Ocalan is still pulling the crowds ABDULLAH OCALAN, the Kurdish rebel leader and sole inmate of a Turkish island prison since 1999, should by now “have become a perfect irrelevance, the living dead, a Kurdish Ariel Sharon. And yet he had not. His every delusional sally, every spasm of self-pity and promotion was greeted by his supporters as evidence for an ability to outsmart his jailers.” Thus wrote a puzzled Christopher de Bellaigue, a British author (and a former correspondent for this paper) in “Rebel Land”, a tale of eastern Turkey published in 2009.Five years on, Turkey is banking on Mr Ocalan’s continued grip to end the 29-year-long rebellion waged by his outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK). On March 21st, in a calibrated message read out by members of the pro-Kurdish Peace and Democracy (BDP) party to over a million Kurds gathered in Diyarbakir, in south-eastern Turkey, Mr Ocalan heralded the dawn of “a new Turkey”, saying it was time for “the guns to fall silent and for ideas to speak”. Assurances followed that the Kurds no longer had designs on Turkey’s borders. Turks and Kurds ought to “unite under the banner of Islam”….
