by Meredith Tax
Ancient Mesopotamia, located in the rich agricultural delta between the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers, is often called “the cradle of civilization” because it is the place where human beings first settled down and became farmers rather than hunters and gatherers.57 Mesopotamia and Sumer, the southernmost region of Mesopotamia, are also where people first began to live in cities and develop a more complex and hierarchical mode of social organization than had previously existed. In the mythology of ancient Sumer, Ocalan traced the lineaments of patriarchy and the origins of the state. To him, Sumer was the site of original sin, the place of transition from a horizontal society based on kinship groups to a hierarchical state based on slavery. Under one of Mesopotamia’s early rulers, Sargon the Great, wrote Ocalan, “the slaughtering of people through a well-planned use of force, the appropriation of all their belongings and resources, the deportation of captives as slaves, and the creation of tiers of colonial dependence, became principal features of historical development.”58
In Ocalan’s vision, Kurdistan, the place of original sin, would become the place where the sin is reversed, and the long historical trajectory of war, suffering, and domination would be replaced by local self-management, direct democracy, gender equality, and fellowship between all its peoples.59
Although Ocalan’s thinking on democracy did not fully flower until the 2000s, when he began to read and to re-examine all his old ideas while in prison, his new vision was clearly taking shape by 1995. In a 1998 discussion with US diplomat David A. Korn, he said that the PKK was definitely not striving for the kind of socialism in which “the individual is shrunk to its bottom limit but the State is swollen to its top limit. . . . Rights for the individual as much as the needs of society, social benefits and social order as much as the needs of the individual, is what we are trying to be loyal to as a principle.”60
But the Kurdish struggle needed a particular kind of individual, and Ocalan’s vision of “rights for the individual” did not allow for much deviation from that ideal type. He was obsessed with the problem of how to build cadre who were more developed than the society that shaped them. In his last interview before he was captured, he alluded to what he saw as deficits in the Kurdish personality structure: “Our problems are partly the result of the situation within the party, the central committee, the leadership. Reform will allow us to improve. We don’t want to cheat, there are shortcomings and we must correct them. Our activities during the last 15 years should have brought other results. The Turks should not be so free with us. We made tactical mistakes. Our political leadership did not play its role. These shortcomings were caused by faults in the Kurdish character: its individualism, its lack of foresight, its incapacity for collective action, its narrow-minded vision. So I want to transform this personality.”61
As in so many of his other writings, he seemed to want to create a new kind of human being. This emphasis on individual development harks back to the romantic and prefigurative socialism of the period before Lenin. Ocalan’s language, in fact, sometimes sounds like that of Ibsen, that great nineteenth-century modernizer and critic of bourgeois hypocrisy—phrases like “a splendid search for freedom in the framework of my personality” and “a noble, sacred, and very necessary peace” could have come out of the mouths of Ibsen’s Master Builder or his Enemy of the People, characters who rebelled against stifling social pressures in their search for “something great, something splendid . . . to live for!”62
In fact, by the nineties, as Ali Kemal Ozcan’s history of the PKK indicates, Ocalan had abandoned both the rhetoric of classical Marxism and the ideology of national liberation struggles for “an idiom peculiar to himself, engaged with more universal and philosophical concepts such as ‘humanization,’ ‘socialization,’ ‘human emancipation,’ ‘analysing the Self,’ ‘freed personality,’ ‘pure human being,’ and so on.”63
The personal transformation of PKK cadre called for an intensive, continuing program of socialist education. This was a challenge because many of the peasant recruits were barely literate due to Turkish policies of limiting the number of schools in Kurdish areas and refusing to let Kurds be taught in their own language. Facing a similar challenge in Brazil, the activist educator Paolo Freire developed a “critical pedagogy” that emphasized active learning and dialogue, without a set curriculum, as discussed in his groundbreaking work, The Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1970). But this kind of participatory education did not mesh with Turkey’s pedagogical traditions, which emphasize rote learning, memorization, and respect for authority.64
The PKK training program at the Mahsum Korkmaz Academy, set up at the Third Party Congress in 1986, was largely oral, consisting of lectures by Ocalan, followed by criticism/self-criticism sessions in which cadre would discuss their own shortcomings and be criticized by other participants and by Ocalan. By this means, he hoped to achieve the transformation in consciousness that Freire managed by developing his students’ critical thinking skills.65
By the late nineties, the curriculum of a twenty-day training session consisted of the history and sociology of Kurdistan; PKK history, morality and culture; Turkey’s bourgeoisie and army; the nature and tactics of Turkey’s “Special War” against the Kurds; people’s war; guerrilla war; military leadership; and party style and behavior. These subjects were taught by Ocalan in long lectures, which often lasted four to seven hours and were delivered without notes, with Ocalan drawing largely on his own experience.66
Between 1980 and 1999, all of Ocalan’s lectures were recorded, transcribed, edited, printed, and distributed to party organizations all over the world in both written and cassette form under the title Onderlik Çözümlemeler (Analyses by the Leadership).67 Such an exclusive emphasis on Ocalan’s thought inevitably led cadre towards seeing his words as catechism and venerating him as a prophet. This was not good for democratic dialogue and independent thinking in the PKK.
