A Road Unforeseen

by Meredith Tax

  When Ocalan fled Damascus, the PKK had formed a Presidential Council to manage things while he was on the run, and in January 2000, they called an emergency Seventh Congress. Ocalan was re-elected leader even though he was in jail, and the congress voted to support his new line of preferring negotiation to armed struggle. The autonomous women’s units in particular backed Ocalan and an approach of finding a way towards peace negotiations.

  The next few years were ones of ideological struggle and confusion within the PKK, as described by the scholars Ahmet Hamdi Akkaya and Joost Jongerden: “For the movement, the period between Ocalan’s trial of 1999 and the reorganization of the party in 2003, was a period of retreat and consolidation. The PKK levelled down its demands, ceased military activities, withdrew the majority of its guerilla forces from Turkey into Northern Iraq and consequently gave an impression of introversion. The political activities of the PKK were confined to Ocalan’s case, the sentencing in particular.”50

  Ocalan appealed his sentence to the European Court of Human Rights, and, because Turkey wanted to join the European Union, which bars the death penalty, his death sentence was commuted in 2002 to life imprisonment on Imrali. (Turkish leader Recep Tayyip Erdogan later said that if he had been prime minister at the time of the arrest, he would have made sure Ocalan was executed.)51

  Ocalan continued to lead the PKK from his cell via messages transmitted by his lawyers and close family members, mainly his sister, who was allowed to visit him once a month. He read voraciously, everything from ancient history and mythology to contemporary political theory. In the eighties, his writing had referred mainly to such writers as Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Dimitrov, Giap, and Le Duan. In contrast, his bibliography in Prison Writing I cites sources on mythology and prehistory including Joseph Campbell, Samuel Noah Kramer, James Frazer, Gordon Childe, and feminist Merlin Stone, as well as political thinkers ranging from Bakunin to Seyla Benhabib, Karl Popper, Ernesto Laclau, and Judith Butler; he was particularly influenced by Benedict Anderson, Michel Foucault, Murray Bookchin, and Immanuel Wallerstein.52 Despite all these influences, his thinking remained his own, rooted in Kurdish experience and his own life history, and moving in new directions, particularly in regard to women.

  He wrote his defense for the European Court of Human Rights in the form of political articles, which he gave his lawyer in their one-hour weekly visits. These articles centered on the idea of democracy based on local councils. Digging into the history of the Middle East, he reframed his ideas about the state much more systematically than before, developing a theory he called “democratic confederalism,” which consisted of parallel democratic structures that would coexist with the state—provided it was a democratic state that respected human rights.

  In all the countries where they lived—Iran, Iraq, Syria and Turkey—Kurds and others in the same area would establish local systems of self-organization and eventually link them into a regional “confederal system. Within Kurdistan democratic confederalism will establish village, town and city assemblies and their delegates will be entrusted with the real decision-making, which in effect means that the people and the community will decide.” The confederal system would not reject the laws of the states involved, but these laws would have to be reconciled with those of the EU and “the democratic confederal law.”

  He envisioned democratic confederalism as promoting an ecological model of society, “opposed to all forms of sexual oppression,” and called for the establishment of “democracy in all spheres of life of Kurdish society, which is based on ecology and equality of the sexes and struggles against all forms of reaction and backwardness. It conjoins individual rights and freedoms with the development of democracy.”53

  Ocalan’s conception of local control and democratic autonomy owed a lot to Murray Bookchin, with whom he corresponded before Bookchin’s death. But as Ercan Aybola, a Kurdish activist interviewed by Janet Biehl in 2011, pointed out, these ideas were further developed by the movement, which drew on its own years of experience and that of other movements to make something new: “The Kurdish freedom movement developed the idea of ‘democratic confederalism’ not only from the ideas of communalist intellectuals but also from movements like the Zapatistas; from Kurdish society’s own village-influenced history; from the long, thirty-five-year experience of political and armed struggle; from the intense controversies within Turkish democratic-socialist-revolutionary movements; and from the movement’s continuous development of transparent structures for the broad population.”54

