‌One

The Kurdish Issue: Made in Turkey

The Kurdish Insurgency

‘Why do you call it the Kurdish problem?’ an American novelist had once asked me, trying, genuinely, to grasp the subject. ‘It is like calling a person a headache.’ When I think about the Kurds in Turkey, it is never my head but my heart that aches. There are around 30 million Kurds in the world, primarily in Iran, Iraq, Syria and Turkey. The majority of them – 14.7 million – live in Turkey.1 And they have a problem. Even acknowledging the fact that Kurds have a problem was a huge step for Turkey to take, one which took decades. Thus the term ‘Kurdish problem’ does not disturb them; on the contrary.

Many people draw comparisons between the Irish Republican Army (IRA) and Kurdish violent separatist group the PKK, which was founded in 1978 on the premises that the Kurds of Turkey have long been persecuted by the state, that Kurdistan – divided into four countries: Turkey, Iraq, Syria and Iran – was colonized by regional ruling elites and that it should be first liberated and then united.2 Between 1969 and 2010, the Northern Ireland conflict claimed 3,568 lives.3 In Turkey, 35,576 people have died in clashes between the Turkish army and the PKK since the 1980s.4 The Kurdish conflict – or problem or issue, call it what you will – is one of the most violent and long-standing intrastate conflicts in the world today.

There is a plethora of descriptions regarding the Kurdish problem, many of which reflect the political and strategic position of the person or group making them. For the majority of Kurds, it is a plight that befell them as a consequence of demanding their birthright from the state. They were Kurds, they were squeezed and they wanted to be recognized as a distinct population living in Turkey. Simply put, they wanted to be who they are. On the other hand, for the Turkish government, the Kurdish problem was a case of terrorism, embodied in the PKK’s deadly assaults on Turkish soldiers and police officers, predominantly in south-east Turkey. For some, solving the Kurdish problem means giving up Turkey’s land to Kurds so that they can build their own state. For others, Turkey will only truly be unified if the Kurdish problem is solved.

Undoubtedly, the Kurdish issue is a political problem that demands a political solution. It is rooted in the demand for Kurdish self-determination, which has been denied them since the fall of the Ottoman Empire, something that led to the birth of the Republic of Turkey. It is not only about Kurdish ethnicity, nor is it about diminishing or eradicating PKK violence. The PKK is not the cause of the problem, but emerged as a consequence of it. Nor can the unrest in the Kurdish region or the PKK’s emergence be explained solely as an issue of economic underdevelopment, as many politicians in Turkey have characterized it since the 1960s. It is true that areas where mainly Kurdish people live are less developed than the rest of Turkey. Even at the beginning of the millennium, GDP per capita in Diyarbakır was little more than half the national figure.5 However, this underdevelopment is hardly the main reason for the Kurdish insurgency.

So, what lies at the core of the Kurdish problem? For the answer, we need to return to the founding of the Republic of Turkey.

Turkey’s nation-building project, which dates back to the 1920s, grew out of a notion that the non-Muslim population, and the Muslim and non-Turkish population, should be clamped down on and assimilated. Compared with other ethnic minorities in Turkey, such as the Lazis, Circassians, Bosnians and Arabs, Kurds as an autochthonous people occupy a different place in society. Having lived together in a particular region for a very long time, they have developed a distinct set of interrelated economic, historical, cultural and geographical features. Thus, they possessed all the necessary requirements for being a nation. They were neither leaving their land, nor were they abiding by the Turkish state’s assimilation policies. They were Muslims and had fought effectively side by side with the Turks in the War of Independence in 1919.6 Kurds had a certain awareness that they were different from other minorities in Turkey. This self-awareness could not only be attributed to the size of their population. There were several other reasons for it.

