This year marks a quarter-century since the Kurdish political leader Abdullah Öcalan was detained by Turkish state forces, with the support of international intelligence agencies. With the Middle East currently plunging into a conflict triggered by Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza and threatening to suck all the region’s neo-colonial powers into violent confrontation, his vision for a democratic, grassroots, anti-statist alternative remains more urgent than ever.

Yet Öcalan, the ‘Mandela of the Middle East’, has spent the past 25 years in conditions of almost complete isolation, without any contact to the outside world whatsoever for over three years. The humanitarian implications of his detention, which has been widely condemned by international bodies, lawyers and rights monitors, are themselves grave enough.

More than that, it is only Öcalan’s liberation which can pave the way for the resumption of peace talks between the Kurdish movement and Turkey like those in place 2013–2015, and the establishment of a multi-ethnic, democratic settlement for both the Kurdish people and millions more living throughout the Middle East. The Kurds themselves face the threat of genocidal violence in Syria, Iraq, Turkey and Iran, aided and abetted by Western technology and complicity with the Turkish government’s existential war against the Kurdish people and political movement. Now, more than ever, it’s imperative that international bodies and governments exert pressure on Turkey to take this essential step toward a lasting peace in the Middle East.

As the Kurdistan Solidarity Network (KSN), we urgently call on the UK government to raise Öcalan’s detention with their Turkish counterparts, join international initiatives to send fact-finding delegations to İmralı prison, and work with Öcalan and the broader Kurdish movement to pursue a democratic political settlement in the Middle East.