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Internationale Initiative
Freiheit für Abdullah Öcalan - Frieden in Kurdistan
Pf.: 100511, D-50445 Köln
E-Mail: info@freedom-for-ocalan.com
Url: www.freedom-for-ocalan.com
Cologne, 15 January 2002
INTERNATIONAL INITIATIVE BRIEFINGS:
CONSPIRACY AND CRISIS
Turkey and the Kurdish Question: From the Nineties to the Present
Day
by Aram Publisher*
*Written by a collective of journalists and researchers on behalf
of Aram Publisher, Istanbul, January, 2002
At the dawn of the year 2002, there are many indications to the
effect that the Kurdish question is once again about to become a
prominent issue in international mediatic discourse. Talk of an
imminent US attack on Iraq has now made the Kurdish factions of
Northern Iraq a favourite theme of what the New York Times or the
Washington Post purport as 'possible strategic scenarios'. On the
other hand, Turkey, with its large Kurdish population and notorious
human rights problems, is being much wooed as a key player in a
pre-intervention balance of forces while a major International Monetary
Fund (IMF) scheme keeps the population of Turkey occupied with ridiculous
increases in consumer prices.
The outcome of legal proceedings before a Turkish State Security
Court against a book by Noam Chomsky* criticising American Interventionism
may depend on the actual course American interventionism will eventually
take in the Middle East as much as it undoubtedly depends on the
internal developments in the struggle for democratisation and fundamental
rights and freedoms in Turkey itself.
The following sketch is an attempt to look at both of these factors
in the dynamics of their intertwinedness.
*****
*... (Fatih Tas, the owner of Aram Publishing, is facing
charges of separatism for publishing Chomsky’s book. The court
case will start on the 13th of February 2002 at the State Security
Court in Istanbul. Besides attending the trial of his book, Chomsky
is said to visit Amed (Diyarbakir) to "test the level of freedom
in Turkey". According to Turkish daily Hurriyet newspaper,
Naom Chomsky has also written a letter to the UN critisising the
lack of freedom in Turkish law.)....
*****
THE PAST
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 MIT 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 Paolo 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..."
THE ABDUCTION
The rough sketch of the course of events from 1993 to 1998 rendered
above makes it appear plausible why the regime should answer such
a call by massing up its troops at the Syrian border in order to
have Öcalan expelled from there and unabatedly continue their
operations against the Kurdish guerilla both within its own national
borders and beyond them. In the process of carrying out these operations,
the regime would exploit Kurdish displays of good will to both militarily
and propagandistically gain territory against an enemy who, although
leading strategists had acknowledged that he could not be destroyed,
had to be confronted militarily precisely because of the very fact
that he existed. Furthermore, it was necessary to prolong the conflict
because the protracted fighting would allow an uncontrollable gang
of war profiteers to perpetuate their undisturbed economic and political
pillage of the country. As we said above, that was not surprising.
What was surprising in a way was the extent of both American and
European involvement in Turkey's die-hard annihilation politics
vis a vis the Kurds, which would slowly surface as events around
Abdullah Öcalan's quest for a peaceful settlement took their
course.
Once expelled from Syria on 9 October 1998, Abdullah Öcalan
decided to make his way to Europe rather than to the PKK's strongholds
in the Kurdish mountains of Northern Iraq or North-Western Iran.
In an interview with Reuters News Agency, he explained his motivation
in doing so in the following terms:
"I am positive that if a political settlement to the [Kurdish]
question gains some degree of acceptance, all violence in Turkey,
irrespective of from whom it originates, and definitely including
the guerrilla warfare, can be halted to a large extent. [...] A
process of political dialogue, once initiated, can be transformed
into a strategic approach. What does that depend on? If Europe uses
its weight, if the USA are supportive and if Turkey is prepared
for a political settlement, then we shall definitely prefer to consider
such a settlement as our strategic prospective since that is what
we want in any event. So it is not correct to say that I came to
Europe to escape adverse conditions. Really, if we can only grasp
a chance for such a solution, a process of [purely] political struggle
can be initiated."
Similar views were expressed by Abdullah Öcalan in an interview
conducted with him by the magazine Middle East Review in January
1999:
"There can be no doubt that once the international community
has acknowledged the Kurdish question, this will more than anything
else result in diplomatic recognition and accordingly my priority
is that a dialogue with the Turkish Republic be established in conjunction
with internal efforts towards a political settlement. I would like
to reiterate what I said about a solution within the existing boundaries
of Turkey and the democratic structure of the state. I would like
to concentrate on finding a solution to the Kurdish question based
on a pluralist concept of democracy. And I shall put emphasis on
attempts to get the support both of Turkey and of international
democratic powers."
Abdullah Öcalan's first destination was Greece, from where
he immediately had to continue to Moscow. Neither of the countries
were prepared to effectively grant him political asylum. On 13 November
1998, Abdullah Öcalan entered Italy, where he was allocated
temporary accomodation in a Roman suburb until 17 January. The Italian
authorities turned down a Turkish request for extradition on grounds
that Mr Öcalan would face the death penalty upon his return
to Turkey. At the same time, the German Federal authorities decided
to defer an arrest warrant against Abdullah Öcalan that had
been issued in 1990 on grounds of a legally adventurous construct.
The two countries' prime ministers conferred on possible venues
for an international conference on a political solution to the Kurdish
question with European involvement.
Mr Öcalan, in turn, expressed his belief in the basic principles
and democratic safeguards of the European Union. For example, his
statement to the exile publication Özgür Politika on 16
January 1999 is worded as follows:
"I believe that a concept of law as expressed in the legal
framework of the European Union should be developed for the Kurdish
question and I have expressed according demands. I wish to underline
[our demand] that a legal commission founded on the principles of
the European Union should go on fact-finding and research missions
in Kurdistan and, if necessary, an international court should be
established."
Mr Öcalan repeatedly made clear that he was prepared to stand
trial before such an international court himself under the sole
condition that Turkey be tried, too. But his hopes and demands were
not met. The Turkish government and media apparatus had unleashed
an ever-mounting campaign of chauvinist outrage against Italy for
harbouring Öcalan, "the baby killer and murderer of 30,000
people". The campaign amounted to a boycott of Italian products
and generated stark anti-Italian sentiments amongst the Turkish
populace. At the same time, and less parochially, the USA silently
used diplomatic channels to dissuade European governments from supporting
any political initiative for a peaceful resolution of the Kurdish
conflict. Germany's move to defer the arrest warrant then turned
out to be a green light for the Italian government's final decision
to pressure Abdullah Öcalan into leaving the country for an
uncertain destination notwithstanding his outstanding asylum application.
All European countries refused to grant him leave to enter. Via
Moscow, Athens and Corfu the Kurdish leader was finally flown to
the Greek Embassy at Nairobi, Kenya, in what became increasingly
obvious as a deliberate consipracy to maneuvre him into a position
where he could be handed over to the Turkish authorities as soon
as safeguards of European law were effectively by-passed.
In their pending application to the European Court of Human Rights,
Abdullah Öcalan's legal representatives have shown that the
conspiracy leading to his abduction involved unlawful conduct on
the part of either the authorities or at least unauthorised officers
of Greece, Russia, Italy and Kenya, while there are strong indications
that Germany, Britain, the Netherlands and Israel were at least
indirectly involved at some stage of the operation.