According to the renowned political scientist Professor Hamit Bozarslan of L’École des hautes études en sciences sociales, whose specialist expertise is on the Kurdish issue, one of those reasons was the establishment of regiments called Hamidiye by the Ottoman state in 1846.7 The Hamidiye regiments consisted of Kurdish tribes and were assigned to combat Armenian rebels, and their actions enabled the Kurdish tribes to have local authority in the region. ‘They were keen to preserve their own autonomy rather than defending the state’s interests, [and] later became the most fervent supporters of the Kurdish challenge to state authority.’8 The abolishment of the Hamidiye regiments by the Young Turks – a political reform movement which desired to replace the Ottoman monarchy with a constitutional government – and the fall of the Russian front in World War I left Turks and Kurds pitted against each other.9

The second reason for the heightening of the Kurds’ self-awareness as a distinct population was the claim that they had been promised the right to self-determination in south-eastern Turkey, where they predominantly lived. According to Andrew Mango, Atatürk was vocal about Kurdish rights during the War of Independence and said that certain Kurdish-speaking counties might be allowed to govern themselves in accordance with the constitution.10 This is a long-running argument in Turkey, one that involves politicians rather than historians. On the other hand, historical evidence has been unearthed that could potentially prove the Kurds right. A protocol signed on 22 October 1919 in the city of Amasya between the national independence movement led by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk and the Istanbul government of the Ottoman Empire was kept secret from the public until the 1960s.11 The first article of the protocol ‘accepted the principle of Kurdish autonomy and recognized the national and social rights of the Kurds’.12

Abdullah Öcalan, the founder of the PKK, after a meeting with his lawyers in İmralı prison, had commented on this protocol in 2009:

Currently the press is discussing the Amasya Protocols of 20–23 October. Of the protocols, three are known and two are still being kept secret. The second protocol, of 22 October 1919, signed by Mustafa Kemal, also contains ethnic and social rights of Kurds. […] What is more, there was a plenary [held in parliament] on 10 February 1922. A friend from prison wrote to me and told me that there were 237 votes for and 64 votes against Kurdish autonomy.13

The Treaty of Lausanne, which concluded World War I in Anatolia and led to the foundation of the Republic of Turkey, signified the end of the Kurdish nationalists’ hopes and laid the foundations for the division of lands where Kurds mainly lived among four different countries: Iran, Iraq, Turkey and Syria. There was no mention of a Kurdistan. This ended the political bargaining for self-determination and the alliance between the Kurds and Mustafa Kemal, which would give rise to hostilities for the next nine decades. Kurds were let down not only by the new successor to the Ottoman Empire in Lausanne but also by Great Britain, which had at first encouraged an independent Kurdistan but then opposed the idea in order to appease Turkey.14 Although the Kurdish people are not on the whole familiar with the details of these protocols or the Treaty of Lausanne in full, they know and talk about the fundamental unfairness perpetrated against them during the foundation of the Republic of Turkey. Emine Ayna, a Kurdish politician, articulated that feeling to me:

They [the government] talk about giving Kurds cultural rights, but that is not the same as shared administration. Think of a company led by a partnership of five families. What if one of the families says, ‘This is my company; you are employees here’? If we built it together, then we must govern it together.15

Kurds revolted against the Turkish state 28 times between 1923 and 1938, all the uprisings being quelled with heavy bloodshed and considerable overkill. The Kurds were revolting not only against the nationalistic Turkish state but also against its secularization. The ending of the caliphate by Mustafa Kemal meant that an important feature that bonded Turks and Kurds together was gone.16 It was no coincidence that the first major uprising in 1925 was led by a Kurdish religious leader, Sheikh Said. He was hanged at the direction of the Independence Tribunal in Diyarbakır, founded earlier that year to prosecute individuals fomenting uprisings. Following Said’s revolt, the Turkish government began to perceive Kurdish ethnicity as a threat to national sovereignty and gradually adopted policies to weaken it.

An unspoken Turkification project had been initiated. According to that project, ‘[t]ribes of eastern Turkey were purely of Turkish origin and their language was a corrupted Turkish owing to their geographical closeness to Iran, and they should be called Mountain Turks.’17 By the end of 1924, one year after the declaration of the new republic, all Kurdish madrasas (an Arabic word for educational institutions) were closed, and publications in languages other than Turkish were prohibited. The Republic of Turkey’s first attempt at resettling the Kurds started in 1926 with a law that authorized the Internal Affairs Ministry ‘to settle nomadic tribes’.

