Öcalan’s PKK: A Look at the Movement

The capture of Abdullah Öcalan by the Turkish government marks a victory for Turkish policy, though it may prove to be a Pyrrhic one (see Forward Tracking). As many European countries, and Israel (See Between the Lines ) learned in the past 10 days, Ocalan is a hero to many Kurds living abroad, even while he is the devil incarnate, a terrorist of the worst order, to the Turkish regime, which brands him literally a baby killer (there are Turkish pro-government web pages with the pictures of the dead babies, though we do not recommend them). The old saw that one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter may be as appropriate with Öcalan as with many who have gone before him. Quite a few one-time “terrorists” are now heads of state. Quite a few others have been executed for their efforts. At the moment, Öcalan seems likelier to fit the latter model than the former.

At first glance, or for that matter even at second and third, the Kurdistan People’s Party (Partiya Karkerén Kurdistan), or PKK, is not a very attractive organization to most outsiders, at least those in the West who do not harbor romantic images of Communist revolution. And Öcalan is no poster child for human rights. The PKK has long espoused a radical Marxist-Leninist rhetoric, with a Maoist tinge; it has often insisted it is not a Kurdish nationalist movement, but an “internationalist” socialist revolutionary organization. In the past few years it has sought to moderate its Stalinist rhetoric and sound more like a nationalist movement seeking self-determination, but it has not always been convincing. Lately it has been responding to some left-wing European criticisms by re-emphasizing its Marxist-Leninist credentials. This may suggest the degree to which the PKK’s ideologists in exile are still overly influenced by fashionable Marxism in Germany and other parts of Europe. Despite his popular nickname of “Apo” and the personality cult which surrounds him, Abdullah Öcalan may have never actually led his troops in the field; he is a leader who operates from exile. This is no Che Guevara. (It can be argued that the real Che Guevara was no Che Guevara either, but that is not the issue here.)

Kurdistan (To show location of Turkey’s Kurds)

On the other hand, the Turkish government and Army have not exactly been models of an innocent leadership beset by malevolent revolutionaries. Although the Turkish government no longer insists that there are no such things as Kurds, only “mountain Turks”, as early governments once claimed, and one recent Turkish President (Turgut Özal) was of partial Kurdish heritage, Turkey still puts many barriers in the way of teaching, publishing, or broadcasting in Kurdish. Many political figures in the legal Kurdish political party are under arrest or in prison. Turkey has long waged a scorched earth campaign in the southeast against the PKK, depopulating whole areas. One result has been to drive many Kurds into the arms of the PKK; another has been to displace a large Kurdish population to the cities of western Anatolia, where they may pose more of a threat to security than in the remote, rural east. Where Kurds were once geographically concentrated, today, as a result of the campaigns against the PKK, they are all over Turkey. And all over Europe as well: the degree to which Ocalan’s arrest sparked eruptions throughout Europe was a sign either of the tightly organized network of underground pro-PKK cells, or, perhaps even more alarming to some European capitals and especially Ankara, of the genuine popularity of Öcalan among exiled Kurds. This Dossier examines the PKK.

Abdullah Öcalan is the founder and leader of the Kurdistan People’s Party (PKK), and its history is in part his. But it also grows out of the frustrations of modern Kurdish history. Today, the Kurds of the Middle East and the Caucasus are the largest ethnic group on earth lacking their own state; of some 25 million Kurds, half live within the present Turkish Republic. The Estimate ran four Dossiers on various Kurdish movements in the spring of 1995; the second of these, “The Kurdish Conundrum, Part Two: The Kurds of Turkey”, in The Estimate for April 14, 1995, introduced the problem of Turkey’s Kurds.

When the multi-ethnic Ottoman Empire collapsed in World War I, its various ethnic groups met differing fates. The Empire’s Balkan subjects had already thrown off Ottoman rule. Its Arab subjects were separated into independent states or League of Nations Mandates. Those Armenians who survived the war lived in a diaspora, or under the rule of what became the Soviet Union. The Kurds of the Ottoman Empire were at one point promised a state of their own, but that never occurred.

In the immediate wake of the war, many Kurds supported Mustafa Kemal’s resistance to the Treaty of Sèvres, a resistance which led to the creation of the modern Turkish Republic, the expulsion of colonial and Greek forces from Anatolia, and the new Treaty of Lausanne. But it soon became clear that Kemal — who would become Atatürk — was not about to back Kurdish aspirations. Instead, as part of his effort to create a strong Turkish national sense, he banned the Kurdish language. In 1925 a Kurdish revolt led by the Naqshbandi Sufi order erupted; in 1929 another Kurdish revolt won some victories against the Turkish state. A Turkish law of 1930 actually provided that “murders” and other actions committed by authorities or civilians in repressing the Kurdish revolt would not be considered crimes. From this period, too, came a Turkish nationalist insistence that the Kurds were merely “Mountain Turks” who had forgotten their native language, not a separate ethnicity.

