MESOPOTAMIA NEWS X-RAY PORTRAIT : WHO IS & WHO WAS ABDULLAH OECALAN (PKK)?

WILL THE REAL ABDULLAH ÖCALAN PLEASE STEP FORWARD? –  By Sheri Laizer 1 March 2016

Will the PKK return to its original Manifesto endorsing a ‘national liberation struggle’ for a greater Kurdistan given Kurdish territorial gains beyond the watchtowers and the barbed wire?

Five young men wearing flared trousers and fitting shirts, in keeping with the fashions of the mid 1970s, walk side by side smoking cigarettes and discussing the goals of the Turkish left.Among them is Abdullah Öcalan, Apo, not yet envisioned as group ‘leader’. (Apo the Kurdish abbreviation of the longer name Abdullah, like Memo for Mehmet and Hemo for Hamit). It did not mean ‘Uncle’ as some said much later.One of the group of friends, Necdet (a pseudonym) recalls: “Apo did not shine brighter than anyone else. It surprised me when he became leader of the Kurdistan Workers Party. He wasn’t smarter, wasn’t even as sophisticated as some of the others that were serious intellectuals. No one listened to him more than to any other.”

In the ten years between the party putting down roots in 1974, announcing its official establishment in 1978 in the Kurdish village of Fis, Lice, Diyarbakir province[1] and launching an armed struggle in 1984, Abdullah Öcalan became ‘Serok Apo’ (Kurdish for ‘Leader Apo’) and the Onderligi (‘leadership’ in Turkish. The armed wing was first known as the UKO (Ulusal Kurtuluş Ordusu – National Liberation Army) and later became the ARGK – the Kurdistan National Liberation Army. Today it is the modified HPG –People’s Defence Forces from which the word ‘Kurdistan’ has been dropped.

 

The PKK’s 1978 Manifesto is a small red book headed ‘Partiya Karkaren Kurdistan’ in Kurdish followed by PKK, Kurdistan Devrimin Yolu (Kurdistan Revolutionary Path/Way) in Turkish.

 

The small booklet was published by the organisation’s media house, Weşanen Serxwebun (Kurdish for ‘Revolution Publishing’). A third edition was produced in January 1984 when the use of arms had become a justified political tool.

 

Of its aims and objectives the manifesto states, “the Kurdistan Revolution is a National Democratic Revolution (Kurdistan Devrimi Milli Demokratik Devrimdir…)” [2]

 

Political concepts hereby cross lines – nationalism, democracy and revolution all in one. Can that be and could it ever have been in practice? The short answer is no because dictatorship got in the way.

 

The Manifesto continues, “the main focus of the Kurdistan Revolution is to target Turkish colonialism… it is the task of those in the Kurdistan Revolution to prioritise the creation of an independent and democratic Kurdistan.”

 

The venerated icon of the exemplary leader collides with a very natural man

 

Abdullah Öcalan was born in the late 1940s in the village of Ömerli, Urfa, in the predominantly Kurdish south east of Turkey. It is said he does not know the exact year, as was typical of births in Kurdish villages at that period. 1948-1949 is variously given and Abdullah was the first of seven children.

 

Israeli lecturer at Tel Aviv’s Bar-Ilan University Amikam Nachmani claimed that Öcalan did not know Kurdish in 1991 when he met him. “He [Öcalan] told me that he speaks Turkish, gives orders in Turkish, and thinks in Turkish.”[3]

 

This is not quite correct. Abdullah Öcalan was born in a Kurdish-speaking village and spoke basic Kurmanji, as I know from hearing him addressing recruits at the training schools in Damascus in the 1990s. However, he was formally educated in Turkish as by law were all citizens of Turkey as education in the language of any of its minority groups was prohibited under the Constitution. One nation, one language, one flag.

 

Political concepts were also better expressed in Turkish given Apo’s student years experienced outside the Kurdish south-east, firstly at the Ankara Tapu-Kadastro Meslek Lisesi – Ankara Vocational College, followed by a year at the Faculty of Law, Istanbul University in Beyazit in 1971 and finally majoring in political science at Ankara University thereafter (Ankara Üniversitesi Siyasal Bilgiler Fakültesi Mülkiye).