When Mr Öcalan was finally forced off the premises of the
Greek Embassy at Nairobi on 15 February 1999, the private plane
of a Turkish businessman (who, most notably, was extradited from
the USA to Turkey on serious charges of off-shore banking and tax
crimes in summer 2001) had already been waiting on the tarmac of
Nairobi airport for a couple of days.
In his application to the European Court of Human Rights, Mr Öcalan
gave an account of the last sequence of events surrounding his abduction:
"Black persons in a jeep kidnapped me by force. Staying in
the embassy or going with them could have resulted in my being killed
all the same. They drove the car right up to the door of the plane.
Later, we entered a non-public area of the airport. My consciousness
failed me. Most probably they used some drugs on me. I can confirm
that I was not in the possession of my will power at that stage.
I can confirm that I felt numb. As soon as I entered the plane someone
hurled on me. They were Turkish. All those standing around the plane
were armed and from their appearance I think they were either US
Americans or Israelis. No Turks were there until we got to the plane.
Turks were only on the plane itself."
The Turkish Prime Minister Bülent Ecevit was trembling with
emotion as he read out a statement on 16 February 1999 announcing
that Öcalan "was caught following our silent but intense
efforts that lasted 12 days in different countries and different
continents." Ecevit's boastful statement is not only contradicted
by Mr Öcalan's own account, but by other evidence as well.
It was in autumn, 2001, that the former special advisor to Bill
Clinton, Mr Tony Blinken, described in an interview he gave to CNN
how the United States of America had assisted Turkey "from
the beginning", in that the "countries" which "harboured"
Mr Öcalan were "encouraged" to ensure that he be
"brought to justice". But even during his trial before
the Turkish State Security Court in summer, 1999, where Öcalan
was sentenced to death, Turkish newspapers blurted out that Öcalan's
capture was a present to Turkey from the CIA. On 20 January, 2002,
the former President Süleyman Demirel confirmed on CNN that
"everybody knows that the USA played a big part in bringing
Öcalan to Turkey".
On being informed about Blinken's statement, Abdullah Öcalan
instructed his legal representatives to the effect that "it
seems as if the USA and Greece had given me to Turkey as a present,
perhaps an incentive for Turkey to solve the Cyprus and Aegean question.
There wasn't even an agreement, no deal, I was more like a gift-wrapped
packet. It was really hideous. The US is cruel. It gives me to Turkey
saying kill him or let him live, do whichever you please. And the
target was not just me as an individual - Kill the Kurds if you
like or let them remain in whatever position you think fit for them.
Let's see if they can survive... Now I wonder what the Bush administration
says about this? We reserve our right to self-defence against the
USA. We expect an explanation from the USA. And we expect one from
Greece."
THE CONSPIRACY
When Öcalan draws attention to the fact that the act of international
piracy that was his abduction was not so much the achievement of
a band of Turkish top-agents as the end result of a long-term policy
on the part of global players, he does not do so merely for the
sake of the moral value of the evidence available to him. He says
in the same statement: "The conspiracy originated in Britain,
and a layer of collaborationist Kurds has been involved in it. Turkey
itself was unprepared. It had been exerting pressure to have me
handed over from the time I was in Syria but the Turkish regime
wasn't involved in the actual planning. The planning can be traced
way back to 1996 when it was said that Clinton and [Greek Prime
Minister] Simitis had arrived at an agreement to have me liquidated.
Rather than liquidating the PKK as a whole, their intention was
to liquidate me."
There is an important shift of accent on the political level of
the argument: The conspiracy to abduct or kill Öcalan was in
essence a conspiracy against not only the Kurds but against Turkey.
By serving the vested interests of those forces in Turkey who have
drawn material profits out of the 15 years of the Turkish armed
forces' all-out war against the Kurdish population, by perpetuating
the conflict, the abusive and exploitative rule of the degenerate
pro-American oligarchy that had been installed in Turkey at the
dawn of the Cold War was to be perpetuated and consolidated amid
growing polarisation between the Turkish and the Kurdish people
and an escalation of the counter insurgency strategists' 'low intensity
warfare' into a full-fledged civil war. Ethnicisation of an originally
political, social and economic conflict as a contemporary form of
divide et impera, an integral part of the Pax Americana, was what
Öcalan and the PKK leadership made out as the rationale behind
the conspiring of the US and many a European power on the issue
of concertedly denying the Kurds the seemingly last venue to arrive
at peace in justice, to resolve the Kurdish issue of Turkey.
The pogrom-like atmosphere in Turkey before and much more so after
the illegal abduction of the Kurdish people's national leader Abdullah
Öcalan offered a taste of what was to be meted out to the peoples
of Anatolia and Mesopotamia: Fascist mobs hunting down and lynching
Kurdish youth on the one hand, indiscriminate arson attacks on public
transport buses and a department store in Istanbul on the other
hand. The run-up to the national elections in Turkey was completely
tainted by this poisonous atmosphere, and the fascist Nationalist
Action Party (MHP) was elected into the government coalition on
18 April 1999 along with Ecevit, the man who could boast that he
was the leader who had achieved the capture of the public enemy
number one. But Mr Öcalan was a public enemy for only a part
of the Turkish majority population, even if the more vociferous
one, while millions of Kurds took to the streets in angry and desparate
protest, not only all over Turkey, but in Iraq, Iran, Syria, Lebanon,
Pakistan, Russia, all over Europe and even as far as the Philippines.
It was in this context that the People's Democracy Party (HADEP),
which had, since its inception faced incessant accusations on the
part of the authorities of being a legal outlet for separatist activities,
was viciously obstructed in its election campaigning and failed
to pass the 10 percent threshold to parliament. Amid reports of
international monitoring committees to the effect that hundreds
of ballots with Kurdish votes were burned by the security forces
and voters in the Eastern provinces threatened not to vote for HADEP,
the party scored over 60 percent of the vote in some areas and managed
to win 37 municipalities in the council elections held on the same
day.
As to what kind of elite was to lead the Turkish nation into victory
over the Kurds, it is not only highly enlightening to see that Cavit
Çaðlar, the millionaire regarded trustworthy enough by
the Turkish intelligence service to be made privy to the 'Kenyan
operation', was prominently involved in the common practise of syphoning
uncountable amounts of money from both private and public banks,
but that the whole power elite so staunch on not talking to terrorists
has in the meantime been exposed as benefitting from disasterous
off-shore banking and similar practises of milking public enterprises
on a grand scale: The whole family clan of then State President
Süleyman Demirel; the family clan of Tansu Çiller, the
Prime Minister who vigorously pushed for the '93 concept'; nearly
the entire Nationalist Action Party (MHP) leadership, all of them
have provenly played their part in the pillaging of the Turkish
economy in a way that makes Monsieur Mobuto look like a harmless
old man. They all may have been exposed, but hardly any of them
has been effectively tried and convicted. A Turkish High Court investigating
the more mysterious aspects of the country's budget deficit has
established in 2001 that a sum amounting to about 22% of the government's
total budget was syphoned off in the form of 'unrecorded' budget
spendings beyond parliamentary control, i.e. poured into the black
sector of the economy associated with the activities of the 'inner
state'; however, no action has been taken to retrace or retrieve
this money. This phenomenon is by no means new to the Turkish public,
and it must be assumed that this sum was even higher at the height
of the all-out war. A former Minister of the Interior under Tansu
Çiller, Mehmet Aðar, has publicly conceded that he used
large chunks of such 'missing money' to organise and finance '1000
operations' against the Kurds, employing wanted mafiosi and other
illegal organisations.
