by Meredith Tax
Once he had a free hand, Mullah Mustafa reasserted the old KDP demand for autonomy and started another war with Baghdad in 1965. That ended when President Arif was killed in a helicopter accident in 1966. A struggle for power between the military and civilians broke out in the capital, a drama cut short in July 1968 by yet another Baath Party coup, this one led by Ahmed Hassan al-Bakr, who became President. Saddam Hussein began his rise to power as al-Bakr’s deputy; he was also the head of security and the man in charge of the Revolutionary Command Council, the leading body of the Baath Party.
The Kurds still wanted autonomy. The Baathists did not want to give it to them but they also wanted to avoid another war in Kurdistan while they consolidated power. They were willing to grant Barzani some of what he wanted, even agree to allow the Kurdish language to be taught in schools throughout Iraq. But they would not relinquish control of Kirkuk and its oil.13
Saddam’s project was to make the Baath Party secure and the country stable: This depended on oil. In 1972, he nationalized Iraq’s oil industry, which meant the profits from then on flowed to the state rather than to British and US oil companies. He also signed a fifteen-year friendship agreement with the Soviet Union. In the Cold War context, these moves were a repudiation of the West.
In 1973, a world energy crisis sent oil prices sky-high. With Iraq’s oil income, Saddam was able to set up the strongest welfare state in the region, with compulsory free education, free hospital care, land reform, and farm subsidies. He created an impressive security apparatus with help provided by the Soviet Union and East Germany. In a 2000 interview, Palestinian journalist Said Aburish described this as the basis of Saddam’s hold on power: “Saddam Hussein borrowed from Stalinism. He had his security people trained in Eastern Europe, particularly East Germany. Then he brought them back to Iraq and he taught them how to use the tribal linkage to eliminate people. So whereas they used Stalinist methods to discover people who were opposed to the regime, after that came the tribal factor, when Saddam said ‘Don’t get rid of Abdullah, get rid of his whole family, because one member of his family might assassinate us.’ And that made it a perfect system for Iraq. . . . Family and tribal connections are supreme. They come ahead of ideology. They come ahead of commitment to the nation-state, they come ahead of all commitments. Saddam Hussein realizes that. This is why, at a certain point, he transferred power from the Ba’ath Party, which put him in power, to his family, because he decided that the family can be trusted, but the party cannot be trusted.”14
Mullah Mustafa also understood tribal politics and he too was building a secret police force, the Parastin, trained by the Shah’s dreaded SAVAK. Determined to permanently sideline the KDP Left, Mullah Mustafa not only sought aid from the Shah, but also turned to the US and Israel, a pariah state in the Arab world since the Six-Day War of 1967. To the Baath Party, these alliances were enough to make him look like a traitor. The alliance with the US and Israel also infuriated left-wing members of the KDP, but anyone who protested was expelled.15
Mullah Mustafa trusted the West. In July 1972, his representatives met with Richard Helms, head of the CIA, and Alexander Haig, Under-Secretary of State for Henry Kissinger, who said they were willing to give him military aid at the request of the Shah. On the CIA’s recommendation, the Nixon administration funded the KDP peshmerga. With additional funds contributed by Israel and Iran, the military aid package came to $18 million.16
Mullah Mustafa told the Washington Post in June 1973, “We are ready to act according to US policy, if the US will protect us from the wolves. In the event of sufficient support we should be able to control the Kirkuk oilfields and confer exploitation rights on an American company.”17
This was not the smartest thing to say to an international newspaper. Saddam responded by bombing Kurdish positions. He had been biding his time while secretly negotiating with the Shah, who was willing to dump the Kurds in exchange for the Shatt al Arab, a disputed waterway between Iran and Iraq leading into the Persian Gulf. In early 1974, Saddam offered Mullah Mustafa a new autonomy law, which gave him much of what he had been asking for, though not Kirkuk. Mullah Mustafa not only rejected the law but sent his secret police to arrest and murder Kurdish members of the Iraqi Communist Party, allies of the Baath. Left-wing members of the KDP, including his oldest son, were so outraged that they left the KDP to join a “national front” with Saddam.
