ANKARA, 14 May 2005 — Turkey’s president said Parliament must first remove legal obstacles before Kurdish rebel leader Abdullah Ocalan can be retried in line with a ruling from Europe’s top human rights court. The European Court of Human Rights, based in the French city of Strasbourg, declared on Thursday that the 1999 trial of Ocalan was unfair, putting pressure on Ankara to retry a man reviled by Turks as a terrorist.
“If the ECHR demands a retrial, it is my conviction that the court in Turkey dealing with this case will reject such a demand. Because there is a legal obstacle to this,” President Ahmet Necdet Sezer told reporters late on Thursday. “Allowing a retrial is impossible unless the law is changed... And it is up to the lawmakers to decide whether to do this or not,” said Sezer, a former constitutional judge. “If the Code of Criminal Procedure is amended, the ECHR’s decision can be accepted as the renewal of the trial.”
Ocalan, serving a life sentence for treason as sole inmate of an island prison near Istanbul, is blamed by Turks for the deaths of some 30,000 people during a separatist revolt in southeastern Turkey in the 1980s and 1990s. He was sentenced to death in 1999 but capital punishment was abolished in 2002 as part of Turkey’s EU-inspired reforms. The ECHR verdict on Ocalan must still be confirmed by the Council of Europe, the continent’s top human rights body to which the ECHR is attached.
Turkey’s government signaled on Thursday it was ready to retry Ocalan if the ruling is upheld, though it will face strong opposition from nationalists who see the verdict as another example of European bias against Ankara. Nationalists yesterday staged anti-Ocalan protests in Istanbul, Turkey’s biggest city, and in the eastern town of Erzurum.
Ocalan said that his possible retrial could pave the way for Turkey to make peace with its restive Kurdish population and armed rebels, a pro-Kurdish newspaper reported yesterday. But he also warned that should Turkey fail to meet Kurdish demands for greater cultural freedoms, it could face a violent backlash from militants of his outlawed Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK).
Ocalan told his lawyers that Turkey should see Thursday’s ruling as an “important opportunity, a chance to resolve the Kurdish question”, the Europe-based Ozgur Politika newspaper said on its Internet edition. Ocalan also said he would use a possible retrial to push for a democratic resolution to the Kurdish problem, and warned Turkey that Kurdish rebels could retaliate if it uses violence against the Kurds rather then meet their demands for greater cultural rights.