 

These were the inter-coup years of military take over in Turkey that ruptured the country in 1960, 1971, and 1980. In the process, Turkey effectively became divided between the left and right wing rather than according to class stratification as in Ottoman times.  A plethora of left-wing students, thinkers and writers formed pro-left-wing parties and in 1974 Apo became a co-founder of the fledgling Democratic Association of Higher Education (Demokrat Yüksek Öğrenim Derneği) while still living in Ankara.[4]

 

The post 1980 coup and the region’s Kurdish leaders

 

The Kurdish revolution in neighbouring Iraq had collapsed in 1975 and the KDP leadership and peshmerga were in exile in the Soviet Union, Iran or had become political refugees in the West, among them Ibrahim Ahmed, Jalal Talabani and his wife hero, Ahmed’s daughter, Hoshyar Zebari and others now in senior positions in the post-Saddam government in Iraq.

 

In Turkey, numerous pro-Kurdish and revolutionary left parties had appeared, each with its magazine, newspaper and singers and artists that supported the party line appearing in concerts, films and the media.

 

In 1979 Apo fled to Syria where he was hosted as a guest by President Hafiz al-Assad and the PKK exploited as a political lever against Turkey. The group had free access to Syria- controlled Lebanon and established a military training camp and ideological school in the Bekaa Valley near the village of Bar Elias. Over time, two additional ideological training schools were established in walled farm compounds outside Damascus – one that delivered the party teachings in Turkish and the other in Kurdish.

 

After the 1980 military coup under Prime Minister Turgut Özal, as Turkey began rebuilding its economy under a civil government, the Kurdish issue was still referred to as the Eastern Problem (Doğu Sorunu) and the PKK militants denounced as ‘eşkiya’ (brigand), associated with 19th century references to the marauding and feuding Kurdish tribes.

 

The PKK’s 1st Conference was held in Syria between15-25 July 1981, attended by some 60 members.[5]

 

At that period of political transition, Kurdish singer, Şivan Perwer was probably more influential among Kurds in arousing a sense of national identity than was Apo. Sivan hailed from Urfa, like Apo and Ibrahim Tatlises who had become popular across the Middle East for his sweet rendition of Arabesque melodies and Kurdish folksongs translated into Turkish. Tatlises means ‘sweet voice’. Tatlises was seen by Kurdish nationalists as having sold out to Turkey for packaging Kurdish songs as Turkish ones, growing vastly rich on the proceeds and keeping company with Turkish celebrities and politicians as well as the Turkish underworld and organised crime.

 

Patriotic Kurds throughout their divided homeland chose to listen to Şivan, the bravest of the Kurdish singers born in Turkey (forced into exile in Sweden), fired by the zeal of his revolutionary compositions and the emotion of his voice that brought tears to their eyes.

 

Given his enormous popularity, the PKK wanted to harness Şivan to the party machinery.  The functionaries sought to control Şivan’s material and place him in service of the party message. But Sivan was strong willed: he was his own man and both socially and culturally was more sophisticated than the party strong arms, living in Sweden and able to hold his own in European company. Politically speaking, Şivan was also closer to the KDP and the resistance of its Peshmerga fighters in Iraq than to the PKK. He did not bend and for that the PKK ostracised, criticised and threatened the singer. For years he did not appear on any programme hosted by the PKK in Europe while remaining banned from Turkey.

 

Apo demanded obedience and total domination of the PKK in the public arena. Behind the scenes he consulted with those closest, Cemil Bayik (Cuma), Sakine Cansiz[6], his brother Osman (Ferhat), Murat Karayilan, Mustafa Karasu, Ali Haydar Kaytan, (of Turkish ethnic origin), and Riza Altun among others. Certain founder members from the original group, including Kani Yilmaz, were still serving long sentences under inhumane conditions in Diyarbakir prison until 1991 and thereafter.

 

A new base camp was set up in 1982 in the Bekaa valley, Lebanon, for military training. Safe houses were used in the village of Bar Elias. Ex-PKK Commander, Sait Curukkaya privately stated that Hezbollah provided some of the weapons training in this period. The PLO also provided support from the Palestinian camps and safe houses in the area. One of the principal buildings of this camp was the Mahsum Korkmaz Academy. Its ideological training school was named the Martyr Hamza Classroom (Şehit Hamza Dershanesi).  Öcalan would visit and deliver lectures before returning to the greater comfort and privacy of his urban safe houses close the centre of Damascus city where he also received visitors and guests, well vetted beforehand by the party machinery.

