A Road Unforeseen

by Meredith Tax

  The Kurdistan Revolutionaries were determined to clear the field of rival groups who might mislead the people, not only by ideological struggle but by fighting with fists or guns over who had the right to hang out in a specific coffeehouse or patrol certain streets.30 This “revolutionary violence” was part of the spirit of the times. Everyone admired the way the Vietnamese were battling the US military, and one of Mao Zedong’s most quoted proverbs was “Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.” In the international Left, where Frantz Fanon and Sartre’s introduction to Fanon’s book The Wretched of the Earth were extremely influential, the cleansing effect of violence was almost a truism. In Turkey this tendency was surely magnified by the violence visited by the state upon the Kurds, making it virtually impossible for them to do anything except fight back.

  Ocalan’s group decided their first targets—beyond other Leftist groups—should be the big Kurdish landlords whom they called the comprador bourgeoisie, a Marxist term meaning a native elite that acts on behalf of foreign imperialists and gets its position and money from them. Economic relations in the Kurdish countryside were certainly highly exploitative. In 1983, Le Monde described a cotton-growing village in Mardin Province where the agha was an absentee landlord: All the peasants except those who were too old or young worked eleven hours a day in the cotton fields for a daily wage that was the equivalent of $1 per child, $1.50 per woman, and $2 per man. Children in the area had a thirty percent mortality rate.31

  In November 1978, the study group became a political party, the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK). The PKK’s first public action was a killing to avenge the murder of one of its cadre by conservatives. Battles between the PKK and conservative Kurds raged until the spring of 1979, when the Turkish government started arresting party activists.

  That July, the PKK made a failed attempt to assassinate Mehmet Celal Bucak, a prominent conservative politician and landlord who owned thousands of hectares of land and collected the votes of more than 20 villages. Bucak was an aggressive anticommunist who bragged that he had a blacklist of Leftists who were to be killed, making him an ideal target. And attacking a man whom Mullah Mustafa would have considered a comrade enabled the PKK to show how different it was from the bourgeois nationalists of Iraq’s KDP. With its attack on Bucak, it began to win the support of peasants who had never had anybody to defend them before.32

  By that time, there were so many signs that another Turkish military coup was coming that Ocalan fled the country for Syria. He was to remain there for the next eighteen years. His plan was to make contact with Palestinian revolutionary groups in Syria and ask them for military training. After six months of trying, he was introduced to leaders of the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine (DFLP) in Beirut and succeeded in convincing them to train a small number of PKK members in guerrilla warfare; they had already done this with fighters from Iran, Nicaragua, and Greece. In the summer of 1980, the likelihood of a military coup in Turkey was so great that Ocalan told his people to get out of the country and join him as soon as possible.

  That year, the first group of about forty to fifty PKK fighters began to train at various camps in Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley, which was controlled by Syria. In addition to the DFLP, Ocalan organized training arrangements with other Palestinian factions and the Lebanese Communist Party.33

  While PKK members trained for armed struggle, other Kurdish activists sought ways to bring about democratic change through civic resistance and political organizing—legal in most democracies, but off limits for Turkish Kurds. One of the most prominent leaders to emerge from the struggle for democracy was Leyla Zana, who was born in 1961 in the village of Silvan in Diyarbakir Province. Her father, who worked for the local water authority, was a man of very traditional views, and the family was poor, with five daughters and only one son. In a 1991 interview, Zana described her family environment: “Everywhere in the world women are ill-treated by men but amongst the Kurds it is especially bad. A woman is not even treated as a servant, she is a thing, almost an animal. At home, for example, my father slept from the morning through to the evening when he would wake, eat, and go out to see his friends to chat with them. Meanwhile, my mother spent the whole day working, taking care of the animals. When she returned home in the evening to prepare food and take care of the family he would regularly beat her. He believed she should do everything he wanted, just like a slave.

  “For the first 12 years of their married life my mother did not bear children. Then she had four daughters, in quick succession. Nobody talked to her, especially my father’s family. If one of my little sisters would awake and cry in the night and disturb my father, he would take my mother and the child and throw them outside, whatever the weather. She would stay there until she felt he was asleep and it was safe to creep back inside. For a Kurd the birth of a girl is nothing.”34

  Her father didn’t believe in female education and pulled Leyla out of school after a year and a half, but this only made her more rebellious about the way women were treated; she even refused to wear a headscarf as was normal in the Kurdish countryside. “I have never accepted the idea that I should be a slave, be passive. When I was only nine-years-old I attacked my 45 year-old uncle for beating my aunt. I have always been a combatant.”35

  In 1975, when she was fifteen, her father married her off to the thirty-five-year-old son of a cousin. Mehdi Zana was a tailor and communist activist who had just spent three years in prison, but this did not seem to have bothered her father. She did not want to get married, especially to someone she didn’t know who was so much older, but she couldn’t do anything about it. A year after she was married, Leyla Zana gave birth to a son. The next year, Mehdi was elected mayor of Diyarbakir. Though he was a man of the Left, he did nothing to educate his wife politically.