The final implosion in December, 2000, of a Turkish economy that
had been in crisis ever since the earliest days of the raging war
against the Kurds is then but a repercussion of the mode of governance
of the civilian political oligarchy entrusted with running the country
by the military junta installed in September 1980 with active support
from both the USA and Federal Germany. Economists agree that the
IMF policies vis a vis Turkey must be regarded as a root cause of
the crisis rather than its remedy. Hand in glove...
It follows from such analysis that a conventional response on the
part of the PKK to the captivity of their leader would have fallen
short of providing an answer to the social and political plight
of both the Kurdish and Turkish masses. Armed struggle based on
the classic demands of national liberation might, under the given
conditions and especially given that the organisation's leader's
life was at stake, well have served to fulfill the hopes of the
analysts of the London-based International Institute for Strategic
Research that "the removal of the Kurdistan Workers' Party
(PKK)'s autocratic leader [would] also expose potentially crippling
divisions within the organisation" between "hardline Marxists"
and followers of "a more nationalist and pragmatic position".
The think-tank's calculus was that different groupings within the
'beheaded' movement would fight one another at the expense of the
movement's integrity and that "the PKK's decline may allow
the emergence of a new, moderate and peaceful Kurdish movement".
From their warning to the effect that a "democratic Kurdish
organisation would be more likely to attract Western sympathy, and
Turkish repression of such a [new] movement might cause problems
for Ankara ... with its most important ally, the US", one can
easily infer that repression of the existing Kurdish movement was
far from disturbing to the US, even if it meant the destruction
of nearly 4,000 villages or thousands of extralegal killings of
political oppositionals by death-squads and systematic torture all
over the country: If the existing, autochtone Kurdish movement moderately
campaigns for a democratic and peaceful solution, it has to be destroyed,
and a new one, shaped in the image of what has now become the post-Taleban
government of Afghanistan or the Iraqi National Congress, has to
be created - that is, one that will be loyal to US interests from
the outset. After their experience with the illegal abduction of
Abdullah Öcalan at a time when he determinedly campaigned for
a non-violent settlement, many Kurds strongly felt that what Western
powers demanded from them was loyalty, submissiveness and dependence,
not the peacefulness and democratic spirit of their methods. Outrage
and disillusion were widespread. Commenting on the PKK's decision
to adopt a non-violent strategy while their leader was in Rome,
the IISS blatantly states: "If Kurdish mass parties do appear,
they could, paradoxically, be more dangerous for the Turkish state
and its relations with Europe" - so the Kurds need to be kept
away from political struggle by being drawn back into an armed struggle,
the leadership of which would be consumed by in-fighting to then
be replaced by an artificial, dependent and tame entity.
PEACE OVERTURES
In an atmosphere where even his domestic lawyers were intimidated
by death squads and beaten up by both police officers and nationalist
mobs on their way to the court room; in an atmosphere where nocturnal
patrols marked the doors of Kurdish houses in some cities of Western
Turkey with paint, Abdullah Öcalan used the tiny space that
was afforded to him in a glass cage to which he was confined during
his hearings on Imrali Island in June, 1999, to call upon his organisation
to continue observing the cease-fire, stop all unauthorised actions
against civilians and prepare for the transformation into a purely
political organisation.
His insistence on the pre-abduction strategy in the form of extrapolating
the tendencies towards a peaceful political struggle that had been
ripening from 1993 to 1998 came as a surprise to many, and was widely
commented upon as a radical turn in the organisation's politics
now based on Öcalan's attempts to save his own skin. But the
PKK supported Öcalan's appeal and even withdrew their fighting
forces to territories beyond Turkish borders.
The defence document Abdullah Öcalan submitted to the State
Security Court during his hearings on Imrali Island suggests that
a concrete analysis of the concrete circumstances will establish
a democratic system as the sole prospect:
"The option of a democratic solution is, not only in general
but also for the Kurdish question, the only option available. Secession
is neither possible nor necessary. It is no doubt in the interests
of the Kurds to establish a democratic union with Turkey. If a democratic
solution is implemented to its full extent, it is likely to become
a more successful and realistic model than autonomy or even a federation.
That is where the practical course of events is leading us to in
any event...
"... Societies in which democracy can grow roots are usually
those which, after having blasted the most aggravated problems to
the surface in a revolutionary outbreak, then seek to resolve the
remaining contradictions and the interests represented in them by
means of non-violent mechanisms involving the individual and social
groups, i.e. by means of parties and public institutions. Once a
society has attained this degree of maturity, the whole problem
consists of adequately defining the principles and institutions
of democracy and relating them to the existing problems...
"...When to the collapse of the fascist regimes and the overall
developments after the Second World War there was added the dissolution
of real socialism in the '90's, the democratic system influenced
Turkey just as it influenced the whole world. The Kurdish movement's
growth into a true popular movement was undoubtedly another factor
of primary importance. The Kurds' popular demonstrations in the
'90's have virtually amounted to a full-fledged democratic revolution...
If the Left in Turkey had profoundly understood this process and
joined in it with its own party, and, again, if the guerilla war
had found its end with the cease-fire overtures of '93 and been
transformed into political democracy, Turkey could certainly at
that stage of its history have made a successful leap towards a
democratic republic. But unfortunately, the Çiller-Karayalçýn
[Çiller was Prime Minister and Karayalçýn head
of the armed forces at that time] Government of Special Warfare
from '93-'96 jeopardised this positive development by enforcing
gangsterisation on the state, leading into a severe deviation, dirty
war, rent-based economy and extremely degenerate social corruption,
thus laying the groundwork for what would be the army's conduct
from '95 to the present day... The democratic quality of the republic
will be ensured to the extent that with the PKK the position of
Kurdish society in democracy is inadvertantly legitimised...
"...What we oppose is not the substance of the republic, but
all its oligarchic and anti-democratic aspects in Turkey in general
and the feudal belief, criteria of value and structures at the heart
of the society we were born into. The corollary of this is the aim
of a democratic republic: free citizens and a free society to be
realised under its constitution. The republic can only win strength
from these activities of ours. That is how we interpreted our duty
to be modern: It would have amounted to disrespect for the republic
not to engage in these activities."
The PKK officially adopted this political stance at its Extraordinary
7th Party Congress in autumn, 1999. Democratic mass struggle for
fundamental rights and freedoms was to create the basis for a change
in Turkey that would allow the Turkish population to engage in the
struggle against the oligarchy suppressing them, too, without being
absorbed by the chauvinist clamour about the inevitability of fighting
terrorism under the leadership of militarism and organised financial
crime.