War between the KDP and the central government in Baghdad broke out in spring 1974. Mullah Mustafa was confident of victory; he had military aid, 50,000 regular troops and 50,000 more irregulars, support from Iran, and a distinguished record of defeating Baghdad. But the Iraqi Army had heavy weapons, almost the same number of troops as the Kurds, and more professional leadership than in the past. By the fall they had moved into Iraqi Kurdistan, captured substantial territory, and were threatening the KDP supply route from Iran—and this time they didn’t go home for the winter as they always had before.
By early 1975, it was clear that the Kurds faced defeat unless they got more help from Iran. At that point Saddam said he would give Iran the disputed Shatt al Arab waterway if Iran would stop helping the Kurds and seal the border. In March 1975, he and the Shah signed an agreement; within hours, Iran withdrew its forces and Iraq cut the KDP supply lines.18
The KDP peshmerga could only flee or surrender. About 100,000 refugees, including Mullah Mustafa and his family, managed to cross the border into Iran before it was closed, but had no food or supplies. When they pleaded for refugee assistance from the US, Secretary of State Henry Kissinger ruled that they were not eligible, and when the Senate’s Pike Committee questioned Kissinger about US responsibility for creating hundreds of thousands of Kurdish refugees, he said, “Covert action should not be confused with missionary work.”19
The war of 1974–1975 was a disaster for the Iraqi Kurds. Saddam created a “security belt” along the Iranian and Turkish borders, which involved razing as many as 1,400 Kurdish villages. The inhabitants of these villages, at least 600,000 people, were deported to internment camps elsewhere in the country, and Arabs were resettled in their place.20 Completely disgusted with Mullah Mustafa’s leadership, the Left wing of the KDP formed a new party, the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK), led by Jalal Talabani, who was still at its head in 2016.
Mullah Mustafa Barzani died in a US hospital in 1979. But his son Masoud, who had spent most of his life at war, was ready to carry on the Barzani tradition of tribal patronage, war, and an often-betrayed love affair with the US.
Turkey: Implacable Kemalism 1924–1980
Unlike the Iraqi carrot and stick, Turkish policy towards the Kurds was shaped by what historians call “implacable Kemalism,” named after Kemal Ataturk. Although Ataturk introduced progressive policies in some areas, particularly women’s rights, his idea of complete cultural uniformity allowed for no minority deviations. Since at least a quarter of the Turkish population is made up of ethnic or religious minorities, this was a major problem.21 One of Ataturk’s first acts was to make it illegal to use any language but Turkish. Other rules enforced secularism, abolished religious schools, and forbade any discussion of religion in public life. These methods of cultural suppression were supposed to unite the Turkish people.
But religious schools were practically the only schools that existed in the country’s southeast. Despite the fact that Kurds make up perhaps 20 percent of Turkey’s population, there were only 215 government schools in the Kurdish region, out of 4,873 in the whole country. Very few people in southeastern Turkey spoke anything but Kurdish. By neglecting public schools and forbidding religious ones, Kemalist policy kept southeastern Turkey in a perpetual state of underdevelopment and illiteracy.22
The new rules prompted two Kurdish revolts, one by a nationalist group called Azadi, another led by a religious leader, Shaikh Said. Neither had much support, but they gave the government an excuse to declare a state of emergency that lasted two years and involved human rights violations that were to
become routine in Turkey’s treatment of the Kurds: deportation of vast numbers of people to other parts of the country; destruction of their villages; widespread rape, brutality, and murder; massive press censorship; and martial law.
Turkey wanted nothing less than the total obliteration of Kurdish culture. No one was even allowed to acknowledge the existence of a people called the Kurds; they were supposed to be called “mountain Turks.” Their language was illegal, their publications were illegal, even celebrations of their traditional spring holiday, Newroz, were illegal. The Turkish army’s main function was control of Kurdistan. With the exception of the Korean War and the 1974 invasion of Cyprus, the military fought all its battles in southeastern Turkey.