A 1927 law was more precise, demanding ‘certain people of the east be displaced and resettled in the west’ (‘Bazı eşhasın şark menatıkından garp vilâyetlerine nakillerine dair kanun’).18 With that law, 1,400 locally influential Kurdish landlords were displaced. The displacement policy continued until 1936, only to be revived in 1980 and again at the beginning of the 1990s. Between 1927 and 1936, the number of displaced Kurdish people was 2,774. Another law that entered into effect in 1936 forced 25,831 Kurdish people from the cities of Tunceli, Erzincan, Bitlis, Siirt, Van, Bingöl, Diyarbakır, Ağrı, Muş, Erzurum, Elazığ, Kars, Malatya, Mardin and Çoruh to leave their houses and start a new, more ‘Turkified’ life in Western Anatolia.19 However, the attempts to dissolve Kurdish identity never worked, instead causing a great backlash among Kurds, who suffered ever more forceful suppression by the Turkish governments. According to Andrew Mango, the Kurdish areas were too inhospitable to attract newcomers, and a voluntary migration to richer provinces outside the Kurdish area followed the forced deportation. Coupled with a high birth rate, the government’s plan of displacement and resettlement had little effect on the ethnic map.20

In 1937–8, the Turkish state carried out a series of operations in Dersim, a mainly Kurdish and Alawite city in south-eastern Turkey, where an uprising of ‘bandits’ and ‘looters’ had been going on for some time. The military operations were brutal beyond words. A lieutenant who had taken part expressed his remorse about the Dersim operation in his memoir: ‘I beg my readers to excuse me. I shall not write this page of my life.’21 One of the pilots, Sabiha Gökçen, stepdaughter of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk and the first Turkish woman to fly a combat plane, also maintained her silence. She had returned home from Dersim as a heroine. But for what? There had been no mention of a Dersim operation in the press, nor was there a statement from the government as to why Gökçen had received a medal of honour.22 In her memoir, she talked about Dersim very briefly: ‘I will not go into the reasons for and consequences of the Dersim operation. What I and my friends tried to do in this operation was to carry out a duty given to me by my country.’23

This state-perpetrated atrocity was kept from the public for a long time and then denied by the Kemalists, secular nationalists who were devoted to Mustafa Kemal’s foundational ideology, implying that such cruelty could not have been inflicted during Mustafa Kemal’s time. However, the accounts of witnesses tell a different story. Hüsamettin Cindoruk, a Turkish politician and a lawyer who had worked for Celâl Bayar, the prime minister of Turkey at the time of the Dersim operation, remembered a conversation:

I was Bayar’s lawyer for 25 years, so I had the chance to ask him about Dersim. What he told me was exactly this: ‘The Republic [of Turkey] had achieved total control over the country except in Dersim. Neither police nor gendarmerie could go into Dersim. They could not even collect taxes. The nature of its geography had enabled such resistance. We issued countless warnings and passed laws to overcome this situation, but to no avail. In the end, Atatürk told us to hit Dersim, so we hit it. We annexed Dersim by annihilating it.’ So, people who are saying that Atatürk did not know what was going on in Dersim because he was ill are not telling the truth.24

The National Pact (Misak-ı Millî) was the manifesto of Turkey’s War of Independence. The six-article text advocated not only for Turkish national identity but for that of all Ottoman Muslims.25 However, this did not prevent the fledgling Turkish state from treating Kurds as a threat to the National Pact or as a group of bandits whose ‘illogical’ demands for a national identity should be crushed. The government had shaped its policies through that lens, ironically giving birth to a socio-economic crisis characterized as the ‘Kurdish problem’, which is now as old as the republic itself.