The Kurdish population, especially those in the war-ridden areas,
swiftly found that their interests and yearnings were reflected
in such a political process. In the political nerve center of the
Kurdish areas, Diyarbakýr, where visits by government officials
were usually marked with general hartals, stay-indoors strikes,
now a crowd of Kurdish women in their traditional dresses greeted
Ecevit and his lot with slogans and ululations in their mother tongue
and by launching hundreds of white pidgeons into the skies - which
perhaps angered and frightened the Turkish leaders more than the
previous total absence of local spectators (they had never come
to actually see them anyway). The 37 Kurdish municipalities, including
that of the City of Diyarbakýr, that had elected the People's
Democracy Party (HADEP) in the council elections in April 1999 were
working hard to meet the demands of the local population for better
communal services, cultural facilities and political representation
- perhaps the first time Kurds could identify with their local governments
(the powers of which are strictly curtailed under the strong Turkish
centralism). Columnists and commentators started discussing 'the
Kurdish issue' which had never before been taken up in such terms;
before, it was merely a 'terror problem'. High-ranking jurists picked
up the slogan of a democratic republic in their inauguration speeches
and a new State President, Necdet Sezer, was elected into office,
a former judge who would not tire of emphasising the importance
of the rule of law. Human rights violations abated significantly.
The PKK sent two voluntary groups of representatives, one from the
ranks of the guerilla in the mountains and one from European exile,
to Turkey where they were to convey the message that the party was
ready to participate in political life if an unconditional general
amnesty were declared and the death penalty abolished. The first
group at least had lengthy and cordial discussions with high-ranking
army generals. Talk about constitutional amendments and accession
to the European Union on the basis of fulfilling the Copenhague
Criteria was everywhere.
THE CRISIS
Less than a year later, some forces within Turkey and the US had
succeeded in bribing the feudal tribal chiefs of the Patriotic Union
of Kurdistan (PUK) headed by Jalal Talabani into attacking the PKK's
positions in Northern Iraq with the intention of re-engaging them
in armed struggle. The domestic atmosphere of calm had not moved
Turkey's elite to actually grant the Kurds any fundamental rights,
either. What had occured, though, were 'potentially crippling divisions'
among those parts of the elite who wished for a return to unrelented
state terror and a continuation of Turkey's autistic aggressive
policies based on the black sector of the economy, on corruption
and syphoning off of public funds - those who had drawn a tremendous
rent from the status quo - and those who desired mildly democratic
reforms, good governance, a Western type liberalism and accession
to the European Union. Since the latter group is less vociferous
and badly organised, and especially because the labouring masses
of Turkey are not organised and unified enough to provide effective
support for it, not to mention being a force in their own right
expressing their independent interests, the schism has not resulted
in a democratic opening generating palpable gains in terms of the
much-desired change on a legal, political or social level.
The IMF and the World Bank prepared to tighten their stronghold
on the marred Turkish economy by enforcing the introduction of international
arbitration and having the retirement age set up to somewhat above
average life expectancy. Inmates affiliated with radical leftist
Turkish organisations launched a hunger strike against the introduction
of high-security isolation cells - a model adopted from the American
and European prison systems - which were to replace the traditional
prison dormitories. The hunger strike turned into a fierce death
fast but failed to rally mass support among the Turkish population
for the prisoners' demands. They rejected the Kurdish people's campaigning
for an unconditional general amnesty as an expression of the wish
to integrate with a system that had to be toppled and so confined
themselves to a struggle against the introduction of isolation cells,
while Kurdish prisoners in turn criticised the intransingence of
the marginal Turkish left on the issue of a negotiated compromise
and their lack of concern for social issues beyond their own immediate
situation. This lack of unity was to take a horrifying toll. When
talks between the prisoners and the authorities finally failed,
despite the mediation of public figures, and when a Maoist organisation
claimed responsibility for the killing of two constablers in Istanbul,
several thousand armed riot police poured into the streets to hold
a protest march against human rights and a planned amnesty and gathered
in the yard of the police headquarters to threaten some moderate
superiors, thus proving once again that the fascist movement had
done splendid work in infiltrating and organising the body of the
urban police force.
In the morning hours of 19 of December, 2000, security forces raided
several prisons where the hunger strikers were being confined and
killed a total of 32 inmates using bullets, grenades and the fire
they set to the dormitories where the exhausted hunger strikers
were held. A Turkish journalist introduced on CNN's Turkish broadcast
as privy to Ankara's backstage affairs blurted out in a slip of
the tongue that the assault on the prisons had been planned well
in advance but was postponed when a number of public figures offered
to mediate between the prisoners and the authorities.
When the amnesty law was eventually passed, it turned out to be
a kind of 'wholesale' parole law, drastically reducing the terms
criminals had to serve while completely exempting political prisoners.
The Research Foundation for Society and Law (TOHAV) has undertaken
to take the applications of 1274 of the political prisoners exempted
from this law to the European Court of Human Rights on the basis
that it is discriminatory.
By January 2002, the hunger strikes are still going on and the
total death toll is now at 85 with another 150 approaching death.
The little public support that the hunger strikes had rallied has
been effectively eradicated.
While the hungerstriking prisoners were slaughtered and the PKK
had to fight back Talabani's offensive in Northern Iraq in December,
2000, Turkey was thronged into the grave economic crisis so learnedly
debated in the Western press, triggered off by the over-night floating
of the dollar that sparked off a loss of value of the domestic currency
against any other, thus resulting in increases of consumer prices
of up to several hundred percent in various branches while at the
same time creating mass unemployment. While 1 USD was 650,000 Turkish
Lira before the devaluation, it climbed to over 1,500,000 Turkish
Lira at its climax. While the government had previously announced
its objective to push down the rate of inflation to 'only' 35% in
2001, the actual annual rate of inflation in 2001 was 88.5%. According
to official figures, more than 1 million people were laid off between
January and September 2001. What, then, apart from what we know
about its overall policies, may have prompted the IMF into suddenly
abolishing the currency peg it had itself fixed? Could it have been
the sudden, massive flight of foreign direct investment (which went
down by 45% while the stock trade index declined from 15,000 to
7,000)? But what then was the cause of this sudden withdrawal of
foreign direct investment? Analysts agree that it was the collapse
of several private and public banks that were ruined by the ruthless
off-shore practise of the political figures and their business friends
mentioned above. It is estimated that at least 17 billion USD were
thus 'transferred' from state-owned banks and 18 billion USD from
private banks into private pockets. Less than 15% of the total sum
has been retrieved as of yet. The next question then must be: What
made these cliques believe that they could steal billions of dollars
'in cold blood' and get away with it? The indisputable political
dominance enjoyed by these cliques while the war against the Kurdish
people was raging on full scale went parallel with an economic process
that, given the typical alliance of political elite and finance
capital, laid much of the groundwork for the present crisis. The
finance sector grew rich and out of bounds under the super profits
it extracted from the enourmous public loans the Turkish government
had to take out in order to finance its war efforts all through
the late 1980's and 1990's. (The mechanism by which this occurred
has been described in great detail by the economist Fikret Baþkaya,
'Turkish Economy in the Prongs of War and Rent'; however, to paraphrase
Baþkaya's study here would go beyond the scope of this article).
Today, about 70% of all banking activities - including those of
public banks - are related to loans to the state, and only 30% are
related to the real sector of the economy. Even 60% of the profits
of Turkey's biggest holdings come in the form of rent from government
loans. Domestic debt is at a height of 110 billion USD with foreign
debts at about the same level. By November 2001, the government
devoted 54.4% of its total budget spendings, i.e. about 80% of tax
revenues, to paying off the interest on domestic and international
loans while only 4.8% went into investments. Considering these statistics,
one may easily reach the conclusion that there is an objective alliance
of vested interests between the domestic and international creditors
of the Turkish government. Furthermore, one may surmise based upon
the evidence so far presented in this report, that both the external
factors conditioning the dynamic leading to the economic implosion
- in the form of the IMF grip on Turkey - as well as its internal
factors - in the form of the surfacing of the nearly irrevertable
corruption of the economic sector as a whole - can be traced back
to the situation that the escalation of the Kurdish question has
dumped Turkey into.
