by Meredith Tax
Kurdish deputies in the Turkish Parliament were deeply disturbed by the police violence at Newroz and the 1992 acceleration of Turkey’s war with the PKK. When the coalition government voted to support the military and extend the state of emergency in the southeast, fourteen Kurdish deputies left the Social Democratic Party to join Hatip Dicle and Leyla Zana in a HEP caucus.
Such an enlarged caucus was impressive in theory but in real life the Kurdish MPs couldn’t get anything accomplished. They had no allies in Parliament and, whenever they went home to meet with the people they represented, the police harassed them, and their constituents were arrested. On one such trip, a local chief of police told the MPs he would crush them like rats and drink their blood. And large numbers of HEP officials continued to be killed or disappeared: twenty-seven in 1992, seventeen in 1993, eighteen in 1994.34
Leyla Zana told a reporter in 1993, “I no longer believe in the Turkish parliament. Its role is to cover up the action of the State, to conceal the misdeeds of the army and the police. The people who take the decisions in Turkey are the members of the national security council. Members of parliament are like notaries, they merely register the decisions. In fact, it is against everything I believe in, I do not have a voice.”35
The Kurdish movement needed new tactics. The armed struggle had been badly damaged, and the parliamentary struggle had reached an impasse. In March 1993, Ocalan once again proffered a limited unilateral ceasefire, to last a month.
This time there was some hope that the government would respond. The President of Turkey was Turgut Ozul, who had been Prime Minister of the first civilian government after military rule and was more liberal than most in his party; he thought it was time to negotiate with the Kurds. But conservatives—including Suleyman Demirel, the Prime Minister—and the military were totally opposed to any concessions. They thought Ocalan’s offer of a ceasefire meant that the PKK was defeated and they had won the war.
Still trying to get some response, Ocalan renewed the ceasefire, listing basic human rights demands that were no more than what the EU and even some Turkish politicians had suggested: “We should be given our cultural freedoms and the right to broadcast in Kurdish. The village guard system should be abolished and the emergency legislation lifted. The Turkish authorities should take the necessary measures to prevent unsolved murders and should recognize the political rights of Kurdish organizations.”36
It didn’t seem like much to ask. But all demands became moot the next day when President Ozul suddenly died of a heart attack. The PKK thought he was murdered to forestall negotiations, a question which has remained unresolved.37
Ocalan tried to maintain the ceasefire, but the military now had free rein and Demirel, the new president, made it clear that his objective was complete annihilation of the PKK. The army and police renewed efforts to hunt down any guerrillas who remained in Turkey and, over the next six weeks, killed at least one hundred Kurds, both guerrillas and civilians, and arrested hundreds more. They also went back to demolishing villages.
Semdin Sakik, one of the PKK commanders in Turkey, warned Ocalan that the party was losing people’s respect because they were not retaliating. When Ocalan told him to go ahead and do so, Sakik ordered units in Diyarbakir to set roadblocks up after dark on all the main roads in the area, something the PKK did frequently to reinforce the idea that they ruled the night. On May 24, 1993, an unmarked bus full of off-duty unarmed conscripts came along one of the roads. PKK guerrillas manning the roadblock ordered the thirty-three soldiers off the bus, along with four teachers, and shot all of them. According to McDowall, this was the work of a rogue commander who wanted to end the ceasefire, but the PKK did not disown the attack.38
The war got much worse after the killing of the soldiers. The PKK did everything possible to show its strength, which was considerable. It attacked tourist sites and took Western oil and archeological workers hostage. In November 1993, it banned all schools, which it saw as bases for Turkish indoctrination; it killed thirty-four teachers that year compared with ten the year before.39
But the state had far more resources at its disposal than the PKK, and was willing to punish not just the guerrillas but the entire Kurdish population, shelling civilians and wiping out villages. According to Turkish journalist Ismet G. Imset, “By the end of 1994, at least 2,664 Kurdish villages and hamlets in Turkey’s troubled southeast region were recorded as completely evacuated or partially destroyed by government forces.” The people who lived in such villages were rounded up at sunrise, and told they could either join the village guards and fight the PKK or get out. Between three hundred thousand and a million Kurds were driven from their homes into the slums of Diyarbakir, Adana and other Kurdish cities; some made their way farther west to Istanbul and Izmir. The army also beefed up its checkpoints and arrested anyone who might be bringing supplies to the guerrillas.40
This counterinsurgency strategy is known as “draining the swamp”—the object is to empty the villages and small towns on which guerrillas depend for supplies, thus starving them out. As noted by journalists Robert Jensen and Rahul Mahajan, the strategy inevitably involves major war crimes: “The phrase has roots in Mao’s description of guerilla fighters as fish swimming in the sea of the people. US counter-insurgency experts after World War II took up the phrase in their strategies of ‘draining the sea’ to counter guerilla warfare. Drain the sea: Deprive a fighting force of cover. Drain the civilian population. For those unlucky civilians who make up the sea, to be ‘drained’ means one of two things. Either they are forcibly driven out of their villages and towns, often with their homes, property, and crops destroyed, or they simply are killed.”41
