community is silent. Many massacres were carried out against our people when our leader was imprisoned; the world again turned a blind eye to the massacres. If our leader was free to express his thoughts, those crimes could have been prevented. The hunger strike that our comrade Leyla Guven has launched, is to protest this isolation, it is a demand to achieve circumstances for Ocalan to freely express his ideas. Firstly, I offer my self-criticism to the Leader, Leyla Guven and other hunger strikers, for I was late to start my hunger strike. As a young Kurdish man, I am against this isolation and I do not accept this oppression. We will continue our struggle to the end. Once again I repeat, ‘Resistance is life, life is resistance.’”