by Meredith Tax
Writer Dilar Dirik offered a similar criticism: “Over the last year, the world witnessed the historic resistance of the Kurdish city called Kobane. That women from a forgotten community became the fiercest enemies of the Islamic State group, whose ideology is based on destroying all cultures, communities, languages, and colors of the Middle East, upset conventional understandings of the use of force and warfare. It was not because men were protecting women or a state protected its ‘subjects’ that Kobane will be written in humanity’s history of resistance, but because smiling women and men turned their ideas and bodies into the ideological front line on which the Islamic State group and its rapist worldview crumbled apart. Especially in the Middle East, it is no longer enough for women to ‘condemn violence’ when violence has become such a constant factor in our lives, when our perceived, or constructed status as ‘victims’ is used as a justification by imperialists to launch wars on our communities. The rise of the Islamic State group showed the disasters that full dependency on men and state-armies bring: nothing other than femicide.”32
Militarization is central to the ideology of the Kurdish women’s movement. Because of the extreme inequality in traditional Kurdish society, says a spokeswoman for the PKK women’s army YJA-Star, women had to become soldiers; they could only deal with their subordination by “becoming a power themselves. In such context, the women’s militarization had organized itself rather as an instrument of equality in social, political and cultural spheres instead of a simple military organization with only combat related purposes.” The point is to break “the false sense of power that develops in men.”33
One of the central and unique tenets of the Kurdish women’s army is the rule of celibacy. Rural Kurdistan is an extremely conservative society; many of the female cadre went to the mountains to escape forced marriages and traditional family structures. Nevertheless, they often felt they needed parental approval to leave. Most parents allowed them to go only on the condition that the women would remain virgins. If not for this guarantee from the PKK leadership, which ensured that the family’s “honor” would not be compromised, the party would have been culturally separated from the community they were fighting to liberate.
Gandhi, wanting women to be active in India’s national liberation struggle, in a society that was equally conservative, had a similar position in favor of celibacy. He developed this position, at least in part, as a response to child marriage, forced marriage, the oppression of widows, and the general subordination of women, though other ways of dealing with repressive traditions were certainly possible and many Indian women activists rejected his approach.
To Ocalan, as to many feminists, marriage as an institution was so oppressive to women it was to be avoided whenever possible. “It is impossible to imagine another institution that enslaves like marriage. The most profound slaveries are established by the institution of marriage, slaveries that become more entrenched within the family. This is not a general reference to sharing life or partner relationships that can be meaningful depending on one’s perception of freedom and equality. What is under discussion is the ingrained, classical marriage and family. Absolute ownership of woman means her withdrawal from all political, intellectual, social and economic arenas; this cannot be easily recovered. Thus, there is a need to radically review family and marriage and develop common guidelines aimed at democracy, freedom and gender equality. Marriages or relationships that arise from individual, sexual needs and traditional family concepts can cause some of the most dangerous deviations on the way to a free life.”34
Thus the PKK made celibacy a “red line.” Sexual relationships between cadre were considered a grave violation of the party’s commitment to women’s independence and autonomy, an indication of misplaced priorities, and a dangerous distraction to anyone in combat conditions. People who broke the rule were thrown out, and in the early days of the armed struggle, some were executed. The rule applied only to guerrillas and people in PKK leadership, not to people who worked in PKK-linked mass organizations or to civilians.
Ocalan’s theoretical position on the necessity of celibacy was that a new culture had to develop before sexual intimacy could be detached from power relations. Personal love relationships turned women into slaves, he insisted. “Woman’s true freedom is only possible if the enslaving emotions, needs and desires of husband, father, lover, brother, friend and son can all be removed. The deepest love constitutes the most dangerous bonds of ownership.”35 In other words, women’s liberation needed to be tackled right away, but sex would have to wait until after the revolution. This was partly because of priorities and partly because women had to attain more power in society at large before real love between equals could become possible.
There are of course other possible ways besides celibacy to address the contradictions in traditional gender relations, among them the anarchist or bohemian ethos of “free love;” the current redefinition of the family unit by feminist and gay activists; and the various alternative and communitarian solutions to be found in utopian communities over the ages. Feminists all over the world have put enormous emphasis on women being able to decide for themselves what they want, rather than having their love relations dictated by fathers, brothers, husbands or social convention. From this came the commitment to reproductive rights and the idea that women should be the ones choosing when and whether they bore children.