Such a strategy requires complete ruthlessness towards civilians. But this was not a problem for the Turkish government. It wanted to stamp out every sign of resistance. Kurdish offices were bombed. Unsolved murders of activists rocketed. And the HEP was declared illegal. Anticipating that this would happen, the Kurdish MPs had already registered another party, the Democratic Labor Party (DEP) and transferred their memberships there. But the Constitutional Court moved to close that down as well. In March 1994—just before an election—a parliamentary commission lifted the immunity of six Kurdish deputies, the first step toward trying them for treason in a State Security Court. When the six were arrested, the rest of the DEP deputies fled the country and set up a Parliament in Exile in Europe. These events focused European attention on Turkey and made its entrance to the EU more problematic.42
Leyla Zana was one of the Kurdish deputies arrested and put on trial. The year before, she had made a speech at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington in which she spoke of the destruction of Kurdish villages, and of the inability of the Turkish and Kurdish political leaders to address the Kurdish question with frankness and candor. She encouraged Congress to work with democratic forces in Turkey and to help bring about a peaceful resolution to the Kurdish conflict.43
That speech was to cause her a great deal of trouble when she appeared before the Security Court. Zana was tried for treason and sentenced to fifteen years in jail. To show its disapproval, the European Union gave her its major human rights award, the Sakharov Prize, in 1995. But the Turkish military didn’t care how many EU resolutions were passed or prizes given out; they were running the show.
The “Special War” was a disaster not only for the Kurds but for everyone in Turkey, not least the conscripts who were sent to die by the thousands—sons of poor families, since rich ones got their sons out of the draft.44 Turkish democracy became an ever-receding prospect, as Ismet G. Imset observed in 1995: “Any Turkish scholar, scientist, researcher or journalist seeking a peaceful solution to the problem through debate has been arrested. Scores of journalists working on Kurdish issues have been assassinated or imprisoned. The low intensity civil war . . . has not only robbed the troubled region of its own economic resources along with possible investments, but also drains approximately 7 billion dollars a year
out of Turkey’s budget.”45
Beginnings of Change in the PKK
By the time of the PKK’s Fifth Congress in 1995, the group was under more pressure than it had ever been. It had grown substantially: By 1994, the party had a full-time active membership of 15,000 guerrillas, while Turkish military officials estimated that PKK supporters in the southeast numbered at least 400,000. The broader Kurdish liberation movement had also come a great distance in ten years: The armed struggle had changed popular consciousness and affected the political climate enough to make a legal above-ground party possible.46
The program and resolutions that came out of the Fifth Congress show both the strengths and weaknesses of the organization. The program begins with a sweeping narrative of world history, PKK history, and the history of revolution. It makes a strong critique of the Soviet approach to socialism, calling it “the lowest and most brutal level of socialism. . . . Ideologically, there was a decline to dogmatism, vulgar materialism, and pan-Russian chauvinism; politically, there was the creation of extreme centralism, a suspension of democratic class struggle, and the raising of the state’s interests to the level of the determining factor; socially, there was a reduction in the free and democratic life of the society and its individuals; economically, the state sector was dominant and there was a failure to overcome a consumer society which emulated what was abroad; militarily, the raising of the army and acquiring weapons took precedence over other sectors. This deviation, which became increasingly clear to see during the 1960s, brought the Soviet system to a condition of absolute stagnation.”47
The program acknowledged that the defeat of the Soviet system meant the US faced no opposing power and was “trying to bring all regions of the world under its control with its notion of a ‘New World Order,’” but stated that the removal of Soviet-era stagnation had opened up “new possibilities for the development of socialism and revolutions.” These possibilities were being realized in the PKK, “whose understanding of socialism is one of the most developed in the world.” Explaining what this meant in unmistakably Ocalanian prose, the program put major emphasis on the transformation of individual consciousness: “In the reality of our party . . . a type of person is created who goes from a situation of incurable confusion to a condition of development and the ability to solve problems. A leading militant personality is created, one which is marked by great self-control and the attempt to become like other great leading personalities, taking examples from the history of the Middle East. A personality which, with great care, understanding, effort, and determination, seeks to overcome all difficulties and change the negative into something positive; a personality which, under all conditions, exerts a strong force of will and a fascination for the developing struggle of humanity, without seeking personal gain, to the point of being willing to give up one’s own life to that cause.”48
The program did not explain how one was to attain this ideal personality, or how transformations in individual consciousness would lead to social revolution. Instead it went on to develop a strategic analysis of the state of the Kurdish revolution, noting the acceleration of Turkey’s dirty war: “In addition to traditional army units, there are new creations such as the special corps, the special army, and the special teams, as well as the village guard system and the contraguerrilla forces which have been created. With the aid of these forces, and not obeying any rules, all forms of war and unimaginably brutal methods are being deployed in Kurdistan.”
