by Norman Stone
Iraq came up. Saddam Hussein was possessed of megalomania, and the country that he ran, an artificial creation from the First World War, contained dissident elements, held together by oil money. He stood between Turkey and Iran, which, run by megalomaniacs, was Shia, from a branch of Islam so different as almost to constitute a different religion. The key factor was that, in northern Iraq, there were Kurds. That opened up, for Turkey, an enormous problem, the greatest that she had had to deal with. The Kurds are a people who never took off as a nation. There are perhaps 25 million of them, spread over Iran, Iraq, Syria and Turkey, where they formed the bulk of the population of the south-east, bordering Iraq. Kurdish, like Iranian or Hindi, is an Indo-European language, and some of the words are recognizable to a western European (‘new’ is nu; ‘me’ is min; ‘two’ is du; ‘four’ is char, cf. French quatre; ‘valley’ is dal, cf. German Tal; and the grammar is fairly familiar). In Xenophon’s Anabasis people called Curtaroi are mentioned. His 10,000 Greek mercenaries, unpaid, unwept and unsung, were finding their way back home from fifth-century BC Persia, came to a river in some mountains, and found Curtaroi offering attitude on the opposite bank. They wondered what to do, encamped. Next morning, they found the Curtaroi engaged in fisticuffs, and crept past towards the sea. Nearly two millennia later, at the time of the Crusades, the Arabic Ekrad (plural for ‘Kurd’) were well-documented as mountain warriors, of whom the great Saladin was one (‘Selahattin’ in Turkey is generally a Kurdish name). But they were split up over various states, and the language was never standardized. It has divided into several variants, and though a specialist can recognize what is being said, people on the ground have to communicate in Turkish or Arabic once they leave their home area. There were historical differences noticeable even in the sixteenth century, as Kurdish emirates fought; and there was even rivalry between the two chief Moslem brotherhoods of the area, the Kadiri and Nakshibendi. One of the chief Kurdish elements in Iraq, the Behdinandi, simply refused, under the British Mandate, to use the Sorani Kurdish that was expected, and preferred Arabic. The outstanding pioneers of these matters were Russian and British, in this case D. N. McKenzie. In Turkey the chief Kurdish language is called Kırmanç, but it is split into dialects (Dimili) and there is another version, possibly a different language altogether, called Zaza. There are theories to the effect that the Zaza-speaking Kurds are not even of Kurdish origin. Some may even have been Armenian, and when the Turkish army found PKK — Kurdistan Workers’ Party — corpses, these were sometimes not circumcised. At any rate, regardless of the linguistic divisions, many Kurdish parents did not want their children educated in anything other than Turkish, so that they would get on in life. In Van, in the 1960s, there was the moving sight of young men studying in the street lights, with a view to just getting on. Most did: there was intermarriage, and, whatever was said about the Kurdish question later on, most Kurds voted for ordinary Turkish parties and, if they went into politics, shot up that tree. Turkey was simply so far above Iraq or Iran in terms of interest and development that no Kurd in his senses would have wanted to live anywhere else. However, something went badly wrong. A terrorist movement, the PKK, developed, and made the running for the latter part of Özal’s reign.
The Turkish government and army were blamed for this, but it was simply not an easy question, and the Kurds themselves did not know what the answer was. In the end, this had to do with a more general failure, that of the Turkish Left. It had had its chance in the 1960s, and it was even not far from power in the 1970s, when Ecevit ran things. However, it did not know what to do with the Kurds, regarding them as a weird amalgam of Armenians and gypsies. It did not help that Kurdish society (many parts were much less than that whole) was significantly different, in that Şafi Islam reigned, harsher than the Turks’ Sunni version. Ordinary Kurds (there were many extraordinary Kurds) behaved differently towards women, especially, who did not rate very highly: polygamy went on, though given religious rather than legal sanction, and there was a great demographic problem. This imposed a terrible strain on every sort of infrastructure, and matters were again complicated because the south-east of Turkey worked by dry agriculture. The State had responded with a scheme for great dams to divert the water of the two biblical rivers, the Euphrates and the Tigris, towards irrigation and hydro-electricity, but this would take time, and in any case the profits went towards the tribal chiefs, the Agas, who mainly ran affairs in these parts, clan-fashion. The Turkish Left were no good at these matters, and bear some responsibility for the troubles that followed. Sprigs of Istanbul grandee families, Henri Barkey or Çağlar Keyder, thinking beardedly about their own local version of Eighteenth Brumaire and looking to jobs in America, could hardly be bothered, at the Ankara School of Political Science, with some hairy peasant from Siverek called Abdullah Öcalan.