Handan Caglayan, author of the book, Mothers, Comrades, Goddesses, described the PKK taboo against love relationships as one more form of patriarchal restriction upon women, a new kind of honor code: “Women are asked to desexualize themselves when entering the public sphere much as they are in other anticolonial promodernization national movements. Respectable participation in the public sphere is strictly predicated upon an amorous attachment to the homeland, and to fighting for it. Substituting sexual love for the love for the homeland is enough reason to be excluded from the ‘liberated’ and ‘trustworthy’ female identity and being labeled as ‘woman who pulls down.’ Therefore, the same discourse that enables women to leave their homes by overcoming the namus [honor] barrier also establishes a new patriarchal control in the public sphere.”36
And indeed, the PKK regularly subordinated individual freedom to the strategic necessities of what it would take to organize a revolution in Kurdistan—or, more accurately, the PKK saw individual fulfillment as coming not through personal relationships but by giving oneself to the cause. The large number of young PKK women who became suicide bombers and immolated themselves as a political protest in the nineties is another indication of the high value put on self-abnegation.37
During the nineties, when the PKK developed its position on marriage, the transnational women’s movement was focusing on issues of child, forced, and arranged marriage, violence against women, and “honor crimes,” particularly in the Middle East and South Asia. Rather than ban sexual relationships, the movement developed rights-based strategies to deal with abuse, as human rights activist Gita Sahgal noted in an article on the subject:
“Although there is a long feminist and radical tradition of critique of the institution of marriage as a fundamental cornerstone of patriarchy, not least in antinomian religious traditions, there are no attempts to outlaw marriage, which still remains globally the central apparatus to ensure sexual access and unpaid reproductive labour. Comparisons of marriage to the institution of slavery are not inapt. But the legislative battle has consisted of trying to criminalise coercive and violent elements within marriage, such as domestic violence, marital rape, and forced marriage, as well as to change the nature of marriage itself by extending rights of marriage to same-sex partners and by making the dissolution of marriage easier.”38
To Western intellectuals, as anthropologist Michael Taussig noted, the question of celibacy evoked the intellectual battles between followers of Sigmund Freud, who thought it was a good thing that sexuality be sublimated so that people could turn their energy to other creative endeavors,
and followers of Wilhelm Reich, who thought the free expression of sexuality was fundamental to all other freedoms. Taussig visited Rojava in 2015 and wrote:
“A justification of celibacy was proffered: that celibacy eases the anxieties of the women’s families, the honor of their girls is intact; that romantic involvements get in the way of doing your job; and that your capacity for love gets transmuted into love for the group (which brings to mind the polemic concerning sex and repression between Wilhelm Reich and Freud.) Do the Kurdish guerrillas therefore provide their women and men with a new ‘family,’ merging something like a nation-state that is also an anti-state with something like a family that is not a family but an anti-family? Are the guerrilla forces castes of beings serenely distant from the flesh, like nuns and monks in the Christian Church, but with M-16s and rocket launchers? Does celibacy ensure a type of sacred purity and a mythical status of magical power?”39
Some answers to these questions can be found in an open “chat” held in July 2015 on Reddit, the online news and networking services with an anonymous male PKK fighter who had been at university in both Germany and Canada before he joined the PKK, and had fought in Kobane and Cizre in Syria, as well as in Turkey and Iraq. He freely admitted that he was pretty sexist when he joined the PKK; he didn’t believe women could be good fighters and hadn’t given a thought to feminism. But as a result of serving in battle with women commanders and comrades, he changed.
Asked about homosexuality, he said “the organization is equally sexually repressive—to both homosexuals and heterosexuals. No sex allowed—ever.” He was then asked about his own sex life. He said:
“I personally quite like being able to interact with women without the actual practice [of] sex being an issue. We smile, laugh, speak together, but we’re comrades. It ends there. . . . I quite like that the many fighters I’ve known who are women, for example, don’t need me (a man) in order to complete their life. They . . . have left home and are doing something proactive, productive, and indeed revolutionary by going out and fighting and defending their ideas. Why would you need to ruin it by getting into a sexual relationship?
“I mean, seriously, what’s with Westerners and their whole thing about sex, sex, sex, sex, sex? A lot of Kurds who come back from the West seem obsessed with this thing. Who ever put it in their mind that it was so important?”40
As far as Janet Biehl, the late Murray Bookchin’s partner, could observe on her trips to Rojava, sex was not an issue. Interviewed by Biehl, the female Minister of Culture indicated that, while Rojava’s feminists would fight adamantly for women’s equality and against domestic violence, they would proceed very cautiously when it came to sex. And when Biehl asked about a new law on book publishing, which set up a committee to determine whether a book should be published on the basis of “its compatibility with the general legal system and its suitability to the morals of society,” the minister replied that no book promoting teen sex before marriage would be permitted. “We should respect traditions in our society. Teenagers can’t sleep with each other . . . before marriage,” she told Biehl.41
The PKK: Denouement and Transition
After three years of draining the swamp, in 1997 the Turkish government felt it had damaged the PKK to such an extent that it could lift the state of emergency. But it ignored Ocalan’s call for a ceasefire. When he offered one again in 1998, the Turkish military concluded the PKK was really on the ropes and should be hit even harder.
