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“This is an urgent situation,” she said.
Bolton said it was her understanding that Aslan had travelled back to Turkey to visit family.
She said that since Aslan’s arrest, she had heard from the Melbourne Kurdish Association that another person from the same community had also been arrested recently at Istanbul airport on their way back to Australia.
“This was someone who’s not involved in any kind of organising at all in the Kurdish community in Melbourne,” Bolton said.
“They went to the odd event, but not all the events. Cigdem [Aslan] is a lot more active in the Kurdish community, but she is not a terrorist.
“She is a really wonderful, warm human being, and she is a full-on supporter of the human rights of anyone who is oppressed.”
Turkish pro-government newspaper The Daily Sabah reported Aslan had Australian-based links to the PKK.
The newspaper alleged Aslan had been tracked by Turkish intelligence “for a long time” and claimed she had been in contact with “high-level members of the terror group”.
But Bolton said she does not believe this is true.
She said Aslan’s friends and the Australian Kurdish community had started lobbying politicians to help bring her home.
The PKK has fought a long-running insurgency against Turkey, in which about 40,000 people have been killed.
In Australia, there is a growing movement to delist the Kurdish nationalist group as a terrorist organisation.
The Multicultural Centre for Women’s Health in Melbourne has listed Aslan as a bilingual health educator on its website.
Her online biography outlined that she came to Australia 25 years ago as a Kurdish migrant from Turkey.
The bio said Aslan has worked as a registered nurse in several healthcare settings including as a drug and alcohol nurse at St Vincent’s Hospital in Melbourne for six years.
It described her as a single mother of two daughters who is passionate about human and women’s rights, community volunteering and advocating for minorities.
The Australian government describes the PKK as an “ideologically motivated violent extremist organisation”.
“The Kurdistan Workers’ Party’s nationalist ideology encompasses the rights of Kurds to maintain their Kurdish ethnic identity,” the government’s description of the group reads.
“Further to its nationalist objectives, the Kurdistan Workers’ Party aims to monopolise Kurdish political power, including by attacking the interests of rival political parties.
“However, the Kurdistan Workers’ Party primarily conducts attacks against the Turkish government and security forces.”
The Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade said in a statement that it was “providing consular assistance to an Australian woman detained in Türkiye”, but did not provide further details.
“Owing to our privacy obligations we are unable to provide further comment,” it said.
An Australian man has previously been charged with being a member of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party.
In May 2019, the NSW Supreme Court sentenced Renas Lelikan, who had pleaded guilty, to a three-year community corrections order for being a member of the group from April 2011 and August 2013.
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