The Free Women's Movement (Tevgera Jinên Azad-TJA) issued a written statement to celebrate Abdullah Öcalan on his birthday, today, 4 April.

The statement said: “Born as the child of a nation under the threat of liquidation at the hands of colonialism, Mr Abdullah Öcalan has devoted his entire life to struggle against assimilation, slaughter and annihilation. Abdullah Öcalan was the gentle child of a mother possessing the qualities of the mother-woman figure of natural society and a family engaged in farming. As he grew older, he combined the gifts endowed upon him by nature with his arduous rebellion against power holders of all sorts. As the sage of a people whose land/country has been split up into four pieces, mother tongue banned and whose very existence is being denied in an effort to alienate it from its roots, he continues an uninterrupted struggle for freedom and continues to inspire all sectors of the society as the truth-seeker that he is. The philosophy of being/existing which he brought to light in his own personality has become the Sun of millions of people, men and women, children and the elderly workers...”

The statement continued: “Opposing and challenging the nation-state which is part of the hegemonic central system of capitalist modernity, Mr Abdullah Öcalan has grounded himself on freedom and ecological life against hegemonic mind-sets, and has made visible and viable the opportunity and potentiality of an egalitarian life together for peoples. Mr Öcalan is no longer merely an individual per se but has transformed into a philosophy and into truth-seeking. Women who were among those who recognize their own truth as people in his philosophy, therein, also got the opportunity to discover their unique identity. Öcalan, the sage, having pointed out that the free women phenomenon will constitute the basis for free life, has built the systematics of his thought and practice of life on the basis of this philosophy.”

The TJA statement continued: “He has invited women to form their unique autonomous organization and to stand up for their own being. The struggle he launched – first with himself - to analyze masculinity and to transform the masculinity constructed by the system has been an inspiration for the upsurge in the struggle of women. Women who ever since have taken the lead in the actions of the freedom struggle of a people are now also leading the struggle against patriarchal mind-set in feudal family structures, politics, workplaces and all domains of life. The inference “society cannot be free unless women are free” that Öcalan developed theoretically on the basis of his own life experience is being translated into achievements in all social, intellectual, institutional and action related domains in the 21st century. Women who now reject dependence on men, classical womanhood and slave-like lives continue to enlarge organization, to expand and translate the struggle into gains and to ground their fight on an ethical and aesthetical understanding. Women who, cherishing the heritage and the accomplishments of feminism as the uprising of the original and the final colony in history, have put forth the proposition of a science of women based on their local specificities and experience, consider the Mr Öcalan’s being as their own, his imprisonment as their own imprisonment, his freedom as their own freedom. Mr Öcalan, born into a geography which has been home to many sages, prophets, philosophers, and himself a Sage, has also ended up being treated like them by tyrants and has been taken prisoner through an international conspiracy amidst outrageous defamation and brutal torture. Kept under conditions of unprecedented isolation within a small cell on a vast depopulated island for nearly quarter of a century, Mr Öcalan has been keeping up a dignified resistance rarely encountered in history.”

The statement ended with the following remarks: “For all those who adhere to his philosophy and doctrine on life, and foremost for women who have set out on the path of liberation, his freedom means the end of war, the end of poverty, stands for a chance for peoples to live together in equality and the achievement of harmony between human beings and nature. We celebrate your birthday Mr Abdullah Öcalan. May your birthday bring happiness to the universe and peoples. Thankfully, history is bearing witness to an uninterrupted story on dignified resistance and on how to live a life. With the hope that tomorrow we will dance the halay in days of freedom, we celebrate your birthday once more, we are glad to have you here.”