This time they got help from the US, which, as usual, saw the Kurds as a destabilizing force in the region. Despite the end of the Cold War, the CIA retained a residual desire to fight communism, if it could find any communists to fight, and the PKK appeared to fit the bill. Israel, which acted as a US proxy in the region, helped Turkey devise a plan. In October 1998, Turkey suddenly massed ten thousand troops on its border with Syria and said they would invade unless Damascus handed over Ocalan. Syrian president Hafez Assad was not willing to risk war with Turkey and Ocalan was quietly asked to leave.42
He went on the run, first to Moscow, then to Rome, where he was arrested. Italy didn’t know what to do with him but was unwilling to hand him over to the Turks, who had the death penalty. So there he stayed, wondering how things had gone so wrong. A change in strategy was clearly needed. Being in the West made him feel even more strongly that it was essential to negotiate a peace agreement. On November 18, 1998, he told an Italian paper: “We have abandoned terrorism and are ready for a peace accord. . . . My presence here [in Italy] testifies to a change in the strategy of the Kurdish national movement.” The next week he released a press statement, saying that the Kurds wanted to demobilize and work for peace along the lines of the Basques and the Irish Republican Army. The statement contained a peace plan setting seven conditions that Turkey would have to meet: stop attacking Kurdish villages; let Kurdish refugees from these villages return home; end the village guard program; give political autonomy to the Kurdish region within Turkey’s borders; give Kurds the same democratic freedoms allowed Turks; recognize Kurdish identity, language and culture; and allow freedom of religion. He also called for an international conference on the Kurdish question.43
All the demands fit into a human rights framework and deserved consideration. But power politics trumped human rights. Italy could not hold out under pressure from both Turkey and the US, and considered two options: putting Ocalan on trial in an international court or expelling him. So Ocalan fled again, first returning to Russia, then flying to Athens, where the PKK had friendly connections because of the longstanding enmity between Greece and Turkey. Now Greece came under pressure; Turkey said it would invade any country that sheltered Ocalan and, though led by a left-wing prime minister, Greece buckled. The government suggested Ocalan take refuge in the Greek embassy in Kenya and seek political asylum somewhere in Africa. So Ocalan flew to Kenya.
As CIA historian Tim Weiner reported, this was bad timing: “More than 100 American intelligence and law-enforcement officers, along with Kenyan security officials, are in Nairobi investigating the terrorist bombing of the American Embassy there in August, which took 213 lives. Members of that team quickly discovered that Mr. Ocalan had arrived in Nairobi, American officials said. They placed the Greek Embassy under surveillance and monitored his cell phone conversations while he placed calls to political contacts, seeking sanctuary.”44
In February 1999, Ocalan was told he could go to the Netherlands. A car with a Kenyan police escort came to take him to the airport, but instead of being allowed to board a flight to Amsterdam, he was taken to an outlying part of the airport where he was put on a private plane for Turkey. As soon as he arrived, the government broadcast his picture, bound, handcuffed, and looking dazed, being guarded by two ski-masked Turkish commandos.
The Kurdish diaspora went ballistic. Demonstrations and occupations took place all over the world. In addition, between October 1998 and March 1999, seventy-five people set fire to themselves.45 In London, the Greek embassy was occupied by fifty hunger strikers for three days while a large crowd demonstrated outside. Greek and Kenyan embassies or consulates were also occupied in most of Europe’s major cities and many countries in Asia and the Middle East. Demonstrators forced their way into several UN buildings in Switzerland. In Berlin, two hundred Kurds stormed the Israeli Embassy. When security guards opened fire, four protestors were killed and twenty injured.46
Ocalan went on trial for treason that May. Though everyone expected his defense to feature stirring denunciations of Turkish oppression that would vindicate the PKK’s struggle and tactics, his pretrial statements, released on video, sounded confused but hardly defiant. He said his mother was a Turk, he loved his country, and if he could be of service, he would. His comrades thought he had been drugged. Soon the Turkish media began to report that he had made all kinds of confessions. But they had reported similar confessions from other PKK prisoners who later said the reports were false, so people did not believe the stories about Ocalan. The
y waited to see what he would say at his actual trial.
The trial was held at a specially constructed prison on the small island of Imrali in the Sea of Marmara. Ocalan began his defense with a call for peace, stressing that, in order for him to be able to bring about peace and brotherhood, he had to remain alive. Far from blaming Turkey for Kurdish suffering, he apologized to the families of conscripts who had been killed, saying he understood their pain. He praised Ataturk and said the Kurds should have tried to solve their problems through human rights, not armed struggle.47
People in PKK circles were completely disoriented by this line of argument. They assumed Ocalan had a plan but they didn’t know what it was. Many found his praise of the Turkish state and his failure to mention Kurdish grievances extremely hard to take. His critics outside the party sneered, calling him a coward who would say anything to save his life.
Leading cadre left the PKK. Selim Curukkaya, who had spent eleven years in prison and been a member of the Executive Committee, told journalist Chris Kutschera, “Abdullah Ocalan, the man who used to call people ‘traitor’ has himself betrayed us.” Kutschera wondered how long the PKK could “stagger on.”48
Ocalan was sentenced to death in May 1999. Two months later he publicly called on the PKK to withdraw from Turkey and unilaterally end the armed struggle. The party did as he asked, though the Turkish military killed as many as they could find in transit. Ocalan then asked certain cadre to turn themselves in as a token of good faith; they did so and were immediately arrested.49