THE SUBMISSIONS TO THE EUROPEAN COURT
Under these circumstances, a solution to the Kurdish question by
way of establishing a truly democratic system is in the direct interest
of Turkey, too. The labouring classes in particular would benefit
immensely from such a process. The solution Öcalan suggests
is not one that demands feasible or infeasible concessions from
the other side, but a call for united action for the common good:
"unity in freedom". While the Imrali Island defence document
of 1999 set out these points on a pragmatic-political level, the
scientific and ideological dimension of the approach taken, its
historical and sociological grounds, were left unclear. Öcalan
himself announced that his defence during the Imrali Island trial
was hardly more than a call for peace under circumstances rendering
de-escalation an urgent need, adding that he would give a full account
of his activities, convictions and aims in his submissions to the
Strasbourg-based European Court of Human Rights (ECHR), with which
his legal representatives had lodged an individual petition the
day after his arrest in February, 1999, to highlight the human rights
violations Turkey had committed in abducting Öcalan, exposing
him to a trial bearing not so much as the resemblance of fairness
and putting him on death-row. The Court has declared complaints
relating to human rights violations committed against Abdullah Öcalan
under 12 different articles of the European Convention on Human
Rights and Fundamental Freedoms admissible in December, 2000, and
is still in the process of deliberating the file. While Öcalan
had stated during the Imrali hearings that "it is my most fundamental
democratic ideal to turn my own trial into grounds for an honourable
peace", the European human rights application for him was first
and foremost a means to discuss and facilitate such a process of
reconciliation - the quest for a solution to the Kurdish issue -
on an international level. Everything going beyond the urgent call
for peace, then, was to follow during the European Court proceedings.
The document Abdullah Öcalan drafted for his application to
the ECHR is a two-volume work dicussing the circumstances of his
case and the situation of the Kurds against the background of elaborate
historical, philosophical, political and legal arguments. The book,
'From Sumerian Theocracy towards a People's Republic. A Defence
of the Free Human Being' (Istanbul, 2001) is a profound analysis
of the social fabric of the Middle East as a product of several
millenia of additive, complementary and contradictory layers of
civilisation, from the birth of the first state known to historical
research in Sumer in the 4th millenium BC to American hegemony in
the second half of the 20th century AD. His idea of emancipation
is related to the appeal for thorough democratisation on the basis
of a renaissance of the Middle East that can - as an antidote to
the 'clash of civilisations' purported by US strategists - lead
to a synthesis of civilisations in which the peoples of the Middle
East will establish themselves as free and equal members of a global
community to the rise of which they have essentially contributed
by virtue of their civilisational achievements of past ages, but
in which they have ultimately been allocated the status of the subjugated.
While acknowledging that the contradiction between past greatness
and present deprivation is still vivid in the minds of the peoples
of the Middle East, Öcalan is unequivocal on the fact that
the path to liberation from foreign domination necessarily leads
thorugh the dissolution of atavistic and anti-democratic structures
in the state, society and mentality of the Middle Eastern peoples.
His aim is a Democratic Federation of the Middle East. He elaborates
upon concrete proposals for a solution to the Kurdish question in
each of the countries Kurds live in - Turkey, Iran, Iraq and Syria
- in the framework of overall democratisation.
This theory both incorporates the struggle against religious backwardness
and local nationalisms and it rejects positivist, Eurocentristic
concepts of modernisation and Western political dominance. The actuality
of historical analysis for the present struggle for democratic liberation
and the continuity of the historical accumulation of experience
is reflected in the title of the work: 'From Sumerian Theocracy
towards a People's Republic'. By virtue of this, his theory also
offers an alternative to classical theories of historical progress.
The main instrument of struggle he suggests is grass-roots organisation
in the sphere of civil society, the 'third sphere' (neither the
state nor traditional society), a form of peaceful mass struggle
in which the leadership falls to the women and the youth - a new
era of democratic serhildans, but one which transcends nationalist
demands while preserving the democratic and progressive essence
of the affirmative manifestation of Kurdish identity. What Abdullah
Öcalan says about the region surrounding his home town Urfa
(including the archeological site Harran) in the defence document
he drafted for a second, currently pending domestic trial, can be
regarded as programmatic for what he suggests for the whole of the
Kurdish regions. Far from idealising Kurdish society, he critically
points out that feudal traditions are still strong in the region.
"What is more, as far as the mental set-up is concerned, there
are more than just a few remnants of the Sumerian system. In the
rural areas, Neolithic mentality predominates to a large extent.
Capitalist value systems essentially do not function. They only
function in a technical sense. With its surrounding areas, Urfa
is more or less a country within a country. Pluralism still perseveres
in the ethnic and cultural structures. It can be regarded as a micro
example of the mosaic of societies that is the Middle East...
"Our primary task must be the mental revolution. Its significance
becomes perfectly obvious once one has a look at the common law
killings of women. If a form of behaviour that must be regarded
as the most natural right of a woman is met by her family with her
death, then this means that there is an extremely dangerous situation
...Such conservativism draws its strength from the reality of the
ruling, exploiting class perpetuated over millenia and newly developing
capitalist relations would only consolidate this conservativism
rather than have a dissolving impact. But here, too, historical
experience becomes the source of strength...
"Any intervention in the region on an ideological level must
be made according to criteria of democracy... Nothing could ever
be of more value to Urfa than democratisation. It needs a project
of democratisation just as much as it needs the GAP [economic development
programme for South East Anatolia involving the construction of
huge dams along the River Euphrates]... Most of all, there is the
need for a comprehensive project of civil society...
Alluding to the popular Middle Eastern legend narrated in the Jewish
Book of Jubilees and the Qur'an, according to which Abraham was
forced to leave Harran for Canaan because he had destroyed idols
in a temple and therefore come into direct confrontation with the
tyrant Nimrod, Öcalan says:
"As far as mentality is concerned, what is needed can be defined
as a rejuvenated Abrahamite offensive. The present-day idols are
only more in number and more consolidated in their grip. They have
paralysed heads and hearts. That is why we have to hit them with
the axe of moral and intellectual force in the spirit of Abraham.
It is our obligation towards real respect for religion and holy
values that urges us to fight back by way of such an offensive.
The revolution which batters the contemporary idols will result
in a true renaissance ..."
For Öcalan, the invention of monotheistic religion ascribed
to Abraham was an emancipatory reaction of Semitic tribes rejecting
Babylonian and Assyrian idolatry as the ideology of the ruling empires
in which they could only have a subjugated status. But his comparison
of this ideology to the hegemonial ideology of contemporary imperialism
is not merely metaphorical but hermeneutical in that he sees the
fundamental structural features of the latter in an embryonic form
in the proto-type of ruling class ideology, Sumerian mythology.
Phenomena as mass migration from the periphery to the centre or
liberation struggles of the former against the latter can be observed
not only in 2000 AD but also in 2000 BC. However, the power of the
state and the empire of the centre is never based upon mere physical
force but always also upon ideological hegemony over its own populace
and that of the periphery, an ideology which appears in most stages
of history in the form of religion.
