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COPYRIGHT 2001 JAI Press, Inc.
In 1992 Turkey was in the midst of a war with the Kurdistan Workers' Party (Partiya Karkeren Kurdistan--PKK), whose forces were credibly estimated to be 10,000 strong. [1] In 1996 the journalist Franz Schurmann called the PKK "the biggest guerrilla insurgency in the world," and wrote of its leader, Abdullah Ocalan, that "he alone among Kurdish leaders understands that a social revolution is going on in Kurdish society everywhere.... Ocalan will go down in the history books as the Saladin of the late 20th century." [2] By the summer of 1999, however, senior officers of the Turkish military and Jandarma (militarized police) estimated the PKK's total strength inside the country at 1,500 and declining rapidly. [3] In May 2000 the Turkish Daily News reported that "PKK armed militants have largely left Turkish territory after the PKK executive council called on them to cease armed struggle and leave Turkey." [4]
What brought about such a dramatic decline in just three years? Three developments provide a short, albeit incomplete, answer: the February 1999 capture of Ocalan, the PKK's founder and uncontested leader; the increasing disenchantment of Turkey's Kurdish citizens with the PKK's armed struggle; and dramatic changes in the regional balance of power in the Middle East, which weakened the PKK's traditional supporters. Of these, the capture of Ocalan in Nairobi, Kenya, by Turkish commandos was the most obviously devastating blow, but was in fact symptomatic of military and political troubles that were years in the making. This is amply demonstrated by the fact that, after fifteen years of safe haven in Syria, Ocalan was on the run and desperately seeking asylum in Africa.
The PKK's evident vulnerability in the late 1990s raises the question of the depth and strength of its support among the Kurdish population, which had long been considered the source of the party's military and political successes over a decade and a half. The far from simple answer is that the degree of PKK support is a matter of definition. While some Kurdish clans actively backed Ocalan's party, others rejected it and joined the government's efforts to combat it. Clearly, then, the hitherto widespread impression of the PKK as a grassroots movement with broad popular support needs revisiting. To arrive at a greater understanding of the origins, ideology, leadership, and goals of the PKK, this article will rely heavily on the PKK's own statements and documents--all freely available on the Internet. [5] Obviously, such material constitutes propaganda rather than objective analysis, but that does not limit its value. To the contrary, what the PKK wants the world to know about it says a great deal about the wa y it sees itself.
Ideology, Leadership, and Strategy
On occasion, the PKK has presented itself as the defender and chief advocate of Kurdish nationalism. Its weak claim to such a position, however, reveals not any true conviction, but rather astute political instincts and sheer opportunism. Since the beginning, the PKK has been Marxist-Leninist in its ideology, Stalinist in its leadership style, and Maoist in its strategy for the conquest of power.
Marxism, not Kurdish nationalism, has always defined the PKK. Given that the founders of the PKK included ethnic Turks as well as Kurds, their common interest was never based on ethnicity. The history of the PKK, as portrayed in the records of its congresses prior to Ocalan's capture in February 1999, makes abundantly clear the party's unwavering loyalty to Marxism-Leninism. Most important is the "Fifth Victory Congress" of January 1995, which called attention to the importance of ideology in the life of Kurds--and the importance of the PKK in the progress of socialism across the globe. [6] In the two major documents that emerged from that congress, the "Brief History of the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK)" and the "Party Program of the PKK," the organization portrays itself as the "vanguard of the global socialism movement, even though the Party hasn't yet come to power." [7] Perhaps to shore up its claim to the leadership of socialism internationally, the program states that the PKK from the very beginning t ried to enlist support in other countries; that "a new phase of socialism" has begun; and that the PKK "is the embodiment of one of the most significant socialist movements during this new phase." [8] It is important to consider the timing of that statement-a decade after Mikhail Gorbachev initiated perestroika and glasnost, and six years after the collapse of the Berlin Wall. What had the PKK to say about those events? It claimed that "Soviet socialism was a kind of deviation," and went so far as to call it "rough," "wild," and even "primitive." By contrast, "the PKK's approach to socialism is scientific and creative." [9]
The arrogance manifest in such declarations can be attributed directly to Ocalan's leadership style, which in its megalomania and iron-fisted grip on power borrows heavily from Stalin. Ocalan, simply put, created a personality cult with himself as its focal point, and has made his own name virtually synonymous with that of the organization he heads. He has always been identified as the sole author of any text of significant ideological impact (including all major documents of the Fifth Congress), the initiator of every political and military campaign, and the uncontested decision maker at the party's helm. [10] And yet Ocalan's personal background would seem to make him an unlikely leader of Kurdish workers, a fact that makes the PKK's purported nationalist aspirations all the more specious. Ocalan was born in 1948 into a peasant family in the mostly Kurdish village of Omerli. Significantly, his mother was not Kurdish at all, but Turkoman, and it was she (described by Ocalan as an "independent, headstrong, w oman") who controlled the household and dominated his "helpless" Kurdish father. Equally notable is Ocalan's statement that his family "was poor and had lost its tribal traditions, but it continued with strong feudal values" [11]--rather a surprising admission from a self-declared socialist leader who claims to be fighting against the "colonial" oppression of Kurds. After studying at a vocational school in the provincial capital of Urfa, Ocalan moved on to Ankara University's School of Political Science in the early 1970s, a period during which Turkish universities were involved in revolutionary activism far more than education. Ocalan spent his time learning political organizing and Marxist doctrine, and he evidently learned well. As he later put it, "I dedicated myself completely to ideological work"--which included political violence, for which he was arrested and imprisoned for a few months in 1973.
The PKK itself was founded in 1978, and Ocalan's continuous control over it was only obtained by ruthlessly eliminating potential challengers to his absolute authority. Those who threatened his leadership or simply disagreed with him faced demotion, expulsion, or death. As he euphemistically described the fate of those unfortunates at his own trial, despite "comprehensive educational and organisational efforts against them, . . . the most deviated ones of them could only be neutralised by internal struggles." [12] According...
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