 

Nicolos Economopoulos, a Greek photographer with the Magnum agency visited the Bekaa camp in 1991 and undertook a historic documentary photo feature during one of Apo’s visits.[7] His assignment was roughly contemporary with the Kurdish uprising against Saddam Hussein that got underway in the spring of 1991. The Iraqi Kurds made international headlines before and after the collapse of their resistance and the tragic mass exodus, caught by the world’s cameras when fleeing Saddam’s helicopter gunships. British Conservative, millionaire novelist, Geoffrey Archer, an outspoken friend of Iraq’s Kurds came out with the concept of “Good Kurds and bad Kurds” distinguishing between the Iraqi Kurds to be befriended and saved from the tyrant Saddam, and the PKK to be condemned as terrorists.

 

This was a period in which throughout the 1990s the PKK struggled to become the dominant Kurdish political party for the entire Kurdistan region, repackaging its propaganda for Kurds from other parts of the divided homeland. Fighters were poached from KDP and PUK strongholds in Iraqi Kurdistan and from patriotic Kurdish areas in Syria and Iran. Kurdish females were encouraged to joined its armed units and break with their traditional roles of wife and mother. Female graduates were natural recruits, sidestepping arranged marriages. For many, their greatest goal was to be stationed at Apo’s side, even to sacrifice their lives for him as suicide bombers and in acts of self-immolation after his 1999 capture by Turkish forces in Kenya.

 

Abdullah’s word became final in this period. His image steadily became the PKK’s most significant icon, further bolstered by the thousands of faceless fighters who had renounced their individuality and would become ready sacrifices to the war machine, a significant percentage falling ‘martyr’ to the cause.

 

Apo became the object of veneration, the Supreme Leader, like contemporary, Kim Jong-il in North Korea. Those close to the leader in his everyday existence were obliged both to serve and to flatter him. These were the cadres who alone witnessed that the venerated icon of ‘exemplary leader’ collided with the everyday reality of a very earthy and natural man. Whether batting a volleyball or huffing and puffing after a football to score a goal and be applauded around the camp compound, whether jocular and affable around a dining table loaded with food or stern in the classroom, his eyes closed or slightly myopic with concentration, Apo occupied centre stage. A large man, whose comportment altered between personable jollity, giggles of amusement and gruff disapproval, Apo was raw in manners, somewhat clumsy on his feet, and accustomed to belching over his meal while putting his fingers or forks into the dishes of his guests and stroking his hairy belly beneath his shirt.[8]  Video recordings and photographs were edited by the propaganda machine to present a more sophisticated image of their leader.

 

The PKK sought to unify Kurdish identity under the image of the “heroic leader,” the sole voice. PKK co-founders and potential leadership candidates kept watch on one another with hawk-like vigilance. Rivals and dissidents were purged.

 

Internal punishments meted out within the organisation were seized upon by Turkish Intelligence (MIT) that published details obtained from informants and prisoners. This information was distributed in small propaganda booklets sent to Kurdish organisations to sow dissent and spark enquiry and articles were leaked through the pro-state press but Öcalan’s mythology was stronger.

 

Few would dare criticise the leader publicly and few dare do so today, aware that not only would it be disbelieved, it would be denounced as falsehood. Breakaways spoke of torture, executions, burials in Bekaa and the capital ‘punishments’ of traitors in the mountain camps in Iraqi Kurdistan. However, to dare to raise the issue was to be accused of being a traitor, a spy, or a collaborator with the enemy. Equally taboo was the subject of Apo’s love life as also of the senior cadres and PKK commanders.

 

The need to protect the figurehead enforces a wall of silence.

 

The vow of celibacy rubs up against love and sex in Damascus and the mountains

 

Party members are made to embrace a vow of celibacy as a condition of membership agreeing that until the Kurdish homeland be liberated personal, individual desires would be put on hold and focused upon the liberation struggle. There would be no love, no sex, no marriage. The PKK’s women are in practice honorary men living as men, dressed as men, speaking and made to think as men, hiding their menstrual cycles unless these dry up from the harsh conditions.

 

As the vow of celibacy and negation of feeling runs contrary to human nature, infringements are inevitable. Those caught were, however, punished or fled – except for the leader (and the senior functionaries) for whom personal relationships were secretly permitted.

 

Apo, as charismatic, earthy leader, was able to flirt with and seduce the prettiest new recruits. He handpicked the women and virgin girls that most appealed to him and gathered them around him in his safe houses and training schools where they served him like handmaidens, cooking, cleaning, flattering and some standing guard as others bedded him, much like the privileges enjoyed by Saddam Hussein and Muammar Qadaffi and their sons. Apo is after all a Middle Eastern leader and a man with natural desires. He should not be criticised for doing what nature intended – it is the party rules that should be reformed to integrate organic human relationships valuing them beyond the glamorised death cult of martyrdom.