Persecution of the Kurdish identity has endured throughout the modern era in Turkey, regardless of the political party that has been in power, with only a few exceptions, as in the era of former president Turgut Özal. He acknowledged the Kurdish problem and had ideas for a liberal solution, such as forming a federation. He once famously said,

Kurds are not a minority. Turkey is like a little America, because we are the successors of an empire. What if Mustafa Kemal had called it the Ottoman Republic instead of the Turkish Republic? Then we would all be Ottomans, right?26

In terms of the Kurdish issue, he was way ahead of both his predecessor and his successors. It was he who orchestrated the 1993 PKK ceasefire through Jalal Talabani, the then leader of the PUK (Patriotic Union of Kurdistan) in northern Iraq.27 He also planned an amnesty for the PKK guerrillas if the ceasefire held. But his aspirations for solving the Kurdish issue met with strong resistance from the army, and he died of a heart attack in April 1993 before he could realize any of his plans.

His sudden death sparked notions of conspiracy, implying dark forces within the state might have poisoned him because of his plans regarding the Kurdish issue. Abdullah Öcalan is a fervent believer in this conspiracy theory. He has even claimed that Özal was about to meet him and proceed with peace negotiations on the day he died. Özal’s long-time aide supported Öcalan’s claims during an interview in 2012.28

It is a common saying in Turkey that the ruling parties and the structure of the administrations change but the real authority running the country remains the same. The ‘real authority’ in this context could be defined as the Kemalist base, comprising the military and the bureaucracy. Turgut Özal and his contemporaries tried to act outside the scope of that establishment on the Kurdish issue, but to no avail. Because the main component was the army, the machinery was designed in such a way that military methods alone could provide the ultimate solution. This machinery, unsurprisingly, condoned the cultural and social persecution of the Kurds as a sanctioned state programme.

Why? Why do the political elites of the country prefer a military solution to negotiations with the Kurdish movement? The plain answer to that should be, as Professor Feroz Ahmad points out, that they see the Kurdish issue as a challenge to the unitary state, a challenge that would lead to separatism.29 Behind this idea lies the ‘Sèvres syndrome’. Turks fear that the Western world holds a grudge against the nationalists once led by Mustafa Kemal, who, it is argued, will always try to find a way to dismember Turkey via the Kurdish issue and Armenian irredentism, something which they could not achieve during the Sèvres Treaty talks of 1920. In Turkey one frequently hears statements such as The Western world is plotting against us, They want to carve up our land, or We are surrounded by enemies, which obviously do not contribute to the solving of the Kurdish issue.

There is a counterargument among secular elites which identifies the Turkish state’s treatment of Kurdish identity as ‘intentional neglect’, rather than assimilation. According to them, Ottomans did not have a tradition of assimilation; there were already diverse ethnic and religious groups living on their own. When the Republic of Turkey was founded, a nation already existed, and therefore the leaders of the burgeoning republic did not have to resort to means such as assimilation.

In his famous speech ‘Nutuk’, on the tenth anniversary of the Republic of Turkey, Mustafa Kemal had coined the motto Ne Mutlu Türk’üm Diyene! (How happy is the person who can say, ‘I am Turkish’!). Adherents of this argument claim that Mustafa Kemal had been using the term ‘Turk’ as a noun, not an adjective defining the word it preceded. Professor Metin Heper of Bilkent University, author of Devlet ve Kürtler (The State and the Kurds), defends this position:

‘Turk’ is a generic, nominal word, which does not refer to any ethnicity. When you say ‘Turkish nation’, it covers Bosnians, Kurds, Turks, Armenians and Greeks, even though they have their own identities, in addition to being part of the Turkish nation. Yes, between 1935 and 1938 there were 17 Kurdish uprisings. But from 1938 until the 1960s there were none. Why? The answer cannot be ‘Because the Kurds were assimilated’, since, after the 1960s, insurgency on the Kurdish side started again. If a state wants to assimilate a certain group, it does not take a break. It continues. Therefore, I offer a different explanation for the Turkish state’s approach to the Kurds. It is not assimilation but intentional neglect. The state banned Kurdish names, not because it denied their identity. On the contrary, it acknowledged their Kurdishness very well. Precisely for that reason, it insisted that they accept, first and foremost, being a part of the Turkish nation rather than being a Kurd.30

At this point, it is important to note that most people who proudly call themselves Kemalists, mainly the people of western Turkey, do not condone atrocities and assimilation programmes directed at the Kurds. They simply ignore or deny that there are any. They do not believe that Kurds were deliberately persecuted as a state policy. Nor do they believe that the Dersim massacre took place. They see Mustafa Kemal Atatürk as someone who saved the people of Turkey, especially women, from the backwardness of Islam and gave them the right to vote and stand for election. No doubt Mustafa Kemal did all these things. However, as in all revolutions, there were excesses in the case of the Kemalist revolution and Kurds were on the losing end of those excesses. Therefore, it would jolt them painfully out of their comfort zone if they were to acknowledge the authoritarianism and ruthlessness of the Kemalist era.