Öcalan was a megalomaniac, given to comparing himself with Mao and Lenin. His family background was not entirely unlike Stalin’s, in that he had a weak, henpecked (sılık) father and a bossy (Turkish) mother. His first enthusiasms (like Stalin’s) were religious. His first intention was to work in the State, but as a student he encountered Kurdish nationalism. This had complicated origins. There had always been uprisings by Kurds against the State but they did not have a nationalist side until late in the day. There was no doubt a vague idea of Kurdishness, but the realities were religious and tribal. The Republic, declared in 1923, was secular, and the last Caliph was dismissed in 1924. In 1925, and again in the 1930s, there were Kurdish uprisings, the last one (in Dersim, from 1936 to 1938) put down with much harshness. On all occasions, the State used tribes against each other — they had fought all along, whether over access to water, or over some hereditary grievance such as sheep-stealing, and in any case some were strictly Moslem, adhering to the Şafi version of Islamic law, which required its adepts to perform ritual ablutions if they had been in the same room as a foreigner or a woman, while others were Alevi. By the later sixties, Kurdish banners figured in student demonstrations. In 1969 ‘eastern revolutionary cultural hearths’ were set up in Kurdish towns, but after the coup of 12 March 1971 the organizers fled to Europe.
Öcalan went on to a surveyors’ school and then the department of Political Science at Ankara University, which had been a training ground for the bureaucratic elite of republican Turkey (it was called Mülkiye, after an Ottoman equivalent, but the original inspiration had been the modernizing École des Sciences Politiques in Third Republican France, also a country that took a very robust view of peasant dialects). As the university civil war of that period got under way, he was associated with the Left (and spent seven months in prison after the coup of 1971) and took up with his Krupskaya, Kesire Yıldırım; but no-one remembered anything much about him. The university Left, usually products of the professional class and as likely as not to regard themselves as way above village Kurds with a background in surveying, probably played its part in driving him towards Kurdish nationalism. They seem to have regarded him as a possible police agent as he talked ‘in a very gauche [toy] way’ about a Kurdish state, and the Turkish Left hardly bothered to include Kurdish banderoles.
The custom, at that time, was for small student groups to gather at the Çubuk reservoir park outside Ankara, where families might go for excursions at weekends — reservoir parks, as with Rooken Glen outside Glasgow, being a hallmark of progressive towns, but in this case out of sight of the police. There, on 21 March 1973, the PKK appears to have been founded, although its formal establishment came a few years later, in a village of Lice district, in the south-east, in Diyarbakır province, on 27 November 1978. Before this, Öcalan sent off representatives to the Kurdish east, there to spread the word, and setting up assorted protection rackets. For this, they used the grievances of one tribe against another, such as, for instance, the government’s grants of agricultural machinery to one rather than another — in this case, on the Syrian border, the Süleyman and Paydaş clans, respectively for and against the government.
Here are Dostoyevsky’s Demons: a gathering of perhaps two dozen people, most of them vaguely educated (Selim Çürükkaya, an interesting defector, says he was very impressed by Öcalan’s reading: he himself had struggled up from a village, and Alevi-Kurdish, Zaza-speaking, background, and had managed to graduate from sheep-watching to a high school at Mersin on the south coast; another was a schoolteacher of Laz background, i.e. Moslem Georgian, from the Black Sea coast). Of the original members, seven were killed on Öcalan’s orders as ‘agents’, five fled, and were denounced as traitors, and another five, though not classed as traitors, were downgraded. Two committed suicide, and another was murdered by a rival group in northern Iraq. Öcalan’s own wife fled, with another of the originals, and set up a rival PKK (‘Vejin’, though, here, for translation, the Indo-European is not helpful) in Paris. The first action occurred in July 1979, at Kırbaşı, a village in Hilvan. The area was run by a tribal chief, Mehmet Celal Bucak, who was also deputy, for the Justice Party, of Siverek. The PKK’s strategy — following the Maoist one — was to ally with one tribe against another; the Bucaks, strong in the Urfa region, were at odds with the Türks. The PKK blamed ‘feudalism’ for the plight of the Kurds, and decided to make an example. In the event, they attacked a Bucak during an iftar, the fast-breaking dinner celebrated in Ramazan, and wounded the chief, though they also killed a maid and a small boy. The main activity thereafter was partly to fight the Turkish Left, but also to levy a tribute on the timber trade of a government minister. At the turn of 1979-80, as the military stepped up arrests, Öcalan became alarmed, and before the coup of 12 September 1980 he moved to Syria. At this point the PKK became heavily involved in the politics of the Middle East.
In fact his style became very much that of a Middle East dictator. The truth was that Öcalan himself despised the Kurds as zavallı, ‘poor mutts’, who could only be kept in place by Stalinist methods. In 1980, established in Syria, he took up links with one of the two large Kurdish factions in Iraq, Celal Talebani’s PUK, based on the Iranian side (and using its own language), and he opened up a training camp in the Bekaa valley in Lebanon, copying his ways from the PLO. Its attitudinizing leader, Yasser Arafat, had been allowed to address even the United Nations, generously conceding that he would deposit his revolver on the lectern as distinct from leaving it in its holster. Kurds: Palestinians? For Turks and most Kurds, unimaginable, but how should the problem be dealt with? Games were then played, the basic reality being that the Kurds moved in hundreds of thousands to western and central Turkey, and became assimilated. But the south-east remained a problem.
