Kurdish people's leader Abdullah Öcalan has sent a message for the anniversary of the Kızıldere massacre which claimed the life of THKP/C leader Mahir Çayan and nine of his comrades on 30 March 1972. Öcalan sent his message through Peace and Democracy Party (BDP) deputy Sırrı Süreyya Önder who had visited him on Imralı Island on 18 March 2013, together with BDP deputies Selahattin Demirtaş and Pervin Buldan.

In his message, which is expected to be read during the commemoration ceremony to take place today, Öcalan said that “Those who sided with brotherhood and peace and fought for freedom, equality and a dignified life have been the voice of a hundred-year-old longing for liberation. With their voices, words and writings, they presented a perspective against capitalist modernity and a revolutionary language which has today become the common feeling in all resisting parts of the society”.  

Remarking that the three main factors of the modernity, capitalism, nation state and industrialism, were the cause of the ethnic, denominational and national massacres in the history of Anatolia and Mesopotamia, Öcalan said that “Those killed in Kızıldere have been the leaders of the struggle against massacres, hunger, inequality and capitalist modernity. They have sacrificed their lives in response to those who tried to turn the Middle East, the garden of peoples, to a graveyard. Siding with the idea for which the revolutionary fighters fought and died against the power and exploitation of the capitalist modernity, I defend social peace and equality against the capitalist policies aimed at hostility among peoples of the Middle East”.

Öcalan continued saying: "I salute those who have determinedly carried their flag against the capitalist modernity, nation state system and its dark history. We are coming to an end of a period built on the absence of the nations outside the dominant and monist mindset and grounded on the enslavement of the people of Kurdistan and Anatolia. We dedicate the Anatolian peace we are trying to develop to all revolutionaries, Mahir and Deniz in particular, who lost their life fighting for this purpose. I salute all revolutionary martyrs, all people living with the memory of their disappeared children and all revolutionary women who refused to be doomed to the mechanisms of exploitation. On the way to victory and brotherhood to be achieved against the killing capitalist modernity, I invite everyone to join the march for a dignified peace, brotherhood and equality of peoples, and a democratic liberation. In these feelings, I remember all revolutionary marytrs of Kızıldere with respect".