Nevertheless, considering the history of other Marxist-Leninist groups, the wonder is not that the PKK had serious problems of authoritarianism and handled internal conflicts poorly, but that, unlike most similar organizations, they eventually focused on the importance of democracy. This change must be attributed to the growing strength of the mass democratic movement in southeastern Turkey, which virtually demanded that the PKK pay attention to it, although the PKK did not fully grapple with this need until years after Ocalan was jailed.
By the early nineties, however, Ocalan had recognized the importance of democracy, at least in theory, as is evident in statements such as “Democracy is a phenomenon that absolutely needs to be taught and kept alive to the utmost both by education and by experience,” (1990) and “Party cadres must assimilate themselves into democratic culture, be absorbed into democracy and convert democracy into a lifestyle for themselves.”(1993) He said he longed for people to challenge his views, and berated party members for their “naïvety and blind adulation,” “obstinate-blind repetition,” and “incredible slow-motion progress.”68 But slavishness on the part of cadre was the inevitable result of a low educational level combined with teaching methods that treated his words as the only source of wisdom.
One of the chief lessons taught to PKK cadre was the need for self-sacrifice and the subordination of private life to the cause. Joining the PKK was like entering into a marriage: One made a commitment for life, forsaking all others. Sociologist Olivier Grojean, who based his analysis of the PKK on interviews between 2001 and 2005 with “forty-odd PKK activists and sympathizers in Europe, some still actively involved, others not,” described what was expected of cadre at the training academies: “The Çözümlemeler [Ocalan’s Analyses] need to be applied, and this should result in the activists renouncing both their former life (they are obliged to cut ties with their family, spouse, children, friends, and so on) and certain attitudes and habits. They are for instance not allowed to cross their legs (only Öcalan is allowed to do that), to make hand gestures when speaking (Öcalan’s privilege), or to sit before b
eing instructed to do so (attitudes typical of the ‘enemy’s style’). . . . Drinking alcohol, smoking tobacco, and having sexual or even purely platonic relationships are also forbidden, as ‘recommended’ by Öcalan in his talks.”69
Complete personal sacrifice, including separation from family and lifelong celibacy, was considered necessary in order to become new men and free women—fully-developed human beings who had left behind all traces of feudal and tribal personality and had thus become capable of transforming Kurdistan.
