The Atlantic and Its Enemies

The custom, at that time, was for small student groups to gather at the Cubuk reservoir park outside Ankara, where families might go for excursions at weekends — reservoir parks, as with Rooken Glen outside Glasgow, being a hallmark of progressive towns, but in this case out of sight of the police. There, on 21 March 1973, the PKK appears to have been founded, although its formal establishment came a few years later, in a village of Lice district, in the south-east, in Diyarbak?r province, on 27 November 1978. Before this, Ocalan sent off representatives to the Kurdish east, there to spread the word, and setting up assorted protection rackets. For this, they used the grievances of one tribe against another, such as, for instance, the government’s grants of agricultural machinery to one rather than another — in this case, on the Syrian border, the Suleyman and Paydas clans, respectively for and against the government.

PKK propaganda is entirely predictable, written in wooden language, and based on the analysis of almost any Third World Communist movement of the era. There is ‘imperialism’. It has local supporters, the ‘comprador class’, among the bourgeoisie of the State; in the particular locality there is ‘feudalism’, in this case the Kurdish tribal leaders and their hangers-on. Women are oppressed. Religion is regarded as part of the oppression. There are rivals on the Left, but they are potentially treacherous — they might just come to terms with ‘imperialism’ or at any rate show no sympathy for the cause of national liberation. The Turkish Left, in this case, was dismissed as ‘social chauvinism’, another well-worn phrase (it went back to the 1920s) — ‘feudal petty bourgeois and children of family’, meaning Henri Barkey and Caglar Keyder. And now, in 1978, came the ‘First Congress’ of what is almost the last National Liberation Front of the old school and this time round there were Palestinian (and Bulgarian) connections. Ocalan’s outfit elected its central committee, its organizational and political bureaux, and had its officials for media affairs, military affairs, etc. The name was now changed to ‘PKK’ and its manifesto was issued. It invoked a version of Kurdish history, going back to the Medes, and emphasized the Indo-European as against Turkic origins of the people; it talked of ‘Turkish capitalism’ in the 1960s, referring to toprak agalar? (‘landowners’) ve kompradorlar?, and developed a version of the Vietcong programme, for a ‘national democratic revolution’ in which the ‘working classes’ would take the lead; these, it was claimed, were emerging from the peasantry; the enemies were ‘feudal, comprador exploitation, tribalism, religiosity [mezhepal?k] and the slave-like dependence of women’.

Here are Dostoyevsky’s Demons: a gathering of perhaps two dozen people, most of them vaguely educated (Selim Curukkaya, an interesting defector, says he was very impressed by Ocalan’s reading: he himself had struggled up from a village, and Alevi-Kurdish, Zaza-speaking, background, and had managed to graduate from sheep-watching to a high school at Mersin on the south coast; another was a schoolteacher of Laz background, i.e. Moslem Georgian, from the Black Sea coast). Of the original members, seven were killed on Ocalan’s orders as ‘agents’, five fled, and were denounced as traitors, and another five, though not classed as traitors, were downgraded. Two committed suicide, and another was murdered by a rival group in northern Iraq. Ocalan’s own wife fled, with another of the originals, and set up a rival PKK (‘Vejin’, though, here, for translation, the Indo-European is not helpful) in Paris. The first action occurred in July 1979, at K?rbas?, a village in Hilvan. The area was run by a tribal chief, Mehmet Celal Bucak, who was also deputy, for the Justice Party, of Siverek. The PKK’s strategy — following the Maoist one — was to ally with one tribe against another; the Bucaks, strong in the Urfa region, were at odds with the Turks. The PKK blamed ‘feudalism’ for the plight of the Kurds, and decided to make an example. In the event, they attacked a Bucak during an iftar, the fast-breaking dinner celebrated in Ramazan, and wounded the chief, though they also killed a maid and a small boy. The main activity thereafter was partly to fight the Turkish Left, but also to levy a tribute on the timber trade of a government minister. At the turn of 1979-80, as the military stepped up arrests, Ocalan became alarmed, and before the coup of 12 September 1980 he moved to Syria. At this point the PKK became heavily involved in the politics of the Middle East.

In fact his style became very much that of a Middle East dictator. The truth was that Ocalan himself despised the Kurds as zavall?, ‘poor mutts’, who could only be kept in place by Stalinist methods. In 1980, established in Syria, he took up links with one of the two large Kurdish factions in Iraq, Celal Talebani’s PUK, based on the Iranian side (and using its own language), and he opened up a training camp in the Bekaa valley in Lebanon, copying his ways from the PLO. Its attitudinizing leader, Yasser Arafat, had been allowed to address even the United Nations, generously conceding that he would deposit his revolver on the lectern as distinct from leaving it in its holster. Kurds: Palestinians? For Turks and most Kurds, unimaginable, but how should the problem be dealt with? Games were then played, the basic reality being that the Kurds moved in hundreds of thousands to western and central Turkey, and became assimilated. But the south-east remained a problem.

