PKK leader Abdullah Ocalan

ISTANBUL—Jailed Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) leader Abdullah Ocalan called on Turkey to recognize the Armenian Genocide in a letter he send to Turkish-Armenian weekly, Agos, published on Thursday in that newspaper, reported the Hurriyet Daily News.

Urging the Turkish state to reconcile with its past “regarding the Armenian genocide,” Ocalan in the letter added: “In our time, it is necessary that the whole world recognizes the Armenian people’s tragedy, paving the way for the mourning of their sorrows. It is inevitable that the Turkish Republic will approach the matter with such maturity and reckon with this bitter history.”

Ocalan wrote the letter to rally the Turkish-Armenian community to support the demands of the Kurds in Turkey.1

“The Kurdish people’s fight for freedom and the cure for the Armenian people’s sorrows have overlapped in the fight to [be able to] live in this land as citizens who share the same rights,” said Ocalan said in the letter.

The letter came after the co-chair of the Kurdistan Communities Union (KCK), Bese Hozat, controversially described the Armenian, Jewish and Greek lobbies as a “parallel state,” echoing Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s accusations against the movement of the U.S.-based Islamic scholar Fethullah Gülen (Cemaat).

In the letter, Ocalan also accused anti-democratic powers “from inside and outside of” Turkey of hampering the resolution of the Kurdish issue. “Every time that we undertook peaceful paths, they have interrupted it with provocations,” Öcalan wrote. He cited “capital lobbies” and “structures such the Cemaat” as groups that sought to hamper the processes.

Ocalan also said the killing of former Agos editor Hrant Dink was perpetrated with the same logic. “The true friend of the people Hrant Dink was massacred by the representatives of this dirty mentality, to serve the purpose that I have attempted to describe above,” Öcalan wrote, urging the Armenian community to stand against such networks.

“I invite everyone to be more vigilant and consider matters more objectively against deep, open or parallel structures, and different structures as lobbies, or the Cemaat, which intend to frustrate our endeavor for the people,” he said.