  The issue of the state was central. Here Ocalan’s thinking was particularly influenced by Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities, in which Anderson traced the origins of the notion of ethnic nationhood and described the state as a social construction, rather than an eternal organizing principle that existed in nature and was inevitable and unchangeable. Ocalan wrote: “In isolation I grasped the alternative modernity concept, that national structures can have many different models, that generally social structures are fictional ones created by human hands, and that nature is malleable. In particular, overcoming the model of the nation-state was very important for me. For a long time this concept was a Marxist-Leninist-Stalinist principle for me. It essentially had the quality of an unchanging dogma. . . . When you said nation there absolutely had to be a state! If Kurds were a nation they certainly needed a state! However as social conditions intensified, as I understood that nations themselves were the most meaningless reality, shaped under the influence of capitalism, and as I understood that the nation-state model was an iron cage for societies, I realized that freedom and community were more important concepts.”55

  In a world order where everything is based on states, including all international institutions, this was a big leap. Ocalan was definitively rejecting the claim for an independent Kurdish state that had been a foundational demand of the movement—and, what’s more, he was doing it at the same time that Kurds right across the border in Iraq were getting closer and closer to having such a state.

  If many cadre felt betrayed by the new approach, nobody wanted to oppose it openly. Hating the way Ocalan had seemed to capitulate in his speech to the court and disgusted that the party had maintained him as leader even when he was under duress, some quietly left fairly soon after his arrest, finding ways to get to Iraq and from there, to Europe, where they could ask for political asylum.56

  Others waited, hoping the line would change again, while increasingly looking to the Iraqi Kurds for leadership. They argued that if the PKK was going to stop the armed struggle and make peace with Turkey anyway, why not partner with Iraq’s Kurdistan Regional Government, which was already allied with Turkey? An opposing group maintained that they were not giving up the armed struggle; they had only halted it temporarily for tactical reasons. This difference led to a major split in 2004, when a faction supporting an alliance with the KRG left the PKK and moved to Iraq. To make their defection even more scandalous, the group included Executive Committee members Osman Ocalan and Nizamettin Tas, who immediately got married.57

  As if to prove their guerrilla bona fides, the PKK leadership in Qandil, headed by founding member Cemal Bayik, declared an end to the ceasefire and the war started up again. There was another unilateral ceasefire that lasted from 2009 to 2011, then a resumption of battle.

  The costs of this war over the years were staggering; The figures of thirty thousand to forty thousand dead are usually given, although there is no hard data on either side. As the numbers and costs of the war, estimated at $300 billion, mounted, pressure grew for some kind of political settlement. In September 2011, Prime Minister Erdogan announced that Hakan Fidan, head of military intelligence (MIT) had been meeting secretly with PKK representatives in Oslo. A year later, on December 31, 2012, he announced that the MIT had also been negotiating with Ocalan in Imrali prison.58

  But the old Kemalist establishment and the deep state saw any negotiations with the PKK as conciliation with terrorists. At the beg
inning of the new year, they struck. In the early morning of January 10, 2013, Sakine Cansiz, Fidan Dogan, Paris representative of the Kurdistan National Congress, and Leyla Soylemez, a youth leader, were found dead in the locked offices of the Kurdish Information Center in Paris. According to French police, all had been shot execution-style. The office door had a combination lock so the assassin either knew the combination or was let in. The door to the room where the bodies were found was locked from the outside.59

  Most of the press were convinced Cansiz was the target of the assassination, and the other two women just happened to be with her. Many, including Susan Fraser of the Associated Press, thought the purpose of the assassinations was to stop peace talks: “The killings come at a time when Turkey has resumed talks with jailed rebel leader Ocalan in a bid to persuade the group to disarm and end the nearly 29-year-old conflict that has killed tens of thousands of people. Some speculate that the slayings may have been an attempt to derail peace efforts.”60