Although Turkey today has moved far from such fantasies, the Kurds have always been something of a problem in the Turkish-nationalist world view. In the 1950 elections, the first Turkish elections with a real opposition, the Kurdish vote helped bring Adnan Menderes’ Democrats to power. When the military overthrew Menderes in 1960, there was also a new anti-Kurdish reaction. Laws against publishing in or teaching the Kurdish language have been imposed on several occasions.

In more recent decades, there has been a relaxation of the harshness of earlier periods, and in 1991 a law banning Kurdish was repealed. Turkish Prime Minister and later President Turgut Özal, himself of part Kurdish ancestry, helped liberalize many such laws. A Kurdish language newspaper was opened in 1992, but subsequently closed. A Kurdish-based opposition party, the People’s Labor Party (HEP) won seats in Parliament in 1991, though some of its members subsequently had their immunity revoked and were arrested. A second attempt to form a legal Kurdish party failed after it was banned; its current , third, legal incarnation is called HADEP.

Süleyman Demirel, currently Turkey’s President, has often sought to improve relations with the Kurds, speaking in Kurdish once to schoolchildren when he was Prime Minister. Since Öcalan’s arrest, he has called for the Kurds to “come down from the mountains” and be welcomed as a part of Turkish society, hinting that the arrest of Öcalan might make further reforms possible.

But the Kurdish issue has been inextricably linked, since 1984, with the insurgency of the PKK. To be sure, in recent years the PKK seems to have been weakened by successive military campaigns, and a more moderate Kurdish voice has sought to make itself heard, through HADEP or through satellite broadcasts by MED-TV, an independent operation by European-based Kurds. But both HADEP and MED-TV are often dismissed as merely agents for the PKK by Turkish officials.

The PKK

As has been seen, Turkey’s Kurds not only are frustrated with the lack of a state of their own, a plight they share with the Kurds of Iraq, Iran, Syria and Armenia, but have also been blocked even in the use of their own language. Frustration and dissidence is hardly surprising. The resistance movements of the 1920s were based on the traditional Sufi orders and the old feudal social leadership of the Kurds, their agas. Not surprisingly, by the 1970s those particular sources of resistance had been largely supplanted by newer, more radical ones.

During the 1970s, Turkey’s universities were heavily influenced by the Marxist rhetoric and ideology of universities in Europe and elsewhere. Turkey’s streets were the scene of frequent clashes between far-left and far-right factions, and as many as 5,000 people died in such violence during the late 1970s, one of the direct causes of the military coup of 1980.

It was in this environment of the violent, radicalized late 1970s that the PKK emerged. Abdullah Öcalan was born in 1948 in Ömerli in eastern Turkey, to a peasant family. He studied surveying and then went to Ankara to study political science, where he became involved in a number of left-wing groups. Öcalan has always admitted that he speaks Turkish better than Kurdish, and initially he seems to have been involved in more conventional Maoist-type groups without an exclusively Kurdish content.

Abdullah Öcalan (“Apo”)

Known from his student days as “Apo”, or Uncle, the early movement was sometimes called the “Apocular”.

In time, however, he began to emphasize a role for Kurdish nationalism within his Marxist views, and by 1974 had created a precursor of the later PKK. The PKK itself — the Kurdistan Workers’ Party — was formed on November 27, 1978.

Initially Öcalan was preoccupied with eliminating factionalism within his own movement, and then with targeting the traditional superstructure of Kurdish society, killing agas while purging the PKK leadership from time to time. During the late 1970s its targets were primarily the “feudal” and “bourgeois” landholders of Kurdistan, not the

Turkish government. From its beginning, the movement took a Maoist view of warfare, often killing women and children as well as men in families it considered “feudal”.

After the military took over in 1980, however, the PKK faced a different sort of challenge. “Apo” Öcalan fled across the border into Syria. After some limited operations in 1983, the PKK proclaimed the opening of an armed struggle in 1984. In August of that year, the PKK began attacks against police stations and other official institutions in Turkey’s Kurdish regions.

In the early years in particular, the PKK frequently launched attacks against civilian targets as well as against government troops and police. Some of these raids have helped fuel the Turkish government’s campaign against the “baby-killer” Öcalan. Turkey’s operations in the southeast, however, were also frequently draconian, leading to growing migration of the Kurdish population out of the region and to other parts of Anatolia. Village militias were created, who often carried out vendetta-type attacks against suspected PKK sympathizers. By 1990 then-President Turgut Özal claimed that 60% of Turkey’s Kurds now lived to the west of Ankara.

During the 1980s, Öcalan spent most of his time in Syria or in Lebanon’s Baqa‘a Valley, where the PKK set up training camps. Syria was more than willing to support the PKK as one instrument in its multi-faceted rivalry with Turkey, which includes latent territorial claims and the major issue of the Euphrates River’s water. (On the background to Syrian-Turkish issues, See the Dossier, “Syria and Turkey: Many Roots to the Recent Quarrel”, in The Estimate, October 23, 1998.)