Central to this vision was a transformation of relations between the sexes. According to Grojean, Ocalan taught that “in the same way as the Turkish people, who stand out for their masculinity, have colonised and enslaved the Kurdish people, Kurdish men have colonised and enslaved Kurdish women. Since the ‘traditional’ masculine personality traits were associated with domination, violence, superiority, and arrogance, male PKK activists needed to free themselves from this sort of way of living and behaving and adopt the personality of the New Man, whose characteristics – inspired by those of the ‘free’ woman – are peace, communion with nature, culture, ‘sociality’, and a sense of patriotic duty.” His goal, wrote Ocalan, was to kill the dominant male, which he saw as “the fundamental principle of socialism. This is what killing power means: to kill the one-sided domination, the inequality and intolerance. Moreover, it is to kill fascism, dictatorship, and despotism.”70
Ocalan has written that one of the life events that radicalized him was seeing his older sister Havva, the main one in the family who cared for him, sold in marriage to a man from a village several days away for “a few sacks of wheat and a little money.” He later recalled thinking that if he were a revolutionary, he would have been able to stop them from taking her away.71
As in other patriarchal societies, the “honor” of the traditional Kurdish family depended on the sexual purity of its women. To make sure she did not stray, a Kurdish girl was denied education, kept in the home, and secluded from social life. She was forced to marry whomever her father chose, often at a very young age, and, once she was married, her chastity was closely supervised. Girls were property, bought and sold as wives, with polygamy practiced by men who could afford it. “Honor killings” were common, as was male violence in general. And of course, since Kurdistan was economically underdeveloped, poverty was the norm.72
Revolutionary movements in other patriarchal societies have had to deal with similar feudal or tribal gender relations, overlaid and reinforced by colonialism and capitalism. The PKK’s uniqueness lay in seeing the transformation of gender relations not as a sidebar to nationalist revolution but as the central task that would determine the success or failure of the whole endeavor. As the Fifth Congress resolution that founded the women’s army in 1995 stated: “History has always been the history of male domination, because regardless of what class characteristics determined the society, it was always the men who determined social development and power relations. A careful analysis of all the revolutions which have taken place up until today will show that women were never really able to achieve their full political-military strength and were not effectively included in the movement. . . . This reality is most clear when we look at real-existing socialism, where women took part in the revolution, but where an equal power balance between men and women was never achieved, therefore these women were not free, hence these were not free societies.”73
The rising influence of women must be seen as central to the PKK’s growing interest in democracy, mass organization, and a strategy of negotiation rather than an exclusive emphasis on armed struggle. The first PKK women’s organization, the Union of the Patriotic Women of Kurdistan (YJWK) was formed in 1987 as a result of problems Kurdish women were experiencing in the movement and the diaspora. But the organization was based in Europe. The initial effort of this kind in Kurdistan itself came in 1992, shortly after the brief move to Camp Zeli when the PKK was fleeing attacks by Turkey and the KDP. Women guerrillas issued a call for an all-Kurdistan Women’s Congress, which brought five hundred women from all the sections of the PKK to the camp, and had the explicit goal of forming an autonomous women’s organization.
There is not much information on the Congress since its resolutions were not translated into English, nor is it mentioned in English-language histories of the movement on PKK websites. Some information can be gleaned from a poorly translated caption under an anonymous YouTube video of Kurdish women’s militias, which says, “The first Women’s Congress of the PKK was conducted in late 1992. Among other things, the law was called for to get married. The Congress was eliminated by Abdullah Ocalan as a test, the PKK (tasfiyecilik) and considered canceled.”74
According to Aliza Marcus, tasfiyecilik is PKK jargon that in context means “expelled, usually used in reference to those who somehow oppose the group or had ‘anti-revolutionary’ views.”75 Apparently, the first PKK women’s congress passed a resolution that cadre should be allowed to marry, which was later annulled by Abdullah Ocalan on the grounds that these women had failed the test of confronting patriarchal ideas.
