A Road Unforeseen

by Meredith Tax

  22McDowall, Modern History, 192.

  23McDowall, Modern History, 192–200.

  24McDowall, Modern History, 207.

  25McDowall, Modern History, 208–9.

  26Erdem Yoruk, “Turkey: Kurds, the working class, and the new left,” Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal, June 6, 2015, http://links.org.au/node/4457.

  27Aliza Marcus, Blood and Belief: The PKK and the Kurdish Fight for Independence (New York: New York University Press, 2007), 24.

  28Marcus, Blood and Belief, 28–35.

  29Alex de Jong, “Kurdish Autonomy Between Dream and Reality [Interview with Joost Jongerden],” Roar Magazine, June 4, 2015, http://roarmag.org/2015/06/kurdish-autonomy-jongerden-interview/.

  30Marcus, Blood and Belief, 38–41.

  31McDowall, Modern History, 421.

  32Joost Jongerden and Ahmet Hamdi Akkaya, “Born from the Left: The making of the PKK,” in Nationalism and Politics in Turkey: Political Islam, Kemalism and the Kurdish Issue, ed. Marlies Casier and Joost Jongerden (London: Routledge, 2011), 10, footnote 6, https://www.academia.edu/376932/Born_from_the_Left_the_making_of_the_PKK.

  33Marcus, Blood and Belief, 56–8.

  34Chris Kutschera, “Turkey: Leyla Zana, the only Kurdish woman MP,” The Middle East, October 1993, http://chris-kutschera.com/A/leyla_zana.htm.

  35“About Leyla Zana,” Writings from prison (Watertown MA: Bluecrane Books, 1999), http://www.hist.net/kieser/ma11/About_Leyla_Zana.html; Kutschera, “Leyla Zana.”

  36Kutschera, “Leyla Zana,” 1993.

  37Kutschera, “Leyla Zana,” 1993.

  38Aysegul Sert, “A Woman, a Kurd, and an Optimist,” The New York Times, February 19, 2013, http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/20/world/europe/20iht-letter20.html?_r=0.

  39“About Leyla Zana,” 1999.

  40Kutschera, “Leyla Zana,” 1993.

  Chapter 3: Insurrection and Genocide

  1David McDowall, A Modern History of the Kurds, (New York: I.B.Tauris, New York: 2004), 261–274.

  2David L. Phillips, The Kurdish Spring: A New Map of the Middle East (New Brunswick: Transaction, 2015), 36.

  3Interview with Said Aburish, “The Survival of Saddam: Secrets of his Life and Leadership,” Frontline, PBS, January 2000, http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/saddam/interviews/aburish.html.

  4McDowall, Modern History, 343–356.

  5Middle East Watch, Genocide in Iraq: The Anfal Campaign Against the Kurds (New York: 1993), http://www.hrw.org/reports/1993/iraqanfal/ANFALINT.htm.

  6Middle East Watch, Genocide in Iraq, 1993.

  7Dave Johns, “The Crimes of Saddam Hussein: 1988, the Anfal Campaign,” PBS Frontline, January 24, 2006, http://www.pbs.org/frontlineworld/stories/iraq501/events_anfal.html.

  8Middle East Watch, Genocide in Iraq, 1993.

  9McDowall, Modern History, 362–3.

  10Aburish, Frontline, 2000.

  11Phillips, Kurdish Spring, 41.

  12McDowall, Modern History, 371–2.

  13“Endless Torment: The 1991 Uprising in Iraq and Its Aftermath,” Human Rights Watch, June 1991, http://www.hrw.org/reports/1992/Iraq926.htm.

  14McDowall, Modern History, 373.

  15Phillips, Kurdish Spring, 42.

  16Ismet G. Imset, “The PKK: Freedom Fighters or Terrorists,” American Kurdish Information Network, December 7, 1995, 22–3, http://kurdistan.org/the-pkk-freedom-fighters-or-terrorists/.

  17Aliza Marcus, Blood and Belief: The PKK and the Kurdish Fight for Independence (New York: New York University Press, 2007), 83–5.

  18Joost Jongerden and Ahmet Hamdi Akkaya, “Born from the Left: The making of the PKK,” in Nationalism and Politics in Turkey: Political Islam, Kemalism and the Kurdish Issue, ed. Marlies Casier and Joost Jongerden (London: Routledge, 2011), 130.

