Ömer Öcalan

Ömer Öcalan (born 1987 in Ömerli , Turkey ) has been a Kurdish MP for the Halkların Demokratie Partisi (HDP) in the Turkish parliament since the parliamentary elections in 2018 . Ömer Öcalan is a nephew of Abdullah Öcalan . He studied journalism at Ankara University .

School and study

Ömer Öcalan was born in 1987 in Ömerli, but spent a large part of his childhood and youth in Yakapınar , near the city of Adana , where his father had moved to get out of the focus of the security forces. According to his own account, he experienced the state repression against his father Mehmet up close. Later the father returned to Ömerli and lived there from farming. Ömer Öcalan graduated from elementary and middle school and high school in Yakapınar and was arrested for the first time as a signatory of a press release after graduating from high school. Öcalan passed the entrance exam for the University of Ankara and studied journalism there from 2007 to 2011. In 2012 he enrolled for a master’s degree in social sciences in Lausanne , but had to drop out after six months for economic reasons.

Entry into politics

Ömer Öcalan was co-chairman of the Democracy Bölgeler Partisi (DBP) in Mardin from 2014 to 2016 . In 2016, Öcalan's house was searched and Ömer Öcalan was provisionally arrested. Pretrial detention was imposed two days later. The investigation was related to telephone data from a PKK member who was killed. Approx. two months later, Öcalan's release was announced. There was another arrest of Öcalan in March 2018.

When Abdullah Öcalan's niece, MP Dilek Öcalan , fled to other European countries in 2018 because of criminal prosecution, the HDP put Ömer Öcalan on the list in Dilek Öcalan's constituency of Şanlıurfa instead of for the parliamentary elections. The HDP received around 29 percent of the votes in the constituency and sent four MPs, including Ömer Öcalan. According to the Demirören news agency , efforts were made in 2019 to lift his immunity. In 2019, hackers spread the news via Ömer Öcalan's Twitter account that Abdullah Öcalan had passed away.

Öcalan is married and has two children. His wife was dismissed from the public service as part of the measures following the coup attempt in Turkey in 2016 .

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Interview with Ömer Öcalan on the portal otekileringundemi.com from June 12, 2018
2. ↑ Cumhuriyet, April 27, 2016
3. ↑ Cumhuriyet, April 29, 2016
4. ↑ news portal demokrathaber.org from June 18, 2016
5. ^ NTV (Turkey) of March 20, 2018
6. ↑ news portal haberler.com of March 30, 2019
7. ↑ web portal artigercek.com from January 13, 2019