Turkey's Kurds

Preface

There have been many rebellions recorded in Kurdish history, each bearing the ethnic demands of Kurdishness to varying degrees. With the PKK-led movement,1 Kurdish ethnicity has entered into a supra-tribal resistance. It has moved towards becoming a national entity, transcending the societal and geographic boundaries of tribal structures. The major objective of this book is to examine the extent of the party’s organizational share in this process.

In south-east Anatolia, Turkey has been at war with a Kurdish guerrilla army led by the PKK for 15 years. The war started in August 1984, and over 30,000 lives have been lost. The high-profile abduction of Abdullah Öcalan, the leader of the PKK, from Nairobi, Kenya in February 1999, hit the headlines worldwide. Öcalan’s capture, which was aided by an ‘international cooperation’, meant that he became the second ‘Turkish citizen’ since 1923 to feature on the front page of Time magazine. The other was Mustafa Kemal, founder of the Turkish Republic.

Scholars of Kurdish studies, with no exception, talk of Kurdish society’s tribal structure as essential to its social, political and cultural existence. In the related literature, the terms ‘Kurd’ and ‘tribe’ strike one as inseparable twins. Scholars of nationalism do not oppose Gellner’s epigrammatic statement: Tribalism never prospers, for when it does, everyone will respect it as a true nationalism, and no-one will dare call it tribalism’ (1983:87).

Whether or not Kurdish tribalism is prospering in the north of Iraq—thanks to the USled coalition forces’ ‘Operation Iraqi Freedom’—continues to remain a highly dubious question. In the past decade, Kurds of Iraq have reached the threshold of a nation-state2 under the KDP3 and PUK4 by experiencing self-government. The Kurds of Turkey underwent a considerable detribalization under the PKK to the extent that Turkish intelligence sources publicly acknowledged it as ‘a contribution’5 to the social development in the ‘south-east’. In the wake of Saddam’s downfall, attention is increasingly paid to the developing self-rule of Kurds in the ‘Safe Haven’,6 even if it has so far been managed under a double-headed balance.7 Growing grievances from shifting parties towards the controversial interim governing body of Iraq encourages some to fear the probable ‘Lebanonization’ of Iraq (Alkadiri and Toensing 2003), and this in turn threatens the initial assurances concerning the ‘territorial dignity’ of post-Saddam Iraq. Of the recent pile of articles appearing in various journals and papers, the ones pointing to the division of Iraq into three individual states (Sunnis, Shiites and Kurds), which are substantially inspired by the experience of the de facto Kurdistan, are gradually coming to prominence. The ‘unnatural’ state of existing Iraq dominates the fateful worries about her ‘territorial dignity’. Policy-making experts of the region have for some time publicized the ‘unthinkable’ as ‘the only viable strategy’ for—they think—‘the costs of preventing the natural states from emerging had been terrible’:

For decades, the United States has worshiped at the altar of a unified yet unnatural Iraqi state… Washington would have to be very hard-headed and hard-hearted, to engineer this break-up. But such a course is manageable, even necessary, because it would allow us to find Iraq’s future in its denied but natural past.
(Gelb 2003)8

A former US Ambassador to Croatia, Peter W.Galbraith, who contributed to the creation of a safe haven for the Kurds, prophesies that ‘Kurdistan will be virtually independent’.9 Simon Jenkins recommends the break-up of Iraq as ‘the only hope’ for a democratic future: Those who try to do the undoable must also think the unthinkable.’10 Scholars in the field also concede that well over half of the world’s 25 million to 30 million Kurds live in Turkey. The emerging statehood in the ‘South’ (north of Iraq) is, in effect, more vital to the Turkish polity than anything else in Iraq:

Ankara’s biggest concern is no secret: the prevention of a Kurdish nation in northern Iraq. Turkish officials fear a Kurdish state would incite their own Kurdish population leading to a possible uprising as Turkish Kurds express their solidarity with Iraqi Kurds realizing their long-lived dream of statehood.
(Riemer 2003 [26 January])

Turkish officials fear that a Kurdish autonomization of some sort would incite their own Kurdish population, leading to a separation. On the other hand, the ‘indispensability’ of Turkey to the West—especially to the USA—worsens the vicious convolution already there. The question of Turkey’s far larger share of the Kurdish populace is forcing Turkey-US relations into a cul-de-sac more than ever.11 The existing literature on the Kurds of Turkey is confined within the fields of history and power relations of regional/global politics. Kurds are overwhelmingly—and euphemistically—being studied ‘as the “Kurdish Problem” in its intrastate dimensions and as the “Kurdish Question” in its trans-state context’ (Olson 1998:xviii). The studies made so far, on Turkey’s Kurds in particular, do not endeavour to recognize the fact of the population at issue. No complete study of a sociological nature engaging with Kurds exists in the Turkish academic literature. Restricted/biased political approaches constitute virtually the entire overall composition of the intellectual domain in this regard.
Sociological understanding of the societal phenomenon that is there has been lost breath in the generally tense political atmosphere that exists. Turkey’s importance to the West and her self-contained policy towards Kurds have kept the question of ‘Turkish Kurds’
locked in a Pandora’s Box until recently. The book aims to amend this absence.

This book is a modified and updated version of my doctoral dissertation completed in October 2002. Searching for the internal impetus behind the escalation of organizational systems, I attempt to analyse the dynamics of the most recent Kurdish resistance

movement in Turkey. The main focus of analysis is hence the PKK—its ideational and material structure. Because it is the leading entity of the issue, the research focuses on the PKK’s growth (from the late 1970s to the mid-1990s) and its recent shrinkage. Within the framework of the case-study method, much of the research is devoted to answering an indirect question: why wasn’t it the other Kurdish ‘national organizations’ that came to prominence? Asking how the organization became capable of revitalizing the ‘buried’ body of Kurdishness in Anatolia that has been incorporated (in both demographic and geographical terms) into the Turkicized Republic, the study tries to appraise the extent of national and non-national ingredients in the makeup of the movement—the leadership, the grass roots and the masses that give their support.

Ali Kemal Özcan
Cambridge, July 2005