All this was excused by fairly naked racism. A shocked British diplomat wrote home in 1927 to relay the Turkish foreign minister’s prescription for the Kurds: “their cultural level is so low, their mentality so backward, that they cannot be simply in the general Turkish body politic. . . . they will die out, economically unfitted for the struggle for life in competition with the more advanced and cultured Turks. . . . as many as can will emigrate into Persia and Iraq, while the rest will simply undergo the elimination of the unfit.”23
In 1934, Turkey passed what was known as the “Resettlement Law,” which divided the country into three zones: Turkish zones, zones where minorities with “non-Turkish culture” were to be moved for the purpose of assimilation, and zones that were to be completely evacuated. All the property in the evacuated zones was to be confiscated. As described by David McDowall, the law “was intended to disperse the Kurdish population, to areas where it would constitute no more than 5 percent of the population, thus extinguishing Kurdish identity. It was even proposed that village children should be sent to boarding establishments where they would be obliged to speak only in Turkish and thus lose their Kurdish identity entirely.”24
McDowall compared the Resettlement Law to social engineering policies then current among the Nazis, but comparisons with the history of indigenous people in Canada, the United States, New Zealand, and Australia also come to mind.
The Resettlement Law was never enforced in more than piecemeal fashion because there were simply too many Kurds to resettle. But it was enforced in Dersim, an area in Eastern Turkey noted for uprisings even under the Ottomans, where the people were predominantly Alevi. Dersim was given a new Turkish name, Tunceli, made into a vilayet, or official government province, and placed under military rule.
In 1937, Dersim rebelled. The government invaded the province with thousands of soldiers, who proceeded to raze villages and attack their inhabitants with bombs, gas, and artillery. When the people of Dersim sent emissaries to Ankara, their emissaries were killed; when they fought, they were exterminated; and when they appealed to British Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden, they were stonewalled.
In 1938, a junior diplomat wrote Sir Percy Lorraine, the British ambassador to Turkey, that the military was doing to the Kurds what they had done to the Armenians in World War I: “Thousands of Kurds including women and children were slain; others, mostly children, were thrown into the Euphrates, while thousands of others in less hostile areas, who had first been deprived of their cattle and other belongings, were deported to vilayets in Central Anatolia.” But Sir Percy Lorraine was a personal friend of Ataturk’s and did not believe these rumors.25
Once the lands of Dersim were empty of Kurds, ethnic Turks were settled there.
Villagers who survived the massacres drifted towards the cities, where they were gradually joined by economic migrants. In the fifties, as in Iraq, mechanization made the old sharecropping system unsustainable and hundreds of thousands more landless Kurds came to the cities, first to those in the southeast, then to centers of population in Western Turkey. There they became a new urban proletariat, as described by sociologist Erdem Yoruk: “Internally displaced Kurds who left villages that had been destroyed by the army or an economy generally ruined by war were desperate, and willing to do even the worst jobs, without social security or job security, often on a temporary basis, in what came to be known as the informal sector. These people swelled into the big cities, which were on every level—in terms of housing, infrastructure, health—barely able to accommodate them, and everything in their daily lives became a matter of makeshift solutions and negotiation.”26
The first wave of openly nationalist politics among Turkish Kurds developed in these urban ghettos after the adoption of a more liberal constitution in 1961. The constitution contained no mention of Kurds, but it did allow for the formation of a legal socialist party, the Turkish Workers’ Party. Unlike right-wing parties, the TWP had Kurdish members, who eventually convinced other party members to take up the “Kurdish question.”
In 1967, radical students and young workers began to organize in groups loosely affiliated with an umbrella organization, the Federation of Revolutionary Youth. Some of these left-wing students were Kurds, who began to shape Kurdish nationalism in Turkey into something resembling other left-wing national liberation movements of the period. In 1969, they formed a network of cultural clubs called Revolutionary Eastern Cultural Hearths (DDKO), with centers in the southeastern cities of Diyarkabir, Ergani, Silvan, Kozluk, and Batman. These clubs also organized Kurdish language educational programs in the countryside.
Any attempt to use the Kurdish language awakened Kemalist paranoia and in October 1970, DDKO was closed down by the military. Commandos were stationed in the southeast to watch for signs of separatism and a number of DDKO activists were arrested, among them Abdullah Ocalan, a kid from the country in his early twenties who was picked up at a protest demonstration in Ankara. He spent seven months in jail, where he met other students more sophisticated than he, and did a lot of listening.27
Radical student fervor was also high in western Turkey; in fact, there was so much unrest among left-wing students that the military became nervous and, in 1971, staged another coup. The Turkish Workers Party was declared illegal; martial law was imposed on university towns; and thousands were arrested in Kurdistan. The government accused Mullah Mustafa, across the border in Iraq, of trying to foment rebellion among Turkish Kurds, and began another reign of terror in the countryside.
