The Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), founded in 1978, commenced an armed guerilla struggle against Turkey in 1984, in the aftermath of the heyday of the military junta that seized power in 1980. Despite the well-known human rights violations against Kurds that have taken and continue to take place on a mass scale, Western powers have always been reluctant to lend an ear to the Kurds’ grievances, and the PKK is today banned as a terrorist organisation in Germany, the UK and the USA.
Although the plight of the Kurds shortly became a brief media attraction in the aftermath of the war against Iraq, the New World Order did not have much to offer the Kurds – a people of presumably some 40 million – and today they are still far from living in equality and freedom in any of the countries in which they constitute considerable proportions of the population: Turkey, Iran, Iraq and Syria.
By October, 1998, the process of establishing the New World Order in the Middle East had reached a level that allowed Turkey to concentrate considerable military forces on the border to Syria, where the leader of the politico-military organisation PKK, Abdullah Öcalan, had had his abode for a couple of years. These military forces openly threatened to march on Damascus if Abdullah Öcalan was not expelled from Syria within a couple of days. Turkey’s belligerent ouverture to an international hunt for the Kurdish leader was no doubt a peculiar response to the unilateral cease-fire he had declared on 1 September 1998 against the background of the organisation’s long-standing quest for a peaceful and democratic settlement of the Kurdish issue, and it was not the first time that gestures of good will on the part of the Kurdish movement were publically dismissed by the Turkish government, which insists that it “refuses to talk to terrorists”. Nor was it surprising that government officials apparently covertly conveyed a message to the PKK leadership to the effect that Turkey would be prepared to terminate its war-drive if the insurgents were to take the first step, only to then exploit the Kurds’ positive response as a tactical advantage in military and intelligence efforts of increased intensity.
As Abdullah Öcalan points out in his defence document submitted to the Ankara State Security Court in June 1999, the PKK had first declared a unilateral cease-fire as far back as 1993, when the moderate politics of the liberal Turkish President Turgut Özal fanned a spark of hope for a peaceful settlement of the conflict between the PKK and the Turkish State. At a press conference held in the Lebanese town Bar Elias on 17 March 1993, Abdullah Öcalan addressed the Turkish side in the following words:
“Let us end this war at last. War is torture for me. It is for the Turkish State to spare me this torture by responding to our gesture of good will. We do not intend to separate from Turkey on the first occasion. We are in favour of living together in a fraternal relationship on the basis of political and military equality. If this be guaranteed by virtue of a new constitution, we are prepared to transfer our struggle to a political plane.”
Although the Turkish army initially responded with a truce, it soon stepped up its offensive once again, killing about 100 guerillas and civilians, arresting hundreds of others and renewing house demolitions. On the heels of these attacks, an unauthorised group of PKK fighters proceeded to violate the cease-fire themselves when they attacked a bus of Turkish soldiers hors de combat and killed 33 people. The PKK’s offer to investigate the incident was dismissed by the government. This sequence of events might have been different had President Turgut Özal and the Commander General of the Gendarmarie, Eþref Bitlis, and a number of other military and civilian officers who had publicly opposed the government’s war drive not suffered highly dubious premature and sudden deaths during the cease-fire process which they had initially endorsed. With a new cast of leading characters in the ever belligerent regime, the regress of the incipient peace process to a renewed military offensive that soon escalated into the notorious and infamous scorched earth politics of the Turkish state was heralded. It was then that, under the name of counter-insurgency warfare, the planned destruction of Kurdish villages by the thousands was being employed as a means to desiccate the sea in which the guerilla was the fish. This also led to the systematic killing of intellectuals, journalists, trade unionists and human rights and political activists in the streets of Kurdish towns, a killing and displacement spree which quickly began to affect the destiny of virtually every Kurdish family. It was also the time of unarmed popular mass uprisings, the serhildans, the Kurdish intifada, climaxing around occasions such as the funerals of popular leaders killed by death squads or traditional Kurdish celebrations such as the Newroz (noorooz) new year celebrations in the spring, with armed forces firing into the unarmed crowds, causing the Kurds many a Bloody Sunday.
According to estimated figures given by Kurdish sources, more than 30,000 Kurds were killed, and more than 3,000 Kurdish villages evacuated and destroyed, turning between 3 and 4 million Kurdish civilians into internally displaced people. Furthermore, between 23,000 and 30,000 Kurds were imprisoned in the period between July 1987 and May 2001. Most of these human rights violations happened between 1993 and 1998.
While thousands of Kurdish youth joined the ranks of the PKK, especially young girls who were attracted by the party’s emancipatory approach to the gender issue and the prospect of a life free from the stifling domestic slavery of patriarchal family bondage, the Turkish majority population was caught up in the quagmire of unrelented media terror pumping viciously chauvinist and primitively hedonist ideas into their minds, and hegemony over the inner core of the state apparatus ultimately fell to a network of militant fascists, organised mafiosi and corrupt pro-American politicans who trained and financed the Ramboesque Special Task Forces as mercenary troops that bullied even the regular armed forces, the traditional backbone of the autocratic republic, at their will. It was at this time that the seemingly rigidly secularist regime was busy creating and nursing the so-called Hezbullah (which is not related to the Lebanese organisation of the same name) as a fanatic counterweight to the socialist Kurdish movement, a micro version of the green belt. This politico-military concept later became known as the ’93 concept’ and its architects and executors would be termed the ‘inner state’; their links to the NATO’s secret Gladio organisation would be exposed and their prominent involvement in international drug trafficking, money laundering, off-shore banking, the systematic exploitation of state contracts, bribery and manifold variations of organised crime would be documented in the report of a parliamentary commission investigating the fatal accident of a Mercedes Benz car in the small Aegean town of Susurluk in autumn, 1996. The car contained a well-known mafioso and fascist hit-squad organiser who carried a diplomat’s passport although he was being sought after by Interpol, along with a high-ranking police officer and an MP who was the chief of the Kurdish Bucak tribe, a pre-feudal formation from which many of the 60,000 so-called village guards are recruited. These village guards are Kurdish para-militaries paid by the state, employed as footsoldiers in operations against the PKK and often involved in rape, murder and other forms of terror carried out against the Kurdish population. This unholy triumvirate depicted the inner power structures of the Turkish oligarchy “in a nutshell”, as even national Turkish and Western media had no other choice but to acknowledge. But despite the considerable public protests that accompanied the official investigations, little was done to actually dismantle these structures. In January 2002, the Court of Appeals upheld a sentence based on investigations conducted after the incident, according to which a total of only 14 former government agents have to serve as little as between 4 and 6 years in prison for their involvement with organised crime.