  The French police quickly arrested Omer Guney, who had acted as an occasional driver and volunteer in the Kurdish office. He had made several trips to Turkey in the period before the killings. The investigation went nowhere for a year, then a recording was posted on the internet by an anonymous source “close to Omer Guney.”61 According to Rudaw, the Iraqi Kurdish press agency, the tape recorded a conversation between Guney and two agents of MIT, arranging the assassination. While the tape could not be verified, an internal document allegedly from MIT, published in the Turkish press, also seemed to indicate MIT’s involvement in the killings. MIT responded by claiming that the tape was part of a plot to discredit them because of their role in pushing forward the peace process.62

  Rudaw accused the French police of foot-dragging in the investigation to avoid offending Turkey. In July 2015, the case was cleared to go to trial. Le Monde said Guney’s friends described him as a right-wing Turkish nationalist and the French police said he had a direct phone line to the Turkish secret service, which refused to let them interview one of the people he had called. “For the first time ever an official inquiry has implicated a foreign intelligence service in a political murder committed in France,” said Radio France Internationale.63

  The assassinations did not immediately destroy the peace talks; they dragged on for several more years, but brought no result because, while Turkish politicians frequently spoke of peace, they failed to address specific Kurdish demands for human rights. Meanwhile, a broad-based movement for Kurdish autonomy grew in strength.

  International Women’s Day celebration, Qamishlo, Cizire Canton, Rojava, 2015.

  CHAPTER 6

  Democratic Autonomy in Turkey and Syria

  THE MOVEMENT FOR democratic autonomy in southeastern Turkey began in 2005, when people in the Association of Communities in Kurdistan (KCK)—the umbrella organization of groups in the PKK network—started experimenting with local programs that could test their theories in practice. These programs brought cadre to work with recently urbanized, very poor peasants whose villages had been destroyed. Americans would call what they were doing community organizing, setting up organs of self-rule and decision-making from the bottom up. This work represented a huge change in approach for an organization that had been dedicated to revolution through people’s war.

  Though Turkey had expected the PKK to fall apart without its leader, it was actually strengthened by the struggle that developed after Ocalan’s arrest. Now that he was in prison, Ocalan’s tremendous intellectual strengths could be focused on long-range political strategy rather than tactical and organizational questions which others could handle as well as he. This meant that the collective leadership that every revolution needs had more room to emerge.

  As Aliza Marcus put it, “Ocalan had created a system that was able to function as if he were present even when he is not. Day-to-day leadership passed to a small cadre of loyal senior commanders who had been with Ocalan since he began organizing the PKK in the mid-1970s. It did not matter that Ocalan could no longer weigh in on the daily details of military targets and political plans. In many ways, it was even better not to have him so closely involved.”1

  The Kurdish liberation movement’s political transformation continued to evolve in counterpoint to the armed struggle, the civil resistance, and electoral politics. From the relationship among them, a new vision developed for bringing democracy and autonomy to the Kurds.

  Shortly after the PKK split in 2004, when the party leadership in Qandil restarted the armed struggle, the Kurdish ex-parliamentarians Leyla Zana, Orhan Dogan, Hamit Dicle, and Selim Sadak were released from prison. The European Court of Human Rights had ruled against their prosecution. Since Turkey still wanted to join the EU, it staged a face-saving retrial in which the sentence was reaffirmed, and then the High Court ordered them all released on a technicality.

  Zana’s first act was to call for a “new page” in Kurdish-Turkish relations, beginning with another six-month ceasefire. The leadership in Qandil immediately rejected her call, and some predicted there would be a breach between the PKK and the parliamentarians. But this was not what the popular movement wanted. When Zana returned to her home base in Diyarbakir, she was greeted by an ecstatic crowd shouting PKK slogans and calling for Ocalan’s release. The message was they loved the parliamentarians, they loved the PKK, and they wanted unity.