  19Che Guevara, “Message to the Tricontinental,” Che Guevara Internet Archive, https://www.marxists.org/archive/guevara/1967/04/16.htm.

  20Walter Isaacson, Kissinger: A Biography (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2005), 160.

  21Marcus, Blood and Belief, 70.

  22Marcus, Blood and Belief, 79–82.

  23Jongerden and Akkaya, “Born from the Left,” 132; Martin van Bruinessen, “Between Guerilla Warfare and Political Murder: The Workers’ Party of Kurdistan,” MERIP, 153, July-August 1988, http://www.merip.org/mer/mer153/between-guerrilla-warfare-political-murder.

  24Marcus, Blood and Belief, 97.

  25Martin van Bruinessen, Kurdish Ethno-Nationalism versus Nation-Building States: Collected Articles, (Istanbul: ISIS, 2000), 5, http://www.let.uu.nl/~Martin.vanBruinessen/personal/publications/index.html.

  26Marcus, Blood and Belief, 109–10.

  27Jongerden and Akkaya, “Born from the Left,” 137.

  28Marcus, Blood and Belief, 89–96.

  29Marcus, Blood and Belief, 118–9.

  30Van Bruinessen, “Between Guerrilla Warfare and Political Murder,” 1988.

  31Olivier Grojean, “The Production of the New Man Within the PKK,” European Journal of Turkish Studies, July 2014, http://ejts.revues.org/4925. The article was originally published in French in 2008 by the same journal: http://ejts.revues.org/2753.

  32Hamit Bozarslan, “Between integration, autonomization and radicalization. Hamit Bozarslan on the Kurdish Movement and the Turkish Left,” European Journal of Turkish Studies, 14, 2012, http://ejts.revues.org/4663.

  33Marcus, Blood and Belief, 135.

  34van Bruinessen, “Between Guerrilla Warfare and Political Murder,” 1988.

  35Grojean, “New Man,” 7. Selim Curukkaya was a founding member of the PKK who joined its core group in 1974; he left the PKK in 1992 after a disagreement with Ocalan and now lives in Germany. He is the author of a memoir about the PKK that has not been translated into English, and a prison memoir translated as Sing That Song, an excerpt of which can be found online at http://www.epubli.de/shop/buch/39397/excerpt.

  36For Ocalan’s reflections, see Chapters 7 and 9 of Prison Writings: The PKK and the Kurdish Question in the 21st Century (London: Transmedia Publications, 2011); there is actually a section called “Conspiracies and the Course of History.” For criticisms by ex-PKK members see van Bruinessen, “Guerrilla Warfare and Political Murder,” 1998; and Marcus, Blood and Belief.

  37Marcus, Blood and Belief, 115–17.

  38Chris Kutschera, “Turkey: Leyla Zana, the only Kurdish Woman MP,” The Middle East, October 1993, http://chris-kutschera.com/A/leyla_zana.htm.

  39Steven Greenhouse, “Paris Talks Seek Attention for Plight of Kurds,” The New York Times, October 15, 1989, http://www.nytimes.com/1989/10/15/world/paris-talks-seek-attention-for-plight-of-kurds.html.

  40Marcus, Blood and Belief, 127.

  41McDowall, Modern History, 378–85.

  42This description comes from 2001 but the situation was the same before and after, until 2003. Isam al-Khafaji, “Almost Unnoticed: Interventions and Rivalries in Iraqi Kurdistan,” MERIP Press Information Note 44, Iraq Watch, January 24, 2001, http://www.iraqwatch.org/perspectives/merip-pin44-012401.htm.

  43Choman Hardi, “Killing in the name of honour,” 2007; Susan McDonald, “Kurdish Women and Self-Determination: A Feminist Approach to International Law,” in Shahrzad Mojab, ed., Women of a Non-State Nation: The Kurds (Mazda Publishers: Costa Mesa, 2001), 150; Mirella Galletti, “Western Images of Women’s Role in Kurdish Society,” in Mojab, ed., 219.

  44Meredith Tax, “World Culture War,” The Nation, May 17, 1999, http://www.thenation.com/doc/19990517/tax.

  45McDowall, Modern History, 388–92.