To Öcalan, a theory "regarding the ideological power
at the root of the state as a simple reflection" is bound to
be limited and even dangerous. "A mere analysis of money and
not only does capital fail to account for social reality as a whole,
but mutatis mutandis leads directly into a different form of the
very idealism it so vigorously criticises, comparable to the self-surrender
of 'real socialism' into the arms of capital. For the reasons we
tried to set out, it seems inexorable that a faulty Marxist thinking
would lead us to exactly this point."
While examining how Sumerian priests established the temple as
"the uterus of the state", an institution of social organisation,
political administration and ideological hegemony in the wake of
the first class society known to historiography, Öcalan places
an emphasis on the methodological concept of history, with a special
view on the dialectics of written history and the history of the
oppressed that can be deciphered by hermeneutical means. Writing
itself and with it recorded history comes about as an administrative
tool of the ruling class, the priests. Not only does it epistemologically
speaking tend to overlap and somewhat conceal everything that must
then be termed "pre-history" or "non-history",
both concerning times earlier than the development of script and
concerning peoples or areas that do not have script (until a sometimes
considerably later stage connected to subjugation to an expanding
empire) - but it also emerges under conditions where distorting
history gradually became an explicit intention. Written history
is thus a history written against the history of the people, of
the labouring masses, slave workers and peasants, and against the
history of the "others", ethnically or geographically
oppressed. And, until the present day, it has been written against
the history of gender, that of the enslaved woman. It is "the
history of malediction". The basic conditions of all these
forms of oppression come about in Sumer exactly at the time at which
script emerges from 'the rubble of archeological sites'. The development
of script and the tradition of teaching its usage go hand in glove
with the process of developing mechanisms for the collection, administration,
usurpation and extraction of social surplus which is at the same
time the process of developing forms and institutions for the oppression
of women in the temple and in the family, the oppression of the
toiling masses in class society and the oppression of agriculturalists,
nomads and members of other ethnic formations in territorial states
and expanding empires. Öcalan's interest in the beginnings
of history at a time at which his movement defends its ambition
to contest the myth of 'the end of history' is of an immediate practical
value for its emancipatory efforts, too. During an educational dialogue
given while still residing in Syria, Öcalan said about history:
"The end actually contains the beginning. Put the other way
round, features retracable in the beginnings of history palpably
show their presence in the end...
"An approach that accounts for the fact that history is hidden
in the present day and we are hidden in the beginnings of history
can be quite instrumental for us in finding our way. It contains
a chance to stop the wrong course of history, its dizzying precipitation."
The fact that Abdullah Öcalan concentrates on a critique of
civilisation would also be less surprising if one had access to
some of his earlier texts, especially transcripts of educational
dialogues with party cadres in which he had developed progressive
and authentic ideas in disciplines such as philosophy, history,
paedagogy, social psychology, gender studies and cultural theory.
While some of the material has been published in Turkish, none of
it has ever been made available in English or indeed any other Western
language.
Even at the time at which the war was still at its peak, Öcalan
encouraged his supporters to creatively explore questions related
to the humanities:
"We are not only involved in politics, but we are trying to
solve the most fundamental problems of life... If our life is one
in which war plays a major role, that is so because at the present
stage arid principles and mere morality could not see us through
a single year... It is the gravity of looming dangers, on a level
threatening to swallow up humanity, that has forced me to arrive
at this point."
A reading of 'From Sumerian Theocracy towards a People's Republic'
reveals that Öcalan abjectly refuses the "invented tradition"
of a die-cast Kurdish nation in history as the sole inhabitants
of the soil which is now the issue of dispute between the PKK and
the Turkish Republic. His perspectives for liberation are not one-dimensionally
founded on historically legitimised claims on a homeland for the
Kurds. Instead, he recognises the reality of a multi-ethnic set-up
that can serve as a model for a democratic federation of the peoples
of the Middle East. He regards all peoples and societies of the
Middle East as the product of the amalgamation and intercourse of
different cultures, traditions and tribes. The development of ethnic
and at a much later stage national identity for him is a protective
reaction of tribes against the aggressive attempts of expanding
empires to incorporate and enslave them.
His ideas contain a fundamental dismissal of what he calls "primitive
nationalism" just as much as an inspired challenge to Eurocentristic
ideas on how to solve the Kurdish question and their "imitation
by intellectuals of the periphery", to employ an expression
of the Argentinian philosopher of liberation, Enrique Dussel.
The book further contains detailed analyses of the feudal age that
saw the rise of Islam in the East; of the birth of capitalism in
Europe and its expansion all over the world and asks for concrete,
local roads towards a global alternative to it. Öcalan is and
always was critical of the 'real socialism' which he regards as
a system that failed to fulfill the needs of humans for individual
freedom and democracy and contributed to its own demise by virtue
of its limitations. His criticism, though, is not a dismissal of
socialism but an attempt to contribute towards the creation of a
socialism that can fulfill these needs. He states:
"When analysing slave-owning civilisation, I never lose sight
of my aim to show that analysing capitalism as an isolated element
in order to arrive at conclusions in favour of or against this system
is a method that contains severe shortcomings. What is encapsuled
in and has been experienced under capitalism, even under 'real socialism'
to the extent that it has been realised, is in essence nothing but
a more generalised and unfolded form of the 'civilisational features',
of the inventions realised in the substructure and superstructure
of the social set-up of slavery, and of the substratum underlying
it."
The search for an alternative system, then, involves questioning
the material and mental presuppositions that the process, with all
its antagonistic and often destructive developments, of the unfolding
of these fundamental 'features of civilisations' has endowed people
in each society with in a specific way. For the Kurds and other
peoples of the Middle East, this entails a "mental revolution".
But it amounts to hardly less for Western intellectuals:
"All comparisons show that the destruction, torture, starvation
and diseases human beings have accomplished in the 20th century
are more than the sum total of those of all previous centuries.
What this proves is that if we really feel responsible towards history
and society, then the fundamental paradigmata of our era, the methods
on which they rely, the works they have brought about, the correlated
concept of science and especially its application have to be exposed
to a radical auto-criticism."
The auto-criticism Öcalan demands does not involve a departure
from human utopiae of liberation, but rather a reflection on the
mental and social presuppositions that shaped them, and on the means
applicable to realise them. He does not ask whether or not emancipatory
projects can be realisable, but rather how realistic the tools hitherto
applied for their realisation have been. As for the apparatus of
the state, the PKK leader says: "I will never make my peace
with the tool of the state as opposed to human beings and society
(as the classical tool of class rule)... I will not fall into the
trap of real socialism. To crush the state by means of a counter
power and erect a new one in its place is self-deception. What I
shall focus on is how to administer society by means of civil units
relying on the overall co-ordination and technical organisation
of society without resort to physical and armed force."
Pelþin Torhildan, a spokeswoman for the Free Women's Party
(PJA), an autonomous politico-military party founded by Kurdish
women educated within the context of their participation in the
struggle of the PKK, says in a comment on Abdullah Öcalan's
theses: "The state is a model the character of which is tainted
by male predominance... Under given circumstances, the state is
an apparatus that condems the woman more than anyone else to slavery,
unleashes unequal, repressive and exploitative violence on her more
than on anyone else... There is no aspect to it whatsoever in which
the woman could find herself, that would allow her to express and
realise herself. The state in itself is a tool that has created
and continues to create that reality which confronts us in the form
of traditional society. In this sense, traditional society and the
state are two institutions in which there is objectively no place
for women. For this reason and from the point of view of the historical
reality of woman it is more conducive to her situation to find herself
in the third sphere, and considering the quest for the freedom of
women developing in the century we have just entered, practical
activities correspond to this view...