Nevertheless, a Kurd living in the south-east would find this position selfish and irrelevant. For a Kurd, the difference between ‘intentional neglect’ and ‘assimilation’ is pedantic and almost trivial.

The Kemalist regime was a success on social, political and cultural levels, but it also aimed to neutralize diversity, mark a rupture with the Ottoman past, intensify ethnic and religious differences and rewrite history. It was, on the whole, a success for Turkey, but certainly not for everyone in the country.

The founding of the PKK and the Turkish left

In order to follow the intricate details of the Kurdish problem, it is essential to identify the basic actors involved. There are five main strands of activity and influence that determine the nature and course of the problem. First and foremost is the Turkish state: in order of influence, this consists of the armed forces, the National Intelligence Organization (MIT) and the elected government. Second is the outlawed leftist Kurdish organization, the PKK, the armed wing of the movement. The third is the legal political party (with various different names over the years), the activists, NGOs and intellectuals that surround it, and the civilian wing of this movement. It is crucial to note that, unlike the relationship between Sinn Féin and the IRA, where the IRA was born out of the political party Sinn Féin in the Northern Ireland conflict, it was the PKK that had first taken the stage; the political party followed. Thus, the PKK always had a greater say than the civilian wing over what steps should be taken. Fourth is the Kurdish diaspora in European countries, which consists of former PKK members who fled Turkey for fear of incarceration. And last but not least is Abdullah Öcalan, the overall leader of the movement.

Abdullah Öcalan, born in 1948 in Siverek, a town in Urfa, south-east Turkey, went to a boarding high school in Ankara which provided vocational education on land registry and cadastral surveying. After working for a while as a registrar of title deeds, first in Diyarbakır and then in Istanbul, he took the exams and managed to get into Istanbul University’s Faculty of Law. Upon enrolment, he applied to be transferred to one of the most reputable social science institutions in Turkey, Ankara University’s Faculty of Political Science, known as Siyasal (‘Politics’) for short. Siyasal was the place where many of Turkey’s leftists studied and its social movements surfaced. Abdullah, nicknamed Apo, had become involved in politics, despite his upbringing in an ordinary peasant household where there was anything but a politically charged environment. He joined an association called the AYÖD (Ankara Higher Education Association), which was influenced by the Marxist–Leninist and Maoist movements.31 However, before Öcalan became a public figure, there was already a solid Kurdish leftist movement, which had a close-knit relationship with the Turkish left.

The affinity between Turkey’s leftists and the Kurdish movement goes back as far as the beginning of the 1960s. The PKK arose out of the mobilization that the Turkish left had created in the 1970s, and there was close comradeship between the two political movements for 20 years, until the PKK became an independent entity with a mission to influence Turkey’s political scene.32 It was a Marxist–Leninist comradeship of oppressed classes and oppressed people acting against state-sponsored nationalism.33

The Revolutionary Eastern Cultural Hearths (Devrimci Doğu Kültür Ocakları, DDKO for short), founded in 1969, is considered to be the first Kurdish leftist organization to have promoted an independent Kurdish state and Kurdish language, and in that sense represents the first departure from the Turkish left.34 In the 1970s, violence was considered a just means of achieving political aspirations for many of the Turkish leftist groups, such as Dev-Genç, Devrimci Yol and Halkın Kurtuluşu. However, while claiming that violence was legitimate, these groups did not espouse it as a strategy but only as a last resort when all other options were exhausted.