  46Eric Garris, “Cheney vs. Cheney: Invasion of Iraq Would Lead to ‘Quagmire’,” Antiwar Blog, August 12, 2007, http://antiwar.com/blog/2007/08/12/cheney-vs-cheney-invasion-of-iraq-would-lead-to-quagmire/.

  47Houzan Mahmoud, “A Dark Anniversary,” The Guardian, September 27, 2006, http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2006/sep/27/ontheoccasionof24thseptember.

  48Joost Hilterman, “To Protect or to Project: Iraqi K
urds and Their Future,” MERIP 247, June 2008. file://localhost/, http/::www.merip.org:mer:mer247:protect-or-project.

  49Choman Hardi, “Women’s activism in Iraqi Kurdistan: Achievements and obstacles,” Kurdish Studies, October 2013, http://tplondon.com/journal/index.php/ks/article/view/30.

  50Houzan Mahmoud, “We say no to a medieval Kurdistan,” The Guardian, April 13, 2007, http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2007/apr/13/thefightforsecularisminku1.

  51Nadje Al-Ali and Nicola Pratt, “Between Nationalism and Women’s Rights: The Kurdish Women’s Movement in Iraq,” Middle East Journal of Culture and Communication, July 28, 2011, http://booksandjournals.brillonline.com/content/journals/10.1163/187398611x590192; pdf at http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/pais/people/pratt/publications/.

  52Houzan Mahmoud, “Day 16/16 of Activism Against Gender Violence: Women Rights and War,” Women Living Under Muslim Laws, December 10, 2012, http://houzanmahmoud.blogspot.com/2013/06/this-is-my-interview-for-wluml-website.html.

  53Derek Monroe, “Kurdistan: The Next Autocracy?”, Foreign Policy in Focus, June 13, 2013, fpif.org http://fpif.org/kurdistan_the_next_autocracy/; Kawa Hassan, “Kurdistan’s Politicized Society Confronts a Sultanistic System,” Carnegie Middle East Center, August 18, 2015, http://carnegie-mec.org/2015/08/17/kurdistan-s-politicized-society-confronts-sultanistic-system/ieta.

  54Dexter Filkins, “The Fight of Their Lives,” The New Yorker, September 29, 2014, http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/09/29/fight-lives.

  55Jenna Krajeski, “How the War With ISIS Has Exposed Kurdistan’s Internal Divisions,” The Nation, April 6, 2015, http://www.thenation.com/article/celebrated-its-stability-iraqi-kurdistan-actually-plagued-corruption-nepotism-and-int/.

  56Hassan, “Sultanistic System,” 2015.

  57Anna Fifield, “Corruption fatigue fuels critics of Kurdistan’s twin dynasties,” Financial Times, July 25, 2009, http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/d6dfe914-78b1-11de-bb06-00144feabdc0.html.

  58Monroe, “Next Autocracy,” 2013.

  59Seval Sarukhanyan, “Independent Kurdistan ‘family’ state, unlikely,” Ekurd, December 18, 2015, http://ekurd.net/kurdistan-family-state-unlikely-2015-12-18-.VnQDBg0-WvU.facebook.

  60Hardi, “Women’s Activism,” 2013.

  61Hassan, “Sultanistic System,” 2015.

  62Filkins, “Fight of Their Lives,” 2014; Hassan, “Sultanistic System,” 2015.

  63Shenah Abdullah, “Being Fed Up in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq: The Story You Are Not Told,” Pasewan, October 17, 2015, http://pasewan.com/blog/2015/being-fed-up-in-the-kurdistan-region-of-iraq-the-story-you-are-not-told/.

  64Hardi, “Women’s Activism,” 2013.

  65Nazand Begikhani, “Kurds Develop Gender Studies to Face Fundamentalism,” Huffington Post, May 21, 2015, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/dr-nazand-begikhani/kurds-develop-gender-studies-_b_7344338.html; Christina Asquith, “Under the Knife: Grading Iraqi Kurdistan’s Progress Against Female Genital Mutilation,” Foreign Affairs, July 27, 2015, https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/turkey/2015-07-27/under-knife.