"... The latest political developments [following 11 September]
have once more proven the necessity and urgency of organisation
in the third sphere. We are of the opinion that the theory of the
third sphere is the theory of the self-realisation of woman, and
that the third sphere can be called the sphere of her own will,
power and liberation...
"... The Women's Freedom Party PJA is the strongest proof
that it is possible to achieve this. Today, the best-organised force
contesting for ambitious leadership in the democratisation of society,
of the Middle East, is the Kurdish woman and her party, the PJA.
As a movement that has originated from the Middle East and draws
its power from the accumulated historical values of the Middle East,
the PJA has as one of its fundamental ideological approaches the
objective to share its freedom struggle and the beauties it will
create with all the women of the Middle East - Arabic, Persian,
Armenian, Turkish, Syriac and all others. Its basis is scientific
and legitimate, and it can only be strengthened and grow towards
creating the best possible future by the collective efforts of all
women of the Middle East. Expectations and hopes are higher than
ever...
"... In this sense, the new idelogical identity that is to
be created is bound to be a female identity, since the precondition
of a democratisation of the Middle East, of creating a new civilisatory
development, is to renew its idelogical identity, is to succeed
in rendering itself an alternative...
"...To create an ideology on [the Middle East's] its own powerful
historical grounds is the essence of a radical solution to its problems.
The Mother Goddess culture in Middle Eastern history represents
the ideology of that age and constitutes such powerful grounds.
It draws its power from the values it has bestowed on humanity,
from its love for freedom and its understanding of justice. In forming
the new ideological identity of woman it is indispensable to rely
on these historical cultural values and indulge in their colours.
So whether it's economy, politics, law, culture and the arts, society,
family, environment - whatever has to do with life, woman must reflect
her own colours in it by means of alternative projects she has to
set up. She can do so by arriving at a practise of organising civil
society appropriate to the reality of the Middle East, because civil
society means the formation of individuals and a society who claim
their rights and act according to their own will. In order to achieve
the transformation of society and an incarnation of democracy in
society woman has to engage in such organising and continually strengthen
it."
Ms Torhildan's comments read like an answer to Abdullah Öcalan's
reflections on Kurdish society in his ECHR submissions in which
he expressed his respect for the newly founded PJA as "an historical
step towards their [Kurdish women's] determining their own destiny
and a main vehicle for the exposure and solution of contradictions",
but advised them as to the importance of founding their ideological,
programmatic and practical line on an "analysis of all the
historical and contemporary dimensions of the gender issue in the
light of a scientific outlook" giving the historic-social content
of Middle Eastern mythology, religion and philosophy its right.
Pelþin Torhildan acknowledges that the PJA owed to Abdullah
Öcalan "a method of education that aims at developing
in women the ability to love and trust their own bodies, use their
own minds and organise their thoughts, liberate their souls from
meaningless concerns, fears, taboos and fake loves of thousands
of years, thus furthering their emancipation", but adds that
"the process of setting up a women's army, for example, was
at the same time for us an educative process far stronger, more
efficient and transformative than any social environment, any school,
any teacher could ever be." For her, "a woman who attains
the value and beauty she deserves will be tantamount to a soaring,
democratised Middle East solving its problems in peace."
On looking back at his political life prior to his abduction, Abdullah
Öcalan reflects that the movement's activities concerning "the
freedom of woman were ... the most difficult ones, but as far as
I am concerned, they deserve priority over any activities for the
liberation of the homeland and of labour. Woman was the first and
most radically oppressed class, nation and gender of reactionism
and slavery. Superficially, it looks as though the difference between
the sexes was turned into a justification for inequality and suppression.
But a deeper examination of history shows that women were the very
first victims of social and political dominance of all... It was
after woman was enslaved and turned into a loyal and tamed domestic
object (not a subject) that the time had come to create class society
and the state."
Thus, the unity between historical analysis and day to day political
work is always preserved in the theory of Öcalan and indeed
in that of the Free Women's Party inspired by his achievements.
In the second volume of the work, the concrete situation of the
Kurds is discussed in detail and practical proposals for a solution
are developed in the context of an analysis of the mechanism by
which imperialism subjugates the Kurds as the 'divided and ruled'
by means of continuous conspiracies. Thus, the analysis of each
tragedy in the long history of the Kurds lays bare a chance for
liberation in revolutionary action: "Longing for history, recovering
what history has obliterated, doing what could not be done in history;
this is what has left its imprint on our actions", Öcalan
once said when he was still free. The part European human rights
law can play in the process of solving the Kurdish question is critically
examined: "It won't even be possible to see reality in its
totality if we choose to inter ourselves in the reality of Turkey
or indeed the Middle East. It is of crucial importance to look for
the root cause of the problem as well as for its solution in European
civilisation." A further chapter deals with Öcalan's personal
life in the context of the development of his organisation from
its beginnings as a student group around 1973 to its development
as an international movement expressing the identity of a people.
While the first volume of the book offers a highly theoretical analysis,
the second volume is full of practical proposals for Kurdish politics.
Öcalan makes clear, though, that these are only proposals and
that he does not approve of the Kurdish movement's focusing its
politics on his person and his situation.
THE PRESENT
The attacks of 11 September, 2001, came just as the submissions
to the ECHR were drafted and prepared for submission. At this point,
instead of a "synthesis of civilisations" and a process
of democratisation and reconciliation, the 'clash of civilisations',
the 'crusade against Islam' and the 'war against terrorism' became
priority number one on the agenda. The PKK unequivocally condemned
the cruel attacks on civilians and invited the USA to reconsider
its Middle Eastern policy in response to the sitation. In a statement
given to a German national newspaper, Duran Kalkan, one of the party's
leaders, called for international initiatives to curtail both violent
Islamist extremism and US aggression and help to establish democracy
and peace in the Middle East. Mr Kalkan emphasised the fact that
Israeli state terrorism and the indiscriminate attacks on civilians
by fanatical Palestinian organisations had mutually interacted in
escalating violence and destruction to a degree of rage, hatred
and nationalism that posed a severe threat to humanity. The statement
was never published. Instead, the European Union discussed whether
assets of the organisation should be frozen in the course of the
'war on terrorism'. Much like the Israeli spokesman who reportedly
said to 'The Economist' magazine that the attacks of 11 September
had been the best public-relations gimmick in favour of Israel over
the last decade, Turkey immediately demanded that the Kurds not
be spared from the Western campaign under article 5 of the NATO
constitution and did not fail to point out that all human rights
violations it had been mildly reproached for in the past could now
be regarded as retrospectively legitimised.
Even before the bombing of Afghanistan commenced, PKK officials
had warned that 'Afghanistan is only a rehearsal and the real war
will be on Iraq'. Although the downfall of the Iraqi regime might
bring along some kind of status for the Kurds, Kurdish organisations
were encouraged to withstand American efforts at instrumentalisation,
and the international community at large was called upon to stop
the war-drive and oppose any initiatives to the effect of establishing
complete American hegemony on the belt from Pakistan to Lebanon.
