The 1999 abduction of Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) leader Abdullah Ocalan by Turkey's National Intelligence Agency (MIT) while he was in Kenya set a precedent for the CIA's post-9/11 practice of "extraordinary rendition", Ocalan's lawyers told the first Australian Conference on the Political and Human Rights Dimensions of the Kurdish Question, held in Melbourne on October 3.
The PKK is the main pro-independence group within Turkey's Kurdish population and is banned under Turkey's "anti-terror" laws. Ocalan has been held in solitary confinement as the only prisoner on the Imrah Island in the Turkish Sea of Marmara since his abduction and transportation back to Turkey in 1999.
Keynote speakers at the conference included lawyers Kerim Yildiz and Mark Muller, who are part of Ocalan's legal defence team. Muller described how Turkey pressured Syria in 1998 to expel Ocalan by massing troops on its border, five months after the PKK had announced a unilateral ceasefire in its war of resistance to the Turkish occupation of western Kurdistan.
After leaving Syria, Ocalan sought refuge in Greece, Russia, Italy, Belarus and the Netherlands, but the European governments colluded to have him deported to Kenya. Muller argued that Ocalan was sent there because it put him outside the jurisdiction of the European Convention on Human Rights. "Europe is very good at preaching human rights ... but the practice is different, especially with minority peoples on the borders of Europe", Muller said.
Pointing to how many of the irregularities involved with Ocalan's abduction had become institutionalised by the CIA since 9/11, he stressed that in the new "war on terror" environment, human rights activists could no longer restrict their focus to individual rights, but had to also focus on questions such as oppressed nations and persecuted religious communities.
Vicki Sentas from the Federation of Community Legal Centres described how "anti-terror" laws define political dissent as terrorism. She recounted an incident at a Melbourne protest rally following a massacre in the Kurdish city of Diyarbakir on March 27. Police told a protester that it was illegal to carry a placard displaying a portrait of Ocalan. She added that self-censorship would help the laws succeed.
Greens Senator Kerry Nettle, who introduced an unsuccessful parliamentary bill to have the PKK removed from Australia's list of banned "terrorist" organisations, said that the Greens opposed all of the more than 200 "anti-terror" laws in Australia and that existing criminal laws were sufficient to prosecute terrorists. She questioned why national liberation movements such as the PKK, Hamas, Hezbollah and the Tamil Tigers had been lumped in with terrorist outfits such as al Qaeda.