The PKK’s relationship with other Kurdish movements, however, has been considerably rockier. Although Syria allowed Öcalan to live in Damascus and the PKK to maintain training camps in Lebanon for a time, it never wanted to risk Turkish retaliation directly by allowing the PKK to operate directly across the Syrian border. Instead, most PKK cross-border operations were launched from Iraqi Kurdistan, an area which, through much of the 1980s, was controlled by the Iraqi Kurdish movements while the Iraqi government was preoccupied by the war with Iran. The PKK has sometimes cooperated with, but just as frequently fought, the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) of Mas‘oud Barzani, the Kurdish faction operating closest to the Iraqi-Turkish border. Turkey has frequently carried out large cross-border incursions into northern Iraq, sometimes staying for weeks or even months. In recent years it has often had the cooperation of the KDP in fighting against the PKK.

The PKK was never neutralized, but its military capabilities seem to have been severely degraded, though at the cost of very draconian Turkish rule in eastern Turkey and regular operations inside Iraq.

What is intriguing, however, is that the very Turkish operations in southeastern Turkey which have undercut the PKK’s fighting forces have also won it a great deal of sympathy among Kurds who might in previous decades have dismissed it as a radical bunch of Maoists who did not speak for real Kurdish aspirations. The repression of more mainstream Kurdish parties may have driven many to support the only alternative still functioning. Although the PKK once had links with urban guerrilla movements, it has not struck very often in Turkish cities, and has abandoned attacks on tourist sites. But there were threats after Öcalan’s capture that it might begin operating in the cities, where the vastly increased Kurdish refugee population could provide a base.

Estimates of the PKK’s military strength vary widely. Some Western estimates put it, at its height, and perhaps 10,000 to 15,000, but few believe that it has today more than a few thousand men under arms. Nevertheless, its raids and Turkey’s reprisals have, over the past 15 years, taken an estimated 37,000 lives. Like most such organizations, it has a political wing, known as the National Liberation Front of Kurdistan (ENRK), as well as its military wing.

In recent years, with the end of Communism in the USSR and Eastern Europe, the PKK has sought in some of its public pronouncements to forswear attacks against civilians, insist it will only attack government forces, and distance itself from some of its more extreme Maoist past. The Party Program adopted by its Congress in 1995, however, reiterated its basic Marxist tenets, and it has insisted recently that it is an internationalist socialist revolutionary movement, not a “nationalist” secessionist movement. It has sought to portray its fight as one of workers in Kurdistan against Turkish colonialism, not as Kurdish separatism.

Last fall, Turkey clearly raised the ante with Syria, threatening military action if Öcalan was not expelled. He was, and thus began the dramatic he’s here-he’s there-he’s everywhere series of rumors, up to his capture in Kenya. (See Coffeehouse Gossip and Forward Tracking, and Between the Lines.) Öcalan has few friends left in the areas from which he once operated; expelled by Syria, the KDP in northern Iraq is also opposed to his operations. His proclamation, while he was in Italy, that he would settle for autonomy and wanted peaceful negotiations with the Turks, was dismissed out of hand by Ankara, and seemed to some suspiciously convenient at a time when he was on the run and without sanctuary.

However, as his arrest showed, he is enormously popular among the Kurdish population in Western Europe — or at least they are outraged at Turkey’s treatment of him. One of the more curious evolutions of the PKK, as already noted, is that it has become the national movement of many Turkish Kurds (especially abroad), despite its ideological stance and its historical brutality. The eruption of the European demonstrations suggests either genuinely spontaneous outrage or a highly sophisticated underground network: in either case, it shows that the PKK commands considerable support among Europe’s Kurds.

With no safe havens left, and Öcalan in prison, Turkey seems to have won this round. But the widespread support among Kurds of Turkish origin in Europe suggests that the root problem remains to be addressed. The demonstrations in Europe and Turkey suggest strength in the Turkish cities, where PKK leaders have threatened to strike if Öcalan is not released. Will Turkey use the capture of Öcalan as an opportunity to ease up its restrictions against its Kurdish citizens, or will it mistake the euphoria of its tactical victory for a long-term success in eradicating Kurdish aspirations?

Some reports suggest that Öcalan’s deputies over the political and military wings — said to be Kamil Baik over the former and Morat Karailan over the latter — will handle the PKK with him gone. But the PKK itself is not the real problem: even if it withers away (perhaps especially if it does, removing the excuse for restrictions), Turkey still has a Kurdish problem. It has caught its terrorist, but all those Turkish Kurds marching in European (and Turkish) streets suggest that it has not addressed the more fundamental problem of its continuing restrictions on Kurdish language, culture and tradition.

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