AMED - Italian philosopher Donatella Di Cesare, who has expressed her support for the process, said in a letter she sent to the İmralı Delegation for delivery to Abdullah Öcalan: “My hope for peace and my hope for your freedom are inseparable. There can be no peace without your freedom.”

 

Following Kurdish People’s Leader Abdullah Öcalan’s February 27, 2025 call for a Peace and Democratic Society, a framework law has passed in Parliament, despite its shortcomings. Since the call, messages of support have continued to come from prominent intellectuals, writers, philosophers and sociologists around the world. As part of these efforts, Italian philosopher Donatella Di Cesare has also written a letter to Abdullah Öcalan, sending it to the İmralı Delegation for delivery to him.

 

The letter sent by Donatella Di Cesare reads as follows: “I have wanted to write to you for a long time, and I am deeply moved to have the possibility of doing so now. Your name has accompanied a large part of my political and intellectual life. For me, as for many of us in Italy, you have never been a distant figure. We have followed your struggle, your imprisonment, your thought, and the struggle of the Kurdish people with admiration, concern and solidarity.

 

‘NO PRISON HAS BEEN ABLE TO PREVENT YOUR WORDS’

 

I have always felt close to the Kurdish people. Their long struggle for freedom, dignity and recognition has been, for me, one of the great political questions of our time. And your name has been inseparable from that history. Perhaps what has affected me most deeply over the years has been the thought of your imprisonment on İmralı, and especially of the long periods of isolation you have endured. More than twenty-seven years of imprisonment are difficult even to imagine. And isolation is something more than imprisonment: it is an attempt to interrupt the relation between a human being and the world, to deprive a voice of its interlocutors, to separate thought from the community to which it speaks. And yet your voice has not been silenced. This has always struck me. From an island-prison, under conditions intended to separate you from the world, your thought has continued to circulate, to be discussed, translated, contested, embraced. No prison has been able to prevent your words from crossing borders.

 

I therefore wanted to tell you something very simple and very personal: throughout these years, you have been for me a figure of extraordinary importance. I have admired not only your resistance, but also your capacity to rethink political struggle itself, to question nationalism, the nation-state and sovereign power, and to search for other forms of democratic coexistence.

 

These are questions very close to my own philosophical work. How can we imagine a community that does not close itself within identity? How can different peoples inhabit the same political space without one dominating the other? How can we think democracy beyond sovereignty, borders and exclusion? Today these questions acquire an even greater urgency.

 

‘POSSIBILITY OF PEACE FILLS ME WITH HOPE’

 

The possibility of peace that has opened in Turkey fills me with hope. After so many deaths, so much suffering and so many decades of conflict, the prospect that another history might finally begin is of immense importance. But I must also tell you very frankly what I feel: I cannot imagine a genuine peace without your freedom.

 

There is something profoundly contradictory in a peace process made possible in such an essential way by your words and your political initiative, while you yourself remain in prison. How can a new democratic chapter truly begin while the person who helped make that chapter possible remains deprived of freedom?

 

‘YOUR FREEDOM WOULD HAVE A POLITICAL AND SYMBOLIC MEANING’

 

For me, your liberation is not a secondary question to be addressed after peace has been achieved. It is part of peace itself. There can be no genuine reconciliation while you remain imprisoned and separated from the political and human community to which you have continued to speak throughout all these years. After more than twenty-seven years of imprisonment, and after the long periods of isolation you have endured, I believe that your freedom would have an immense political and symbolic meaning. It would be a sign that another era has truly begun. This is why, today, my hope for peace and my hope for your freedom are inseparable. There can be no peace without your freedom.

 

I wanted you to know that from Italy I have followed you for many years, with admiration and solidarity. And that today, in this new and delicate moment, I feel even more strongly the desire to send you my closeness, my respect and my hope.”