  “Until 1980,” she said, referring to the military coup that year, “the politicians of Mehdi’s generation did not mix their family life with their political life; afterwards that changed.” She was one of the people who changed it, but that didn’t happen right away. During the first years of her marriage she was submissive, unhappy, and confused. “When I married Mehdi I was full of contradictions; until then I had no say in choosing my own life, somebody else had done the choosing for me. For the next five years it was the same, it was still not my own life, it was controlled by Mehdi. I was somebody to please Mehdi. I was not brave enough to scream and shout, the age difference was too big. But inside myself I was screaming and shouting as I have always been.”36

  During those years, the political climate in Turkey degenerated and the country became increasingly unstable. There was a severe economic depression, with inflation at 90 percent. Armed left- and right-wing Turkish students fought on campus and in the streets. The fascists of the Gray Wolves organized pogroms against minority groups. When the long-predicted military coup finally came about in September 1980, Parliament was abolished and martial law imposed throughout the country. Along with many other Kurdish politicians, Mehdi Zana was arrested. He was sentenced to thirty years in prison.

  Leyla Zana was by then pregnant with her second child, a daughter. Twenty years old, with no education and no way to support herself and her children, she did nothing but cry for the first year. She gradually grew more politically conscious, starting with the issue of torture. “I had known it was going on since 1979 but when Mehdi was imprisoned they began to torture him and his friends, I saw it as a personal thing then. I began reading political books. . . . I didn’t understand all the words. For six months I was not allowed to see Mehdi, during this time they were torturing him and beating him. Every week I would go to the prison to see him to be told ‘no visit.’ About that time I began reading the books.” She had trouble reading because she knew so little Turkish, but her language skills began to improve when her son started school; she learned Turkish by doing his lessons with him.37

  The government moved Mehdi around from prison to prison: from Diyarbakir to Aydin, from Af
yon to Eskisehir. She and the children moved with him so she could visit, waiting at the prison gates with other women who came to visit their own arrested husbands, brothers, and sons. Some of them were highly politicized.

  “Little by little I began to change,” she said. “To question my own identity and to wonder exactly who I was. Until then I had no interest in the fact that I was a Kurd. The ideal was to be a Turk. The Turks were openly saying ‘the Kurds are bullshit’ or ‘the Kurds have tails’ (like the animals), and we put up with it, it was the official ideology, to be a Kurd was a disgrace.”

  In 1984, having learned Turkish, she decided to try to get a certificate indicating that she had graduated from primary school. She was successful and then went on to get a high school diploma, all without ever having attended any actual school. Soon she began to lead other women at the prison gates in protests and strikes. “I saw oppression. I saw brutality. I had to do something against that injustice,” she said. One protest was sparked when an officer threw an old woman waiting outside the jail to the ground because she was speaking Kurdish, that forbidden language.38

  Before long, Zana became a spokeswoman for the wives and families of political prisoners. Next she helped start a women’s support group that eventually opened offices in Diyarbakir and even Istanbul. She worked for the Diyarbakir office of the Human Rights Association, founded in 1986 by relatives of political prisoners and then moved on to a job on a Kurdish paper, Yeni Ulke, where she was an editor until it was closed down by the government.39

  Mehdi didn’t like what she was doing. “There continued to be conflict between Mehdi and myself. He wanted me to be politically involved, to do things, but for him. He was not happy when I did something for me.” But all this self-education and political activity felt wonderful to a woman who had seen her mother worked to death like a mule. “It was tremendous. I had changed, become different, I had an identity. It was terrific. In 1984 I was able to tell myself, ‘Here I am. I do exist.’”40

  Portrait of Abdullah Ocalan at PKK base in Makhmour, Iraq, captured by Daesh in August 2014, and liberated by the PKK.

  CHAPTER 3

  Insurrection and Genocide

  THE YEAR 1979 WAS A TURNING POINT for both Iran and Iraq. The corrupt and repressive Shah of Iran, who had been propped up by the US, was overthrown by a popular revolution. Islamists, led by the Ayatollah Khomeini, took power, killed, imprisoned, or drove into exile most of the Iranian Left, and imposed a rigid Shia theocracy on the entire population. The new Iranian government also affronted the US when it allowed students to take over the American Embassy in November 1979 and hold the employees hostage. As all this was going on, Iranian Kurds rebelled, but without success.1

  Saddam Hussein vs. the Kurds

  In July of that same year, Saddam Hussein finally seized total power in Iraq, becoming simultaneously Secretary General of the Baath Party, Commander in Chief of the armed forces, and President. To make sure no rivals would arise in the future, he purged anyone who could conceivably challenge him. At the Baath Party Congress that month, he read out the names of 68 men, who were then dragged out to be executed, some on the spot. He congratulated those who remained on their present and future loyalty.2

  Hoping the Iranian revolution would spark a pan-Islamic movement throughout the region, Ayatollah Khomeini called for an Islamic revolution in Iraq, which is majority Shia, while Saddam’s government was largely Sunni. In response, Saddam Hussein invaded Iran in September 1980. He expected a lightning victory, but the war lasted for eight years.