The PKK had differed from such groups and from the Turkish left in that sense. Immediately after its founding, it had invoked armed struggle, first against other Kurdish organizations and later against the Turkish armed forces. According to Öcalan, who had fled the country in July 1979, the elimination of other Kurdish organizations was essential for the PKK to rise as the sole defender of Kurdish rights. In 1974, Öcalan, along with several friends – later called Apocular (‘followers of Apo’) – had decided to form a Kurdish leftist organization detached from the Turkish left, in Tuzlucayir, a suburb of Ankara.35 But it was not until 27 November 1978 that the PKK was officially formed. The PKK’s founding is considered the 29th and last Kurdish uprising in Turkey.

Like that of many militant groups, there is more than one version of the PKK’s history. One is that mentioned above. Another is that it was founded by Öcalan in Fis, a small village in Diyarbakır. Yet another version, promulgated by those who were part of the core group when the organization was forming, claims that ‘the PKK was established between 1974 and 1978 by Kurdish nationalists and that Abdullah Öcalan was not a significant figure at that time’.36 There is also a conspiracy theory put forth among certain groups in Turkey that the Turkish National Intelligence Organization (MIT) and/or the ‘deep state’ – composed of high-level elements of intelligence, the military, security, the judiciary and the mafia – actually founded the PKK. Although there is evidence that MIT could have infiltrated the PKK on several levels and at different times in the past, there is no convincing or sound argument to indicate that either MIT or the deep state was the founder.

Tarık Ziya Ekinci, who was an influential member of the Revolutionary Eastern Cultural Hearths and was arrested along with the Kurdish author and intellectual Musa Anter after the 1971 coup, responded to this allegation. He believed that the only involvement of MIT in the PKK had been to appease the insurgency:

Since the emergence of the Kurdish problem, MIT has talked to Kurdish leaders on behalf of the state and has made promises. I remember how Musa Anter was taken away from prison one day. He was out for a while, then he came back. ‘Where have you been, Musa?’ I asked. ‘I took care of some business,’ Musa replied. ‘I sat down and told them [MIT officials] everything. After we get out of prison, we will be able to talk to them and resolve things. He [MIT officer] said that he would ensure our friends are discharged as soon as possible.’ They did nothing, of course. They took him, ordered him food and detained him for a few days. They did the same to Öcalan over the years. This is a state tactic.37

Şerafettin Elçi, a leading political figure in the Kurdish movement until his death, mentioned a similar encounter with a ‘Colonel in MIT’ in the mid-1970s.

‘We would like the incidents to calm down. So we want to know and understand what the Kurds want,’ said the Colonel. ‘That’s easy,’ replied Elçi. ‘Let them air TV and radio programmes in Kurdish, let them publish their newspapers and magazines and let them have free speech; that’s all.’ The Colonel replied, ‘Şerafettin Bey [Mr Şerafettin], you can be sure that we would give you those rights if we knew you would be satisfied with them, but we have concerns. If we give you those rights, you will gradually ask for more rights, leading to separation.’38

What the Colonel said to Elçi not only reveals the futility of such encounters but also sums up the Turkish state’s approach to the Kurdish problem. The hostility of the PKK had taken firm root in the hostile soils where this approach had been sown.

At its founding, the PKK numbered 162 members, of whom five had a university degree, 24 were undergraduates, 83 were either teachers or graduates of a training school, 48 were high-school graduates and two had primary-school education.39 None of them had had any experience in another Turkish leftist organization before joining the PKK, except for Kemal Pir, who was a Turkish socialist. It is also important to note that the founding members’ education levels were higher than the average for Turkey back then. This contradicts the Turkish government’s long-time conviction and propaganda that the PKK is a bunch of ignorant, uncivilized, uninformed thugs. This propaganda was useful in masking the real reasons behind the Kurdish issue and framing the emergence of the PKK as a sporadic incident that did not reflect the sentiment of the rest of the Kurdish population.