  “Her return to the southeastern Turkish city of Diyarbakir was triumphant, yet illustrated the extremely fine line she and her close supporters must now tread,” said The Washington Report. “Upon Zana’s release, Turkish commentators of a more liberal stripe wondered if she might not be the one person who could turn around decades of fighting and produce a nonviolent Kurdish nationalist movement based within the Turkish state. This may well be Zana’s intention—and [that] of a group of Kurdish intellectuals around her. If so, it is an extraordinarily difficult objective. To put it bluntly, she may end up shot by both sides.”2

  The next year Zana and the other Kurdish deputies founded the Democratic Society Party (DTP) as the successor to their old party, DEHAP, which had been banned. In the July 2007 parliamentary election, the Democratic Society Party won twenty-two seats, enough to allow its members to function as a caucus. The Kurdish liberation movement now had a legal above-ground party that would actually turn out to have some muscle.3

  Meanwhile, the PKK had committed itself to a line that emphasized flexible tactics: keeping the possibility of armed resistance alive while stressing the need for peace negotiations, and working with the new electoral party. Together the PKK, the parliamentary group, and local activists worked out a bottom-up democratic strategy that combined education, cultural work, provision of services, and the development of alternative structures to bypass the official ones of the Turkish government.

  In this they took direction from a new expansiveness in Ocalan’s thinking. One of his first essays, written as part of his appeal to the European Court of Human Rights and released in 2005, was titled the “Declaration of Democratic Confederalism in Kurdistan.” It focused on community organizing, with a clear statement of how such local work would relate to the Turkish state, laying out a profoundly radical reorientation of PKK politics.

  “The Middle East is going through a period of conflicts and chaos in what has been deemed the Third World War and at the centre of these conflicts and contradictions is Kurdistan,” he wrote. “Despite attempts to maintain the former political status quo and the endeavours of the forces of global capital to find solutions in line with their own interests, the peoples seek the development of their own democratic systems based on freedom and to overcome the current situation of chaos and conflict.”

  Ocalan further developed his thinking about the nation-state, arguing that the UN didn’t work because the model of the nation-state was obsolete and had become an obstacle to progress, as demonstrated by the Gulf War and the US invasion of Iraq. “The only way out of this situation is to establish a democratic confederal system that w
ill derive its strength directly from the people, and not from globalisation based on nation-states.”

  Ocalan’s general ideas about organization and democracy became central to the practical program worked out by the movement itself. In October 2007, following its electoral breakthrough, the Democratic Society Party called a conference to form a new mass organization: the Democratic Society Congress. The conference brought Kurdish representatives from every part of Turkey to Diyarbakir to discuss what they called democratic autonomy, which, like Ocalan’s “democratic confederalism,” was a bottom-up, participatory, culturally diverse method of getting things done. Joost Jongerden and Ahmet Hamdi Akkaya, historians of the PKK, reported that the congress “called for radical reforms in Turkey’s political and administrative structure in order to ensure democratisation and to develop problem-solving approaches for which the local level should be strengthened. Instead of autonomy based on ‘ethnicity’ or ‘territory’, it suggested regional and local structures which allow for the expression of cultural differences.”4

  Party activists immediately began to organize local councils and, by the next local elections, two years later, these were strong enough to successfully encourage people to boycott the electoral rallies of Turkey’s ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP). In March 2009, the Democratic Society Party won control of nearly one hundred local governments, including Diyarbakir and seven other important cities. This was almost twice as many as they had won two years earlier.5

  Such a rapid political rise made the AKP and other conservative parties that depended on the Kurdish vote extremely nervous, and a new wave of repression began, described by Aliza Marcus: “In December 2009, the constitutional court shut down the Democratic Society Party for allegedly helping the PKK. (It reopened as the Peace and Democracy Party or BDP.) Thirty-seven senior executives of the party, including two parliamentarians, were banned from politics for five years. On October 18, Turkish prosecutors in Diyarbakir opened the trial of 152 political party executives and members, including eight sitting mayors, charged with working for the PKK. It seems Turkey is having trouble differentiating between peaceful dissent and armed violence.”6