Neither does the exposure of these cross-connections imply that the Turkish public could now freely discuss and oppose these structures. The liberal journalist Celal Baþlangýç might have to face up to 6 years in prison for having published in his book Temple of Fear the results of his research on several massacres and atrocities committed by the armed forces, notwithstanding the fact that the European Court of Human Rights has confirmed a large part of the facts published by Mr. Baþlangýç in two major cases before the Court while human rights applications based on other events he investigated are still pending.
In the midst of all the horrors unleashed by this Pandora’s box of counter-insurgency warfare and shortly before the Susurluk affair shattered Turkey, the PKK observed a second unilateral cease-fire throughout the autumn and winter of 1995. However, this cease-fire was simply dismissed by large parts of the Turkish and international public, and of course by those who generate its ‘opinion’ as a sign of their increasing weakness in the face of the success of the ’93 concept’.
PKK leader Abdullah Öcalan would later describe this period as one of “extreme repetitions” of patterns of behaviour on both sides of the conflict, patterns that the PKK, he remarks auto-critically, failed to creatively overcome mainly because the “kind of warfare applied had gone off the rails on both sides”.
On 6 May 1996, a powerful car bomb was detonated in a suburb of Damascus, defoliating trees within a radius of half a mile according to eye witnesses. The Turkish journalist Tuncay Özkan shows in his book ‘Operation’ how this failed assault on Abdullah Öcalan’s life was planned and executed by the Turkish National Intelligence Agency MİT with the approval of the then Prime Minister Mesut Yýlmaz, today the leader of the junior coalition partner in the present government and an advocate of European integration. In 1997, the PKK commander responsible for the killing of the 33 soldiers hors de combat in 1993, Þemdin Sakýk, surrendered himself to the armed forces and later gave a statement to the State Security Court to the effect that he had helped the Turkish army by ordering attacks on Turkish soldiers hors de combat while the PKK observed their cease-fire.
Ex-commander Sakýk’s confessions were regarded by progressive Kurdish intellectuals as the epitome of the social destructiveness of a personality entangled in the narrowness and parochialism of tribalism, a patriarchal and feudal character whose conception of liberation from oppression is imitation of the oppressor. This mindset in a way resembles what Frantz Fanon or Paulo Freire have written about the split personality of the colonised, and Abdullah Öcalan has sharply dismissed such conduct as “war-lordism” and “primitive nationalism”, tendencies he said the PKK must overcome just as the Turkish state has to overcome its chauvinist, oligarchic gangsterism.
Similar tendencies might have determined the conduct of the Democratic Party of Kurdistan (KDP) of Massoud Barzani and the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) of Jalal Talabani, the two main factions of the long-standing Kurdish nationalist movement of South Kurdistan who were each allocated a portion of the autonomous regional government set up in the safe-haven installed in Northern Iraq by the US after the Gulf War of 1991. In the face of repeated cross-border incursions of the Turkish army and their Special Task Forces into Northern Iraq throughout the 1990’s, both factions – consumed by in-fighting over customs revenues from the limited trade between Northern Iraq and Turkey – chose to assist Turkey in its campaigns against the PKK rather than to unite and further Kurdish interests. Both of the factions maintain strong ties with Washington and London, Ankara and, less openly, Tel Aviv, but reject the PKK as an ‘alien force’ despite the fact that the PKK enjoys the support of a considerable proportion of the population of South Kurdistan. While the First and Second World Wars have created, as far as the political map of the Middle East is concerned, a situation of enmity of the regional states towards one another, the regional states impose a miniature copy of the very same model on the Kurds – they have become enemies to each other in the different parts of their land. After 10 years of its existence, a US-designed Kurdish safe-haven in a British-designed Iraq has predominantly been the stage of the Kurds’ increased fratricide and dependency of Kurds rather than of their unity and self-reliance.
In 1992, 1994 and 1997 there were three major wars between the KDP, PUK and the PKK resulting in several hundred casualties on all sides. Each of these wars was triggered by large scale military cross-border operations of Turkey into Northern Iraq.
Having arrived at settlements, but never unity with the Southern factions, the PKK decided to observe a third unilateral cease-fire in Turkey beginning on 1 September 1998. Abdullah Öcalan made the following announcement over the Kurdish satellite television channel Med TV:
“…We have decided to take this step because we wholeheartedly and sincerely believe that this is a requirement of civilised and contemporary methods. We have taken this step to give a chance to a political solution to a problem that is pivotal to the serious crisis Turkey is in, a problem which, although it concretely appears as the Kurdish question in fact comprises basic and substantive questions of democracy. The human rights issue and the Kurdish national question are also related to this problem. I firmly believe that if we manage to develop and further such an act of good will without giving in to the provocations of certain circles, both among ourselves and in certain parts of the Turkish State, who have vested material interests in the war, we shall be able to solve this great question of Turkey, of the whole of its population, of the peoples of the Middle East, of world peace…”