  During the war, the Reagan administration did everything in its power to help Saddam, whom they considered the lesser of two evils. Saddam’s onetime employee Said Aburish recalled, “He got blueprints to help make chemical warfare plans from the United States. Everybody accused the Europeans of that. It was actually an American company and writers in New York would supply him with this [sic] blueprints. The US government knew about it. He got offers for fighter bombers from both the UK and France. For helicopters, for an atomic reactor from France. For suits against atomic, biological, and chemical warfare from the UK.”3

  When the war with Iran began, the Iraqi Kurds were busy fighting each other. The Left wing of Barzani’s KDP had split in 1975 and formed the PUK under Jalal Talabani. The two parties had spent most of their time since skirmishing and trying to assassinate each other’s leaders. The KDP spied on the PUK for Iran, and the PUK spied on the KDP for Saddam.

  Hoping to stave off any more Kurdish attacks, Saddam had beefed up the jash—the Kurdish tribal militias paid by the government. By the summer of 1986, there were three times as many jash as peshmerga. Some people joined the jash because they were forced to, some to avoid being drafted and sent to the front, and some because they had no other income—the war had made farming impossible. Others cooperated to avoid having their villages burned.4

  But years of war with Iran had so weakened Saddam’s forces that the Kurds could again consider rebelling. In February 1987, Barzani and Talabani, having finally agreed to a ceasefire, announced they were forming a Kurdistan National Front and would unite their peshmerga in a joint command. The time seemed right; Saddam’s forces were concentrated on the border with Iran farther south, leaving Kurdistan largely alone.

  According to Middle East Watch, in the course of the war with Iran, “the Iraqi regime’s authority over the North had dwindled to control of the cities, towns, complexes, and main highways. Elsewhere, the peshmerga forces could rely on a deep-rooted base of local support. Seeking refuge from the army, thousands of Kurdish draft-dodgers and deserters found new homes in the countryside. Villagers learned to live with a harsh economic blockade and stringent food rationing, punctuated by artillery shelling, aerial bombardment and punitive forays by the Army and the paramilitary jahsh. In response, the rural Kurds built air-raid shelters in front of their homes and spent much of their time in hiding in the caves and ravines that honeycomb the northern Iraqi countryside. For all the grimness of this existence, by 1987 the mountainous interior of Iraqi Kurdistan was effectively liberated territory. This the Ba’ath Party regarded as an intolerable situation.”5

  The Anfal

  In March 1987, Saddam appointed his cousin, Ali Hasan al Majid, as governor of northern Iraq, giving him absolute powers. Al Majid, later known as “Chemical Ali,” decided on a scorched earth policy: He would empty and destroy the villages that supported the peshmerga, beginning with those in the Balisan valley, where the PUK command was located. He used the chemical bombs whose blueprints he had gotten from the US under Reagan.

  A survivor told Middle East Watch what happened next: “It was all dark, covered with darkness, we could not see anything. . . . It was like fog. And then everyone became blind. Some vomited. Faces turned black; people experienced painful swellings under the arm, and women under their breasts. Later, a yellow watery discharge would ooze from the eyes and nose. Many of those who survived suffered severe vision disturbances, or total blindness for up to a month. . . . Some villagers ran into the mountains and died there. Others who had been closer to the place of impact of the bombs, died where they stood.”6

  Having tested his new weapons, in 1988 Chemical Ali initiated Operation Anfal, a year of total destruction wreaked on Iraqi Kurdistan, during which he used chemical weapons as well as bombs to decimate and depopulate the region and prepare for a ground assault.

  After the war, Middle East Watch did extensive research in the area and published a report formally accusing Saddam’s government of genocide. They compared the actions of the Iraqi government to those of Nazi Germany, saying “the Iraqi regime became the first in history to attack its own civilian population with chemical weapons.” Estimates of the number of civilians killed range from Middle East Watch’s fifty to a hundred thousand to 182,000 by Kurdish count.7 The Middle East Watch report cites gross violations of human rights including:

  •mass summary executions and mass disappearance of many tens of thousands of
non-combatants, including large numbers of women and children, and sometimes the entire population of villages;

  •the widespread use of chemical weapons, including mustard gas and the nerve agent GB, or Sarin, against the town of Halabja as well as dozens of Kurdish villages, killing many thousands of people, mainly women and children;

  •the wholesale destruction of some 2,000 villages, which are described in government documents as having been “burned,” “destroyed,” “demolished” and “purified,” as well as at least a dozen larger towns;

  •the wholesale destruction by Army engineers of schools, mosques, wells and other non-residential structures in the targeted villages, and a number of electricity substations;

  •the looting of civilian property and farm animals on a vast scale by army troops and pro-government militias;

  •the arbitrary arrest of all villagers captured in designated “prohibited areas” despite the fact that these were their own homes and lands;

  •arbitrary jailing and warehousing for months, in conditions of extreme deprivation, of tens of thousands of women, children and elderly people, without judicial order or any cause other than their presumed sympathies for the Kurdish opposition. Many hundreds of them were allowed to die of malnutrition and disease;