  66Hardi, “Women’s Activism,” 2013; Shahrzad Mojab, “On women’s NGOs in Iraqi Kurdistan: military occupation, ‘imperialist democracy’ and ‘colonial feminism,’” Revolution, July 1, 2007, http://revcom.us/a/094/awtw-ngo-en.html; Lydia Alpízar Duran, “20 Years of Shamefully Scarce Funding for Feminists and Women’s Rights Movements,” AWID, May 14, 2015, http://www.awid.org/news-and-analysis/20-years-shamefully-scarce-funding-feminists-and-womens-rights-movements.

  67Hardi, “Killing in the name of honour,” 2007.

  Chapter 4: The People Take Up the Struggle

  1“PKK Statement to the United Nations,” January 24, 1995, http://www.hartford-hwp.com/archives/51/009.html.

  2“5ème Congrés, Programme du PKK, 1995 (en Anglais),” http://apa.online.free.fr/imprimersans.php3?id_article=746&nom_site=AgencePresseAssociative%28APA%29&url_site=http://apa.online.free.fr.

  3Martin van Bruinessen, “Turkey and the Kurds in the early 1990s: Guerrilla, Counter-insurgency, and Emerging Civil Society,” originally published as “Historical background” and “Developments since Newroz 1993,” Violations of Human Rights in Turkish Kurdistan. Report of a Fact-finding Mission of Pax Christi and the Netherlands Kurdistan Society to Newroz 1993, (Amsterdam: Netherlands Kurdistan Society, 1996), https://kurdishissue.wordpress.com/2014/05/29/1-15/.

  4Eric [Lubbock, Baron] Avebury, Chair of the Parliamentary Human Rights Commission, “Turkey’s Kurdish Policy in the Nineties,” (paper presented at the Middle East Studies Association in Washington, DC, December 1995), http://kurdistan.org/turkeys-kurdish-policy-in-the-nineties/.

  5Lois Whitman, “Destroying Ethnic Identity: The Kurds of Turkey,” Helsinki Watch, July 1990, 2–3, http://www.hrw.org/reports/pdfs/t/turkey/turkey907.pdf.

  6Whitman, “Destroying Ethnic Identity,” 1, 11.

  7Paul White, Primitive Rebels or Revolutionary Modernizers? The Kurdish National Movement in Turkey (London: Zed Books, 2000), 144–46.

  8Aliza Marcus, Blood and Belief: The PKK and the Kurdish Fight for Independence (New York: New York University Press, 2007), 147–49.

  9Marcus, Blood and Belief, 150–51.

  10“The Kurdistan Women’s Liberation Movement for a Universal Women’s Struggle,” Komalen Jinen Kurdistan, March 2011, http://www.kjk-online.org/hakkimizda/?lang=en; Marcus, Blood and Belief, 141–2.

  11Minorities at Risk Project, Chronology for Kurds in Turkey, 2004. http://www.refworld.org/docid/469f38e91e.html.

  12White, Primitive Rebels, 164.

  13Marcus, Blood and Belief, 142–3.

  14David McDowall, A Modern History of the Kurds (London: I.B.Tauris & Co., 2004), 430.

  15Minorities at Risk Project, Chronology. This was when the US-led Coalition finally set up a no-fly zone in Iraqi Kurdistan.

  16Ali Kemal Ozcan, Turkey’s Kurds: A Theoretical Analysis of the PKK and Abdullah Ocalan (London: Routledge, 2006), 15.

  17Marcus, Blood and Belief, 128.

  18McDowall, Modern History, 430.

  19McDowall, Modern History, 430–2; Minorities at Risk Project, Chronology.

  20Lois Whitman, “The Kurds of Turkey: Killings, Disappearances and Torture,” Helsinki Watch, March 1994, https://www.hrw.org/report/1993/03/01/kurds-turkey/killings-disappearances-and-torture.

  21“Counter-Guerilla,” Operation Gladio, December 3, 2012, http://operation-gladio.net/counter-guerilla.

  22Serdar Celik, “Turkey’s Killing Machine: The Contra-Guerrilla Force,” Kurdistan Report No. 17, February-March 1994, http://www.hartford-hwp.com/archives/51/017.html.

  23McDowall, Modern History, 434.

  24It was repressed by the government in the late nineties, when it got out of control, and went quiet for a while but in 2012 founded a legal party called Huda-Par. Kadri Gursel, “New ‘Party of God’ Will Divide Kurdish, Turkish Islamists,” Al-Monitor, December 23, 2012, http://www.al-monitor.com/pulse/originals/2012/al-monitor/hizbullah-turkey-islamist.html.