The Turkish state operated an alliance, never entirely reliable, with the other Iraqi Kurdish group, Mustafa Barzani’s PDK — Kurdistan Democratic Party — and four-cornered fighting might then develop; there were also problems, from time to time, with the Syrians, who sometimes opposed Saddam Hussein, with whom the PKK had, on the whole, good relations. In this atmosphere, Öcalan built up his own cult of personality, and ran affairs very strictly. One former close associate, Selim Çürükkaya, defected in the end, and wrote memoirs. He had come from a village, struggled up to the teachers’ training school at Tunceli, and spent eleven years in prison, there organizing hunger strikes. Then he was smuggled out, via Greece and Serbia, to Öcalan’s camp — the ‘Mahsun Korkmaz Military Academy’, where there was much marching about by young women in camouflage suits and boots. His estranged wife was there, and she had turned into a Rosa Klebb: she ticked him off for smoking, saying that no-one smoked when the Leader was present; she even ticked him off for crossing his legs, such informality being an offence against discipline. The camp was full of informers, and it had its own prison. The place was, generally, run by men who, in Turkish prisons, had not ‘resisted’, as Selim Çürükkaya claimed he had done, but had obeyed orders (a small version of the problems that arose in the satellite European countries after 1945, between Communists who had spent their time in Moscow and Communists who had been part of the anti-Nazi resistance movements). Öcalan himself was puritanical in sexual matters, though he did surround himself with a little group of fanaticized young women; the camp even had its own Orwellian language, imprisonment being called uygulama or ‘treatment’, and there were provisions for self-criticism sessions, with detailed questionnaires being served on people who had emerged from prison, as to their conduct before and during the imprisonment. There was even a version of the witch-hunt against Trotskyists in the Stalin era — one Mahmut Şener, then exiled in Germany. There was a grotesque leadership cult, Öcalan issuing a sort of catechism, comparing himself with the Mahdi, with evocations, in the Party Central School, of ‘The way of life of Apo, the way of work of Apo, the way of striking [enemies] of Apo’; after grandly named congresses (‘Congress of Victory’) there would be purges and liquidations. Apo was supposed, in Turkish, to mean ‘Daddy’, but it was also the name for the German terrorists of the seventies, Ausserparlamentarische Opposition (‘non-parliamentary opposition’), and the PKK’s prose was very Germanic.
The PKK learned its tactics from a school that, by 1984, was already quite venerable. It had a political wing, ERNK, which took twelve of the sixty-five seats in the exile parliament, a dummy body which reflected the Greek Communists’ ways in the Second World War, of ELAS/ETAM. But there were other instances. Mao Tse-tung had matched his Communist guerrillas with village politics, and General Vo Nguyen Giap in Vietnam had famously succeeded by similar methods. In the case of the PKK, tribal politics had a similar part, but this time there was a different element, in that small-town intelligentsia were recruited. Schoolteachers, emerging from the peasantry, had had a role in terrorism as far back as the Russian anarchists and the Armenians who had learned from them. The argument was that atrocity would cause counter-atrocity. The Turkish authorities would overreact against simple villagers, whose sympathies would then be with the rebels. Later, in the 1990s, there was also forced recruitment of boys and young men, just as had happened in the Greek civil war, who could be made to take the blame for an atrocity. It often happened that, upon capture by the army, they would spend time in Diyarbakır prison or elsewhere. There, they would receive lessons in Marxism. This had been a device of Balkan Communists between the wars, and, both in Greece and in Yugoslavia in the early thirties, the Comm
unists took a fifth and more of the vote. In Greece, for instance, they took votes from the Macedonian minority, from the dock workers of Salonica, from the tobacco-growers of Thrace and from children of the refugees who had arrived from Anatolia. Add the sons of some rich and educated families, and you have a model for the Communism of the whole area. A great book, Eleni, describing how, in a village in north-western Greece, the locals could be made far more radical than they might otherwise have been, is the prototype and, curiously enough, after Orthodox services in Greece collections would solemnly be taken to buy rockets for the PKK. Its managers had learned from earlier practices, and they behaved atrociously. In 1985, in a village of Çatak district in Van, they killed a man and his two baby daughters, and then poured paraffin on the house to burn it down, with the wife and two children, of eight and ten. In February 1987, using Turkish uniforms as camouflage, they shot up four houses, in Şırnak, when the villagers guessed who they were, the women and children fleeing. Road ambushes, even stopping local trains, were frequent enough in Bingöl and Bitlis, the travellers being killed with Kalashnikovs. Another speciality became economic targets — the ferro-chrome works and their clerks. Obviously, from the PKK point of view, the more economic distress, the better. Another method was to prevent education by the simple enough device of shooting schoolteachers — over one hundred. In April 1990, in a village near Elazığ, they attacked a primary school, roped in the teachers’ wives and children, and shut them up in the headmaster’s room. Then they killed a teacher. His wife, pregnant, was spared, but when she said that she did not want to survive, they obliged. There was another element. In accordance with Kurdish ways, young men were married off very early, produced two or three children, did their military service, took a second wife, and then a third one. The boys of the first marriage found their mother last in the queue, old before her time; children of the more prosperous years were favoured. According to Turkish military intelligence, the PKK recruited such boys. Of these, there were many. Naturally, local poverty helped the PKK, which then perpetuated it — shooting up chicken farms, for instance.