According to PKK historiography, this first Women’s Congress was a failure. The blame fell on Abdullah Ocalan’s younger brother Osman, the commander at Camp Zeli, who later left the PKK. As the story goes, Osman Ocalan and some of his friends contended that it would be better if PKK cadre could marry. The majority of women at the meeting were new recruits, not yet used to standing up to men and susceptible to pressure from leadership. Thus Osman and his friends derailed the larger discussion of forming a women’s organization to focus specifically on marriage, creating a major setback for women’s autonomy.76
A trainee at the Mahsum Korkmaz Academy reported that Mehmet Sener, the PKK leader who openly disagreed with Ocalan at times and who was executed in 1991, had also been pushing for freedom to marry: Sener “first garnered support,” the trainee told historian Paul White, “by saying things like ‘guerrillas should be allowed to marry each other.’” A PKK lecturer responded to Sener by telling trainees that marriage “would totally undermine the ARGK [the name of the PKK army in the nineties] as a fighting force, given the huge number of women fighters and mixed-sex guerrilla units. Then, at the party’s Fourth Congress, Sener apparently argued that the guerrilla war period of the PKK’s struggle was over; a new period was opening up, that of revolution through popular uprising. Once again, Ocalan and his supporters claimed that this was an indirect way of smashing the PKK.”77
Turkish sociologist Nazan Ustundag, who studied the Kurdish women’s movement, takes a more feminist view of the beginnings of women’s organizing in the PKK: “According to Ocalan’s writings and the women guerrillas I interviewed, the guerrilla organization PKK suffered from the danger of turning into gangster squads and paramilitaries in the early 1990s, when the war in Kurdistan was most intense. Guerrilla leaders who monopolized authority, arms, trade routes, information, and relations with villagers threatened the Leftist path to liberation. Women and their struggles kept these risks under some control as they started challenging the patriarchal structures of PKK. Ocalan facilitated women’s struggles by encouraging them to form an independent army and independent institutions in 1993. The women’s army and institutions not only guaranteed women protection against men, both in the Turkish army and in guerrilla forces, but also disrupted channels of secrecy, transformed relations with locals, and effectively developed an opposition to the abuse of power.”78
This was a long way from the First Congress in 1978, when only two women, Kesire Yildirim and Sakine Cansiz, attended, and Yildirim, who was married to Abdullah Ocalan, was the only woman chosen for the Central Committee.79
Kesire Yildirim was a strong-willed woman from a family connected with the military. Ocalan later said, “I didn’t consider it very likely that the relationship would succeed, but I also was dragged along by the desire for love, emotion, and marriage.” The marriage was over by the mid-eighties—the period of internal PKK terror—and Y
ildirim was arrested in an internal purge and held for a time, then “rehabilitated” enough to be sent off to organize in Europe. In 1988, according to Aliza Marcus, she tried to stage a coup against Ocalan. When that failed, she left the PKK and organized a splinter group. “It is widely rumored,” wrote Marcus, “that Ocalan bought her silence in exchange for a financial stipend and a promise that she would not be killed. Still the PKK leader never forgot her betrayal. Her life—and their marriage—was turned into a rhetorical device, something Ocalan used to underscore the constant dangers he and the PKK faced and the need to be ever-vigilant against traitors. He also used it to buttress his views on marriage and sexual relationships, both later banned for PKK militants.”80
But if Kesire Yildirim was merely a blip in the graph of PKK gender dynamics, its other female founding member, Sakine Cansiz, became a revolutionary hero.
Berivan, PKK commander in Makhmour.
CHAPTER 5
Kurdish Women Rising
SAKINE CANSIZ WAS the iconic PKK woman leader, always pictured with her thin intense face surrounded by a flaming cloud of bright henna hair. “We grew up hearing about Sakine Cansiz, how she withstood torture when she was in prison, spitting in the face of her torturers,” Sebahat Tuncel, an MP for Turkey’s pro-Kurdish Peace and Democracy Party [now the HDP], told Reuters. “She was a very important name for Kurdish women. She was a feminist, and her struggle was always double-edged: against male dominance and for Kurdish rights.”1
Born in 1958 to an Alevi family in Dersim, Cansiz first encountered Kurdish activists as a teenager. After she hung out with them for a while, “a comrade visited our house one day and told us the history of Kurdistan. Me and my siblings all listened to him with great interest and till late hours after his leave [departure], we told each other about what he had told us. Everything he said was of importance for us because I learned from his telling that we were Kurd and came from Kurdistan. Impressed by the ideology of this movement, I started to live a contradiction with my family who were . . . preventing us from taking part in the revolutionary movement.