Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK)

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KURDISTAN WORKERS PARTY (PKK)

Kurdish party in Turkey that fought a guerrilla war for Kurdish independence, 1984–1998.

The PKK (Partiya Karkeren Kurdistan, or Workers' Party of Kurdistan) has been, both ideologically and in its emphasis on violence, the most radical Kurdish political movement ever. During the last two decades of the twentieth century, the PKK was the most formidable opposition force in Turkey, where it was established, waging a bloody guerrilla war from 1984 to 1999 that cost perhaps 35,000 lives. It was and still is also active among the Kurds in the neighboring states, and it became a prominent factor in the Kurdish diaspora.

The PKK came out of one of the radical left tendencies in the Turkish student movement of the early 1970s, when a handful of students at Ankara University, including some Turks as well as Kurds, decided to take up the Kurdish issue and to devote themselves, as they claimed, to the liberation of the oppressed Kurdish people from both national and class oppression. Seeking proximity to the masses they left the university and went to eastern Turkey, where they attempted to mobilize disaffected Kurdish youth against tribal and feudal leaders as well as against the state. In 1978 they formally organized the party, of which they became the political bureau. Abdullah Öcalan (c. 1946–), himself born in the village of Omerli to a poor Kurdish peasant family, became the chairman and soon assumed dictatorial powers in the organization.

At the time of the 1980 military coup in Turkey, the PKK was one of about a dozen Kurdish nationalist organizations and had become notorious through a series of violent conflicts with several of these rival organizations as well as with tribal chieftains. It was the only one of these organizations that was not virtually wiped out in the wake of the coup. The largest mass trials and the heaviest sentences concerned PKK activists, but small armed groups kept resisting arrest and clashing with army and police. Öcalan himself earlier had escaped to Syria; with Palestinian and Syrian support he began organizing proper guerrilla training for his followers, in camps in the Biqa Valley in Lebanon and later in northern Iraq.

In 1984 PKK bands, probably operating from Iraq, carried out their first raids on military positions inside Turkey. In spite of massive counterinsurgency operations, including air raids on suspected PKK camps and repeated invasions of Iraq by ground troops, the PKK managed to expand its area of operations and strike increasingly forcefully deep inside Turkey. Guerrilla bands stayed inside the country for extended periods and locally recruited numerous young fighters. The government mobilized Kurdish militia forces—mostly tribesmen under their own leaders—to fight the PKK; these ultimately numbered over 65,000. The countryside became polarized as both the PKK and the government pressured villagers to take sides and responded brutally to suspected disloyalty.

The 1990s brought great ideological and strategic changes, in part as a result of the PKK's military successes, in part in response to changes in the environment. The party, which had found new supporters and sympathizers among broader strata of Kurdish society, shed its Marxism and adopted a more accommodating attitude toward Islam. It renounced the struggle for a united and independent Kurdistan and aimed instead at a far more modest compromise with the Turkish authorities. It strongly supported such civil society initiatives as human-rights associations, legal pro-Kurdish parties, and village or neighborhood committees, and it attempted, without complete success, to bring them under its control. Realizing that Turkey never would give in to Kurdish demands without pressure from Europe, the PKK gave up its earlier violent protest demonstrations abroad and concentrated on developing an effective international lobby instead. A satellite television station (MED-TV, later MedyaTV) with studios in Belgium that broadcast to the Middle East and Europe provided the PKK with an effective modern means of propaganda and nation-building.

The PKK made various unsuccessful efforts to engage the Turkish authorities in negotiations and several times declared a unilateral cease-fire, but it failed to make a transition from military to political struggle. Counterinsurgency operations in the mid-1990s targeted especially the civilian wing of the Kurdish movement and forced a separation of the PKK from its potential supporters through massive village evacuations. Turkey put increasing political and military pressure on Syria, which had continued supporting the PKK, and secured in 1998 the expulsion of Öcalan. After unsuccessful efforts to find asylum in various European countries, he was hunted down in Kenya in 1999 by Western intelligence services (and according to some accounts, Israeli agents as well) and handed over to Turkish commandos, who flew him to Turkey, which put him on trial for high treason.

During the trial Öcalan renounced most of the ideas the PKK had stood for and ordered the PKK guerrilla fighters to lay down arms. Some disappointed followers turned their back on him, but the remaining political bureau members continued to consider him to be the supreme leader and to follow his orders. Most guerrilla units withdrew from Turkey into northern Iraq; significant numbers later gave themselves up to the Turkish authorities. Öcalan was convicted and sentenced to death in 1999, but this was commuted to life imprisonment in 2002. At a party congress in 2002 the PKK was formally dissolved and transformed into a new organization, KADEK (Congress for Freedom and Democracy in Kurdistan), which vowed to be non-violent and democratic. The congress duly elected Öcalan again as its president. In early 2003 the party still had several thousand armed men and women in Iraqi Kurdistan and at least tens of thousands of active supporters in Kurdistan and the diaspora.

see also kurdish revolts; kurdistan; kurds.