Nobel Laureate prays for PKK leader’s freedom

CAPE TOWN

Desmond Tutu (L) sits next to South Sudan’s President Salva Kiir during an institutional celebration on the eve of South Sudan’s independence first anniversary in Juba.

Nobel Peace Prize winner retired Archbishop Desmond Tutu has prayed for the freedom of Abdullah Öcalan, the imprisoned leader of the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), according to Kurdish politicians.

“The South African experience can be a model for Turkey’s possible negotiations on the Kurdish issue,” Peace and Democracy Party (BDP) Deputy Nazmi Gür, who visited Tutu yesterday in Johannesburg, quoted the Nobel laureate as saying, adding that Tutu “prayed for freedom of Öcalan and the peoples of the Middle East as well.”

Gür, who is in South Africa to attend the Socialist International, was accompanied by BDP co-chair Gültan Kışanak during the visit. Tutu, who was an opponent of the apartheid regime of South Africa during the 1980s, received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1984, and previously called on Turkey to release Öcalan, the convicted leader of the PKK, who is serving a life sentence at İmralı Prison.