Norman Stone - The Atlantic and Its Enemies

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 Communists 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.

The State responded as it had done since the first Kurdish rebellion in 1925, nominating ‘village guards’, who were given weaponry. These tactics were dangerous, in that the guards themselves might hand over the weaponry, and the PKK specifically attacked them — sometimes wiping out entire families or even villages. The army could hardly defend each and every mountain hamlet, and in the later 1980s it was outmanoeuvred: in much of the south-east, the PKK controlled roads as soon as night fell, and it took the military some time to work out proper tactics. These were harsh — the forced evacuation of hamlets, the population being despatched to towns, especially Diyarbakır, which doubled and trebled in size, with hastily erected tower blocks and tent cities. Foreign journalists, seeing the resultant overcrowding and misery, blamed the Turkish state, and its officials, in turn, were sometimes clumsy in handling this — expelling critics or even putting them on trial. Martyrs were created. The wife of the mayor of Diyarbakır, Leyla Zana, demonstrated upon taking the oath in parliament: she used Kurdish and created an uproar (though she went on to take the oath formally in Turkish). She received an eleven-year sentence, and the European parliament took up her cause. All of this allowed the PKK to make the running when it came to propaganda in foreign countries, particularly in Germany (which tolerated the PKK networks), France (where an Institut kurde was set up) and Belgium, which stood host to a Kurdish parliament in exile that was in effect controlled by Apo (though in the end he worked against it). In Sweden there was an ostensibly enlightened policy, of allowing immigrant children education in their own languages. Absurd preaching teams from Sweden then arrived in south-eastern Turkey, with a view to standardizing Kurdish, in a country where basic textbooks were lacking.

But there was also an ostensibly non-terrorist Kurdish political element, which gained parliamentary representation in the early 1990s when it struck an electoral pact with a left-wing party. It itself was promoted by the leader of the Türk tribe, Ahmet, using the tribal patronage machine as his brothers had earlier (1967) been involved with the Republican or Justice Party, depending upon the swings of local patronage. Twenty-four members of the ruling family had been killed in vendettas, and Ahmet Türk was himself imprisoned on suspicion of concealing a member of the PKK. However, he resurfaced as a purportedly moderate, culturally oriented, would-be politician. Through a political group that called itself variously ‘People’s Democratic Party’ or ‘Democratic People’s Party’, demands ostensibly of a purely cultural nature could be advanced — arguments for education in Kurdish, for instance, which appeared to be entirely reasonable but in practice would have required the creation of a standardized Kurdish with a far bigger vocabulary, i.e. almost the same creative effort for a Kurdish State that had gone into the making of the Turkish Republic itself. Why, thought most Turks and Kurds, bother? The party operated summer schools in Romania. There was a further problem, in that a good part of the Kurdish population of the south-east was strongly religious, and there was fighting between militant Islamic groups and the PKK, which was, at least in the first decade, very strongly secular, and dedicated to the emancipation of women. One prominent Kurd, Abdülmelik Fırat, grandson of Sheikh Said, might have served as overall spokesman for the cause, but the secularism of the PKK put him off. In the later 1990s the Turkish Kurds in the south-east divided between nationalists, with PKK connections of this or that depth, and Islamists; elsewhere in Turkey their votes simply went to the existing Turkish parties. In all of this, Greece was well to the fore. There were training camps on Greek soil, and Greece was the favoured place for PKK people to be smuggled through, via Belgrade, to Syria. Rich businessmen, army officers and politicians all took a hand and in the end Öcalan was kidnapped by Turkish military intelligence from the Greek embassy in Kenya. Western Europe played its part. The Kurdish cause was taken up by some French people, including Danielle Mitterrand, in 1989, in connection with the revolutionary bicentennial. In Italy the Communist network could be used, as was shown when Öcalan in 1998 was forced out of Syria and tried to find refuge among allies in Italy, the government of which, for a time, was craven and would not expel him, despite Interpol most-urgent arrest warrants. There was an element of smuggling of people and of drugs into western Europe which made the PKK merge with existing criminal networks, and a constant barrage of propaganda put the Turks on the defensive. They themselves did try manfully to respond to such Western criticism. For instance, one result of the film Midnight Express was for Turkish prisons to be run on liberal, reformist lines, the prisoners assembling, running much of their own life, and equipped ultimately with e-mails or cellular telephones. In the outcome, they became little Marxist universities. Eventually, the authorities felt strong enough to decree a change of regime, with single cells, where prisoners could not be intimidated. There followed hunger strikes by people whom the terrorists simply nominated. Later, as the cause became more desperate, there was a similar attempt at suicide-bombings, and various girls would again be nominated to pretend to be pregnant, and then blow themselves up against a state target. These were not in fact successful — the girls lost their nerve, blew themselves up in the wrong place, or simply could not go along with it. Of a dozen suicide bombings, only two succeeded. There had been a moment, in the early 1990s, when Turgut Özal appeared to be suggesting some sort of Turkish-Kurdish confederal arrangement and there was even a long wrangle in the cabinet, when the éminence grise of Turkish politics, Kamran İnan, himself of prominent Kurdish origin (he was related to the Bucaks), argued the cause. Özal’s suggestion, if in fact it was seriously advanced, was very unpopular. But it would have been a good thing.