After two years of repression, the military loosened the reins again in 1973 and permitted a civilian election. The new president, Bulent Ecevit, amnestied most of the students who had been in jail and they immediately started organizing again. Islamist student associations also formed, and right-wing students created a fascist group, the Gray Wolves, who wanted to exterminate everyone not of Turkish blood. Left- and right-wing student factions fought each other in the streets of university towns.
During this period, Abdullah Ocalan and six friends formed a group to study Marxism-Leninism. Such study circles were forming everywhere in the seventies, when the international distribution of radical literature exploded with the works of Frantz Fanon, Fidel Castro, Che Guevera, and Mao Zedong, among others. In China’s economic mixture of feudalism, local capitalism, and imperialism, Ocalan’s study circle found much that resembled Turkey. They also studied Fanon and Castro, and agreed that the only hope for systemic change lay in revolutionary violence and people’s war.
In this they resembled other student groups of the period, such as India’s Naxalite movement, the Peruvian groups Tupac Amaru and Sendero Luminoso, and Sri Lanka’s LTTI or Tamil Tigers. These groups were to take different paths in years to come. Some, like the PKK, the Indian Naxalites, and, later, Nepal’s Maoists, developed strategies beyond armed struggle and began to build mass organizations and do electoral work. Others, like the LTTI and Sendero Luminoso, became gangs of killers preying on a terrified population. Within the international Left, these two models of revolutionary strategy—an exclusive emphasis on armed struggle and terror, leading to “the dictatorship of the proletariat,” versus a more flexible view of strategy that included armed struggle but also popular education, civil resistance, and electoral work—conti
nued to compete throughout the nineties.
Ocalan’s study group decided there was no point in trying to form a legal organization or even thinking about publishing in Kurdish; they would only be arrested. Instead, the group, which had grown to fifteen members, decided the main task was to send cadres to the countryside to work directly with the peasants, one on one. By now the study group was calling itself the “Kurdistan Revolutionaries.”
Most of the radical Kurdish students in Turkey looked up to the more advanced movement in Iraq, which had already begun armed struggle. They were very disappointed when Mullah Mustafa had to flee the country in 1975. In speeches and meetings with other Kurdish groups in Ankara, Ocalan analyzed the failure of Mullah Mustafa, arguing that he had been defeated because he wasn’t radical enough. His mistake, according to Ocalan, was that he had sought autonomy rather than an independent Kurdish nation, and, instead of siding with the workers and peasants, had stood with the big landlords and depended on support from the Shah and the US.28
Ocalan’s group had to fight for their analysis. Marxist-Leninist politics in the seventies was nothing if not sectarian, and, like other student groups around the world, the Kurdistan Revolutionaries concentrated most of their energy upon their immediate rivals—other student Leftists. But the Kurdistan Revolutionaries were a little different from most groups, according to sociologist Joost Jongerden, because they “did not consider any of the ‘really-existing socialist’ countries to be a guiding light—not China, not Cuba, not Albania, nor the Soviet Union. . . . [They] observed that the reality in the countries where national liberation movements, or ‘really-existing socialism’, took hold was very different from the promises for which people had fought.”29
By the spring of 1977, the Kurdistan Revolutionaries had recruited two to three hundred cadre and were ready to go public. By all accounts a compelling if lengthy speaker, Ocalan embarked on a six-week tour of country villages and towns to introduce core supporters to the group’s basic program, which held that Kurdistan was an internal colony of Turkey, oppressed by both imperialism and the local capitalist class, and the solution was armed struggle leading to an independent socialist nation. Anybody who disagreed was an enemy—right-wing nationalists were wrong because they did not want to overthrow capitalism; Turkish socialists and communists were wrong because they did not recognize the national liberation struggle of the Kurds; and other Kurdish Leftists were wrong because they had a different political line.