Mizgin Tabu/JINHA

NEWS CENTER – Kurdish women are preparing to celebrate April 4, the birthday of jailed PKK leader Abdullah Öcalan, as a day of celebration for all women.

KJA activist Pero Dündar said that the gathering in Abdullah Öcalan's native village of Amara on April 4 will be the eleventh time that tens of thousands descend on the village in Urfa province, the native land of the leader's mother, Mother Üveyş, and at the same time a symbol of resistance for Kurdish women.

"April 4 can't be approached as just an average birthday. For Kurds, April 4 signifies the day when their struggle was reestablished," said Pero. "Like March 8, World Women's Day and Newroz, for women this is the day when our thoughts and ideas come out into the open and our struggle takes to the streets. It's the day we recognize our identity."

Kader Dönmez, a Diyarbakır high school student, says she'll be traveling to Amara this year to celebrate the struggle launched by the jailed PKK leader.

Nesibe Güneyli, an actor in Diyarbakır, said that just as March 21 is a holiday to remember the mythological struggle of Kawa the blacksmith against the tyrant Dehak, April 4 is a day to celebrate the struggle of the Kurdish people for freedom.

The Congress of Free Women (KJA) said in a statement of greeting "we send our greetings on the day of the birth of freedom."

"Like all leaders who resist the hegemonic system, he is now held in the most brutal prison in capitalist modernity," said the statement. "What they want to imprison there on İmralı Island is the equality of all peoples, freedom, the demand to live humanely." The statement said that the imprisonment of Öcalan, a staunch defender of the women's movement in his philosophy and political actions, is also an attempt to repress women's revolution.

(zd/cm)