Despite this, the Fifth Congress took a rosy view of the situation: “In the struggle against the political and military control of the Turkish Republic in Kurdistan, our party has developed a political and military dominance. . . . There is now a form of dual power in Kurdistan. The feelings and thoughts of the Kurdish people have become revolutionized. The mass organizations . . . together with their various legal and illegal associations, form a broad leading force, and the Kurdish population are to a large degree led by this force. The People’s Liberation Army of Kurdistan (ARGK), which our party developed during the course of the war, now has tens of thousands of fighters; this people’s army is stationed in all the strategic regions of Kurdistan and it has placed the Turkish army in a position of immobility there.”
The resolutions that came out of the Fifth Congress struck a far less optimistic note, referring to serious losses and organizational errors, for which cadres were blamed, avoiding any implication that there could be a problem with the party’s approach to armed struggle.49
In the words of a female guerrilla, “Ocalan would say the tactic is not the problem, that the problem has to do with the individual. But we didn’t have enough military supplies, what does that have to do with it? You get blown up by a landmine—that has nothing to do with the individual—that has to do with the lack of mine detectors. . . . Ocalan would say, everything is fine, the problem is you.”50
The PKK would not have gotten as far as it had if it had not emphasized the ability of motivated, self-sacrificing people to overcome all obstacles. Without attention to changes in conditions on the ground, however, its approach risked taking its people over over a cliff into the complete denial of reality. The resolutions of the Fifth Congress reflected a struggle to come to terms with this problem. Realizing that Turkey was depopulating the Kurdish countryside in order to deprive the guerrillas of logistical support, the Congress resolved “to prohibit migration from the country’s territory,” unless “front line committees” had granted permission. The resolution did not say how cadre were supposed to stop people who were being forced by the government to flee. On the other hand, the Congress also resolved to set up committees to help people who were forced to migrate, and to organize them wherever they went.51
Part of the problem was a weakness in the PKK’s collective leadership. While most successful revolutions have had a charismatic, farseeing leader like Ocalan, they also have had strong group leadership and a number of striking personalities, as, for example, was the case in India, South Africa, China, Vietnam, and Russia (though any semblance of real collective leadership ended in Russia after Stalin took charge and killed off his rivals).
Because of Ocalan’s dominance, and because inner-party relations could be described as ruled by fear, people who split from the organization described him as a “despot comparable to Stalin or Hitler” and said he ordered the murders of many cadre.52 Chris Kutschera, a French journalist who covered the Kurdish struggle for many years, wrote that “Abdullah Ocalan frequently displayed a tendency to megalomania which amazed foreign journalists, who would watch with disbelief as the party’s top leaders stood seemingly in awe while the ‘chairman’ spoke or clapped frenetically when he scored a goal during a football game organised for the benefit of a television crew.”53 The scholar Paul White saw him as a leader of the narcissistic or inspirational type; Aliza Marcus referred to his paranoia and inability to tolerate rivals.54
Many observed that the organizational culture of the PKK was skewed by a cult of personality. But while the party was probably as tightly controlled from the top as Ocalan could make it, the total control attributed to him was logistically impossible. Living in Damascus, he could not be reached by phone from most places in the mountains; commanders on the ground, including his brother Osman, had to make many decisions on their own. The idea that everything good in the PKK came from Ocalan is the corollary to the idea that everything bad that happened was caused by a traitor in the ranks. The flip side of idolatry is purges. Both overestimate the power of the individual.
Despite the optimistic tone of many of the resolutions issued by the Fifth Congress, it was clear by 1995 that Ocalan was rethinking the question of the state and the whole nationalist project.
Being a nation without a state was the problem Kurdish nationalists had been trying to overcome for decades. They had assumed the way forward was to have a nation-state of their own. By 1995, Ocalan had begun to think that this might be wrong. Such a state seemed to be forming next door in Iraq, un
der the protection of the US, but it was a conservative state dependent on oil and Turkey. What would this mean for the future of Kurdistan?
The PKK had never seen Kurdishness primarily in ethnic terms. Their whole problem with Turkish nationalism was that it permitted only one culture and one language, ignoring the rich diversity of its people. The PKK was certainly not going to duplicate that mistake. The Fifth Congress program stated that “our national liberation struggle is the basis for unity for all disadvantaged groups adversely affected by Turkish colonialism, and in it they are able to find their own identity. Our party does not wish to lapse into a narrow form of nationalism, and our party views all the many cultures in Kurdistan as a richness; that’s why all cultures are to be guaranteed and supported in their cultural freedom.”55
But was it possible to have a state that wasn’t based on ethnic nationalism? Maybe something like Switzerland? Or was the whole idea of the nation-state outdated, an artifact of a previous period of development? Ocalan began to ponder on his people’s ancient history, before the rise of empires in the Fertile Crescent, thinking back to a time when women and men were equal and managed to govern themselves in small local units, defending themselves without the need for a state apparatus. Women, as the first subjugated group, were central to this rethinking, in which the Kurds assumed world-historical importance as early inhabitants of the Fertile Crescent.56