ANKARA: Thousands of inmates in Turkish prisons ended their mass hunger strike on Sunday, heeding a calling by militant Kurdish leader Abdullah Ocalan whose jail conditions they were protesting against.

The action had grown to involve some 3,000 people held in different prisons, since the first hunger strike was launched last November by a detained lawmaker from the pro-Kurdish Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP) over Ocalan’s isolation in prison.

But after the militant leader was allowed to see legal representatives for the first time in eight years this month, Ocalan told his lawyers the hunger strikes “had achieved their goal” and called for them to end.

“After the call... we are ending our hunger strikes,” the prisoners’ representative, Deniz Kaya, said in a statement, quoted by Kurdish news agency ANF.

Ocalan, the co-founder of the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), has been held on Imrali island off Istanbul since 1999.

The first visit by his lawyers took place on May 2. After Turkish authorities lifted an official ban on lawyers’ visits to Ocalan, a second trip by two of his lawyers was made on May 22.

The hunger strike was initially launched by the MP Leyla Guven while she was in custody, although she was later released.

Other detainees then followed suit. Eight people also killed themselves over the issue, according to the HDP.

Guven, announcing the end of her hunger strike, said in a statement that although the action was successful, “our struggle against isolation and our struggle for social peace will continue in all areas”.

“With this resistance, Turkey’s peoples, Turkey’s democracy has won,” Guven later told reporters in Diyarbakir in the Kurdish-majority southeast.

Published in Dawn, May 27th, 2019