Only a free association of Middle Eastern countries could eradicate
the root cause of the problems that had led to the attacks of 11
September. Turkey, in turn, has been seen whining about the prospect
of a Kurdish administrative entity in Northern Iraq that might be
established in connection with the intervention while reiterating
its full support for the 'war against terrorism'. By January 2002,
the entire political and financial leadership of Turkey made their
way to the USA to secure further credits for the economy. From previous
statements of Turkish leaders, it can be assumed that the Turkish
delegation also tabled demands for American backing for a crack-down
on the PKK's forces in Northern Iraq. Ecevit exclaimed that "Turkey
will be involved in the operation whether it likes it or not. What
will happen to the stock exchange, only God knows." According
to media coverage, both parties were extremely pleased with the
outcome of the talks. However, journalists have suggested that it
was unlikely that the US would be inclined to adapt its own concept
to Turkish wishes.
Analysts assume that the PKK has sufficient military power to defend
themselves in the case of an armed attack on their bases in Northern
Iraq, and the organisation stated that they were prepared for any
eventualities but would adhere to their principle of active self-defence.
In the face of the imminent Iraq intervention, Turkish security
forces have thought it fit to work hard towards a relapse to the
'93 concept'. In October, 2001, in a move to satisfy European demands,
parliament passed amendments on 34 articles of the constitution
drafted in the aftermath of the military coup of 1980, one of them
limiting the maximum duration of police custody to 4 days in accordance
with European standards. However, the Intelligence Department of
the Gendarmarie immediately started to apply a dubious by-law according
to which police custody could be extended for successive periods
of 10 days each in situations related to the 'state of emergency'
and has so far kept 12 individuals in the Eastern provinces for
up to 44 days of interrogation under heavy and permanent physical
torture. A State Security Court in Diyarbakir ruled that this decree
was overriding the constitutional provision. Arbitrary arrests of
Kurdish political activists have been on the increase since September.
The Kurdish people have, once again, stirred to demand their civil
rights. Kurdish women started wearing traditional dresses in the
streets and speaking Kurdish in public. When university students
launched a campaign demanding optional Kurdish lessons in universities
by means of lodging individual petitions with their respective headmasters,
more than 10,000 students followed their example, supported by large
numbers of Turkish students as well as students of other linguistic
and ethnic backgrounds. Hundreds of parents of school students have
so far responded by handing in similar petitions to the Directorate
for Education in their residential areas. But the ancien regime
has shown that, irrespective of the recent constitutional amendment
that abolished the term 'prohibited languages' and now allows the
use of and broadcast in Kurdish, it is terribly afraid of a civil
rights movement, especially if spearheaded by Kurds. The students'
petitions are incriminated on grounds of being instrumental to the
PKK's efforts to establish itself as a political organisation. State
Prosecutors were briefed by the Ministry of the Interior in January,
2002, to bring charges of 'membership in a terrorist organisation'
punishable with 12 years imprisonment against any students or parents
who lodge petitions demanding optional Kurdish lessons. By 23 January
2002, a total of 85 students and more than 30 parents have been
imprisoned and over 1,000 people (among them some juveniles) detained
for having demanded optional first language education in Kurdish.
HADEP has been granted a period of 30 days to submit its final defence
in a trial on its closure, pending since 1998. Whether or not HADEP
will ultimately be banned, the Prosecution has made clear that they
want to do away with the given situation of incertainty. An American
author's book on American Interventionism is incriminated on grounds
that it states that thousands of Kurdish villages were forcefully
evacuated and destroyed in the course of military campaigns - a
fact that has been acknowledged even by the Commission on Migration
of the Turkish Grand National Assembly itself. Could it be that,
according to the reasoning of the Turkish authorities, well-known
facts must be stated only by those who refrain from approaching
them critically - a reasoning well in accordance with the tradition
of political power to crush any oppositional, civil initiative just
because it is oppositional and civil and irrespective of its content?
Could it be that since Aram Publications is a publishing house working
against the mainstream and thus reaching a grass-roots audience
more likely to be inspired by and espouse the critical views expressed
in such alternative works, the powers that be are attempting to
quelch the energy that might arise from the internalisation of critical
thought by those who have already borne the brunt of the system
criticised? And might one of the reasons for the authorities' incrimination
of this particular book be the said book's critique of the American
support that made such horrendous offences against the Kurds possible?
The psychological sustenance that a people, whose plight has not
only been ignored but at least to some extent caused by the USA,
can draw from an American intellectual's critique of such policy
must not be underestimated. Whatever the real reason may be, the
book's publisher in Turkey must stand trial on grounds of contempt
of the armed forces and faces up to 6 years imprisonment.
On 14 January, 2002, the Turkish Security Forces issued a statement
posing the PKK an 'ultimatum' to prove the sincerity of its intention
'not to split Turkey'. The statement says that any initiatives taken
with regard to the right to have optional Kurdish lessons in school
or university were orchestrated by 'the terrorist organisation PKK'
and were, far from being 'an innocent claim for cultural rights',
part and parcel of 'the plan to split Turkey'. Once one claimed
that Kurds should have the right to education in Kurdish 'just because
they are Kurds', the statement continues, the reasoning that 'Kurds
should learn Kurdish history and geography on every level of their
educational careers, that Kurdish businessmen should associate or
a Kurdish Bar Association should be established' cannot be far away.
This then, it goes without saying, would create division and separation
that would 'reflect upon society'. That would amount to terrorism.
What, then, should the Kurds do to prove that they do not harbour
the intention to rip off the chunks of land east of the Taurus mountains?
All Kurdish 'organisations operating abroad have to ommit the word
Kurdistan from their names'; the news broadcast on the satellite
channel Medya TV from Belgian exile has to 'refrain from referring
to our [the security forces'] Southeast and East Anatolian areas
as 'the Kurdish provinces' in items broadcast in Turkish and the
two dialects of Kurdish'; the same TV channel has to stop 'showing
exclusively the meterological situation of our above mentioned areas
in its weather forecast'; the 'Kurdish National Congress has to
be disbanded'; projects as devious as 'an institute of Kurdish philology,
... a Kurdish encyclopaedia and a Kurdish economic congress have
to be abandoned'; and finally, 'no support should be given to Armenian
and Syriac groups campaigning against Turkey on an international
level, and all members of the terrorist organisation have to lay
down their arms and surrender to the security forces'. Anything
short of that is, the tone of the statement implies, a casus belli.
A week later, the PKK leadership replied to this 'ultimatum' by
remarking that the word Kurdistan was a geographical term that did
not refer to a politically separate country and called upon Kurds
to make use of their constitutional right to seek remedies against
the miscarriages of justice in connection with the petitions, adding
that even if one was to assume that the statement represented some
kind of an attempt to commence a dialogue, it was a rather backward
one: Turkish officials should have become aware by now that the
Kurdish question is too serious to be dealt with in such ludicruous
terms. Nevertheless, the organisation was prepared to consider Turkish
calls in case the government, in turn, fulfilled Kurdish demands:
"... Firstly, the conditions under which the Kurds live have
to be ameliorated. Steps towards their freedom have to be taken.
Secondly, if the government wants the guerilla forces to lay down
their arms, it has to declare a general amnesty. No one would want
to be imprisoned and tortured - certainly not our guerilla fighters
who are conscious, determined and well trained..."
So the question remains: Is it really necessary to settle for a
new war, or is it enough to shout out aloud that the emperor is
naked?
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