The Turkish state operated an alliance, never entirely reliable, with the other Iraqi Kurdish group, Mustafa Barzani’s PDK — Kurdistan Democratic Party — and four-cornered fighting might then develop; there were also problems, from time to time, with the Syrians, who sometimes opposed Saddam Hussein, with whom the PKK had, on the whole, good relations. In this atmosphere, Ocalan built up his own cult of personality, and ran affairs very strictly. One former close associate, Selim Curukkaya, defected in the end, and wrote memoirs. He had come from a village, struggled up to the teachers’ training school at Tunceli, and spent eleven years in prison, there organizing hunger strikes. Then he was smuggled out, via Greece and Serbia, to Ocalan’s camp — the ‘Mahsun Korkmaz Military Academy’, where there was much marching about by young women in camouflage suits and boots. His estranged wife was there, and she had turned into a Rosa Klebb: she ticked him off for smoking, saying that no-one smoked when the Leader was present; she even ticked him off for crossing his legs, such informality being an offence against discipline. The camp was full of informers, and it had its own prison. The place was, generally, run by men who, in Turkish prisons, had not ‘resisted’, as Selim Curukkaya claimed he had done, but had obeyed orders (a small version of the problems that arose in the satellite European countries after 1945, between Communists who had spent their time in Moscow and Communists who had been part of the anti-Nazi resistance movements). Ocalan himself was puritanical in sexual matters, though he did surround himself with a little group of fanaticized young women; the camp even had its own Orwellian language, imprisonment being called uygulama or ‘treatment’, and there were provisions for self-criticism sessions, with detailed questionnaires being served on people who had emerged from prison, as to their conduct before and during the imprisonment. There was even a version of the witch-hunt against Trotskyists in the Stalin era — one Mahmut Sener, then exiled in Germany. There was a grotesque leadership cult, Ocalan issuing a sort of catechism, comparing himself with the Mahdi, with evocations, in the Party Central School, of ‘The way of life of Apo, the way of work of Apo, the way of striking [enemies] of Apo’; after grandly named congresses (‘Congress of Victory’) there would be purges and liquidations. Apo was supposed, in Turkish, to mean ‘Daddy’, but it was also the name for the German terrorists of the seventies, Ausserparlamentarische Opposition (‘non- parliamentary opposition’), and the PKK’s prose was very Germanic.

The PKK learned its tactics from a school that, by 1984, was already quite venerable. It had a political wing, ERNK, which took twelve of the sixty-five seats in the exile parliament, a dummy body which reflected the Greek Communists’ ways in the Second World War, of ELAS/ETAM. But there were other instances. Mao Tse-tung had matched his Communist guerrillas with village politics, and General Vo Nguyen Giap in Vietnam had famously succeeded by similar methods. In the case of the PKK, tribal politics had a similar part, but this time there was a different element, in that small-town intelligentsia were recruited. Schoolteachers, emerging from the peasantry, had had a role in terrorism as far back as the Russian anarchists and the Armenians who had learned from them. The argument was that atrocity would cause counter-atrocity. The Turkish authorities would overreact against simple villagers, whose sympathies would then be with the rebels. Later, in the 1990s, there was also forced recruitment of boys and young men, just as had happened in the Greek civil war, who could be made to take the blame for an atrocity. It often happened that, upon capture by the army, they would spend time in Diyarbak?r prison or elsewhere. There, they would receive lessons in Marxism. This had been a device of Balkan Communists between the wars, and, both in Greece and in Yugoslavia in the early thirties, the Communists took a fifth and more of the vote. In Greece, for instance, they took votes from the Macedonian minority, from the dock workers of Salonica, from the tobacco-growers of Thrace and from children of the refugees who had arrived from Anatolia. Add the sons of some rich and educated families, and you have a model for the Communism of the whole area. A great book, Eleni, describing how, in a village in north-western Greece, the locals could be made far more radical than they might otherwise have been, is the prototype and, curiously enough, after Orthodox services in Greece collections would solemnly be taken to buy rockets for the PKK. Its managers had learned from earlier practices, and they behaved atrociously. In 1985, in a village of Catak district in Van, they killed a man and his two