  25van Bruinessen, “Turkey and the Kurds in the early 1990s,” 1996.

  26Marcus, Blood and Belief, 165. Leyla Zana took the oath in Kurdish again in 2015 and once more it was ruled invalid by the speaker of the house. Gulsen Solaker and Ayla Jean Yackley, “Once-jailed lawmaker again uses Kurdish in Turkey’s parliament,” Reuters, November 17, 2015, http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/11/17/us-turkey-politics-kurds-idUSKCN0T627T20151117.

  27Chris Kutschera, “Turkey: Leyla Zana, the only Kurdish Woman MP,” The Middle East, October 1993, http://chris-kutschera.com/A/leyla_zana.htm.

  28Marcus, Blood and Belief, 207.

  29McDowall, Modern History, 432.

  30Minorities at Risk Project, Chronology; White, Primitive Rebels, 166.

  31Avebury, “Turkey’s Kurdish Policy,” 1995.

  32Marcus, Blood and Belief, 203–5.

  33Marcus, Blood and Belief, 206.

  34Marcus, Blood and Belief, 207–8.

  35Kutsc
hera, “Leyla Zana,” 1993.

  36McDowall, Modern History, 438.

  37Andrew Finkel, “Turkey’s Nagging Whodunit,” The New York Times, December 19, 2012, http://latitude.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/12/19/turkeys-nagging-whodunit/?_r=0.

  38McDowall, Modern History, 438.

  39Marcus, Blood and Belief, 214–20.

  40Ismet G. Imset, “The PKK: Freedom Fighters or Terrorists,” American Kurdish Information Network, December 7, 1995, 3, http://kurdistan.org/the-pkk-freedom-fighters-or-terrorists/; Marcus, Blood and Belief, 221-3.

  41Robert Jensen and Raul Mahajan, “Drain the swamp?” Znet, September 24, 2001, http://uts.cc.utexas.edu/~rjensen/freelance/attack6.htm.

  42Marcus, Blood and Belief, 325–8.

  43“About Leyla Zana,” Writings from prison (Watertown MA: Bluecrane Books, 1999), http://www.hist.net/kieser/ma11/About_Leyla_Zana.html.

  44The stories of some of the conscripts were published in 1998 as oral histories by Nadire Mater, in Mehmed’s Book: Soldiers Who Have Fought in the Southeast Speak Out. The book was censored and she and her publisher, Metis Press, were accused of insulting the military; their trial got international attention and they were acquitted in 2000. The book has been published in English under the title Voices from the Front: Turkish Soldiers on the War with the Kurdish Guerrillas (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005).

  45Imset, “Freedom Fighters or Terrorists,” 1995.

  46Imset, “ Freedom Fighters or Terrorists,” 1995.

  475ème Congrés, Programme du PKK, 1995.

  485ème Congrés, Programme du PKK, 1995.

  49“PKK Fifth Conference Resolutions,” Weşanên Serxwebûn, May 1995, http://theirwords.org/media/transfer/doc/ut_tr_pkk_hpg_1995_07-aebf7c10072070be75858618879b7c88.pdf

  50Marcus, Blood and Belief, 241.

  51“PKK Fifth Conference Resolutions,” 1995.

  52Chris Kutschera, “Kurdistan Turkey: PKK Dissidents Accuse Abdullah Ocalan,” The Middle East Magazine, July 2005, http://www.chris-kutschera.com/A/pkk_dissidents.htm.

  53Chris Kutschera, “Kurdistan Turkey: Abdullah Ocalan’s Last Interview,” The Middle East Magazine, April 1999, http://www.chris.com/A/OcalanLastInterview.htm.

  54Marcus, Blood and Belief, 211, 217–18, 245, 254–5, 260; White, Primitive Rebels or Revolutionary Modernizers:, 109–11. In his lectures, Ocalan offered himself as a positive example of what can be achieved: “Why then can I be so effective? I am currently considered to be a miracle; this is because I revealed the state of ideologylessness and absence of morale in the Kurdish existence within the framework of my personality, and the extent of my own self-realization through this very unveiling corresponded quite easily with the concrete circumstances of this phenomenal social and political existence. In fact, the miraculous quality of every historical leap emanates from such a conjunction.” Ozcan, Turkey’s Kurds, 104.