 

Leaving the organisation in disillusion or for falling in love, unfortunately poses a threat to life. Few members and militants manage to attain personal freedom. Secrets are to be preserved through a campaign of silence and denial, even beatings, torture and murder. [9]

 

The ‘Democratic Republic’

In the villa outside Rome in late 1998 until February 1999, the leader was in disarray. The Italian security services guarded their famous asylum seeker outside the compound and inside the house, installed on the top floor. Wires ran everywhere. Monitors were ranged side by side throughout the attic obtaining video feed from numerous cameras. Apo listened to many advisors and heeded the wrong voices, quitting Rome prematurely over a gamble on South Africa. [10]The next phase is history.

 

During his trial on Imrali Island over the summer of 1999, and in his case before the European Court of Human Rights, Apo was effectively re-cast as the Kurdish Mandela, a role he sought to play in court, apologising to the Turkish ‘martyrs’ killed by his organisation, claiming his mother was Turkish, praising the Turkish Army and offering the PKK’s fighters as a new security or police force for Turkey

 

Apo’s fans and supporters did not criticise their beloved leader for this: his actions and reformed policies of a ‘Democratic Republic were interpreted as expedient humility, intellectual genius and a sincere willingness to bring about peace with his captors. [11]

 

An excellent analysis appears in the European Journal of Turkish Studies co-authored by Ahmet Hamdi Akkaya and Joost Jongerden recognising that “The PKK, which can be criticized for the lack of democracy in its own ranks, is at the same time developing a program of radical democracy. This may be referred to as a ‘Jacobin paradox’. It was the Jacobins, responsible for the reign of terror, who developed democracy as a political project (Žižek 2007). The PKK is Jacobin in the sense that it simultaneously uses violence as an instrument for the realization of its political program of radical democracy.

 

Abdullah Öcalan’s defence papers and prison writings have come to be “accepted in the consecutive PKK congresses as the official party line. Initially the texts led to serious confusion in the movement, but since 2005 the ideological and organizational structures have been adapted to one another.”[12]

 

Bid farewell to the “Democratic Republic”

 

Following the 1 November 2015 elections that returned the AKP to government with the majority it sought, Turkey has returned to a war footing with the PKK and, indeed, through harassment, censorship and flawed, politicised legislation the wider, ‘democratic’ pro-Kurdish sector.

 

The character of military operations in the Kurdish southeast, Kurdish PYD-claimed areas of Syria, and the PKK’s bases in northern Iraq recall the worst excesses of the violent 1990s. Will this change in Turkish strategy against an extended Kurdish target group cause Apo to diverge from his Imrali prison policies? What of the borders of Turkey with the Kurds? The 1978 Manifesto had on its rear cover:  “Nothing can be more precious as independence and freedom,” (Hic bir şey bagimsizlik ve ozgurlukten daha degerli olamaz.)

 

Will the PKK return to its original Manifesto endorsing a ‘national liberation struggle’ for a greater Kurdistan given Kurdish territorial gains beyond the watchtowers and the barbed wire? Has it already done so in practice?

 

www.mesop.de

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[1] http://www.milliyet.com.tr/lice-nin-fis-ilcesinde-pkk-nin-gundem-1975981/

[2] Page 177, PKK Manifesto, 1984 3rd edition

[3] Turkey: Facing a New Millenniium : Coping With Intertwined Conflicts, Amikam Nachmani, p.210, 2003

 

[4] http://www.aljazeera.com.tr/dosya/pkk-nasil-kuruldu-ve-guclendi

[5] Ibid.

[6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sakine_Cans%C4%B1z

[7] http://www.magnumphotos.com/C.aspx?VP3=SearchResult&ALID=2S5RYDZ2WKB1

[8] Personal interviews in Syria during filming for Channel Four, 1994, Australian Broadcasting 1996, and with Ali Ghazi and Michael Gunter, October 1998.

[9] http://t24.com.tr/haber/eski-pkkli-selma-batmaz-bekaadaki-mezarlari-gosteririm,186869

[10] Personal private interview with Abdullah Ocalan in Rome.

[11] http://www.freeocalan.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/Ocalan-Democratic-Confederalism.pdf

[12] https://ejts.revues.org/4615