Shortly before the 12 September 1980 military coup, PKK leaders fled the country along with Öcalan and went to Syria, where they set up a military camp, which would continue to exist until 1999. There they established relations with the Palestine Liberation Front and received military training. That was when the PKK decided that it was crucial to be on good terms with other Kurds in the region, which ‘required an understanding with the KDP (Kurdistan Democratic Party) of Iraqi Kurdistan, despite its political conservatism and its defeatist aim of autonomy rather than independence’.40 The leader of the KDP, Masoud Barzani, agreed to sign a protocol with the PKK in July 1983 which allowed the PKK to use northern Iraqi territory.41

Among the core group that founded the PKK, 44 were executed by the organization itself, while 36 were ‘purged’ and forced to leave. Only three of the PKK members who now dominate the organization from their base in Qandil Mountain in northern Iraq were present at the beginning: Duran Kalkan, Cemil Bayık and Mustafa Karasu.

Cemil Bayık, who is the co-chair of KCK, an umbrella organization of Kurdish entities including the PKK, joined the group while he was an undergraduate at Ankara University. He adopted the alias Cuma when he was in Syria’s Bekaa Valley with Abdullah Öcalan. He is considered a hawkish type and known for his ties with Iranian and Syrian intelligence and also with the Iranian Kurdish party PJAK (Kurdistan Free Life Party).

Duran Kalkan, born in 1954 in Adana, is the highest-ranking PKK member in Qandil who is of Turkish ethnicity. He graduated from the humanities department of Ankara University. Kalkan was among those who, at a meeting in the city of Urfa in November 1979, decided that the PKK should have an armed wing. He was also one of those who went to the Bekaa Valley to meet Öcalan and receive military training. Thereafter, he served the organization in northern Iraq and Germany and then settled in Qandil, where he has lived ever since.

Mustafa Karasu was attending Ankara University when he joined the PKK. He was arrested and spent many years in Diyarbakır Prison No. 5, a place that was infamous for torturing Kurds after the 1980 junta. His route in the organization was similar to that of Kalkan and Bayık: Bekaa, Europe, ending up in Qandil. It should be underlined that these three figures are known to be devoted to Abdullah Öcalan.

Beyond a certain point, it was irrelevant who actually founded the PKK, even to the Turkish state, since what mattered was the inexorable rise of the recruits, who numbered in the thousands. The initial support had come from impoverished Kurdish towns such as Doğubayazıt, Hakkâri, Cizre, Nusaybin, Midyat and Diyarbakır in the mid-1980s, just at the time when the party initiated armed struggle. What many of the Kurds who either supported or joined the PKK then wanted was simply to be recognized as Kurds.

The PKK was not initially established to promote Kurdish nationalism in classical terms. The widely spoken and written language of the organization has always been Turkish.42 The PKK first targeted other Kurdish organizations and feudal landlords in the region. The initial ideological structure of the Kurdish movement was Marxist–Leninist, as set out in a booklet called ‘The Revolutionary Road to Kurdistan: A Manifesto’. There are traces of theoretical knowledge of the Turkish left in this document. Öcalan said, in his speech to the first congress of the PKK in 1978, ‘We did not actually start this movement by vigorous agitation and distributing propaganda in a booklet. We started it via verbal propaganda in small student units, on table tops, at local meetings.’43 This manifesto also featured formulations of certain aims beyond the Turkish left’s horizon, such as the independence of Kurdistan. This is exactly where the Turkish left and the Kurdish left parted company, which led to the formation of the PKK. In the Kurdish region, the majority of political activists thought armed struggle was a valid course of action under the circumstances. Şerafettin Elçi explained those circumstances in the context of his own personal story:

The Kurds did not willingly resort to arms. Some people who had never held a gun in their lives and avoided violence were in prison for years just because they expressed their views. I am one of them. When I was a minister in 1979, I served two years and three months in prison just for saying, ‘Kurds exist, and I am Kurdish myself.’ The earth came tumbling down for no other reason than because I gave voice to a sociological reality. You cannot question why people take up arms and head for the mountains44 under such circumstances. I always outlawed violence in my party and in person, but if it were not for the armed struggle, it would not have been possible to put the Kurds on Turkey’s agenda and make Kurdish identity a topic for discussion. This armed organization announced a ceasefire several times. If the state had had the desire to solve the problem peacefully, they could have taken advantage of those times. On the contrary, they virtually swept the Kurdish problem under the carpet. The issue came back on the agenda only when guns started firing. That is why such a perception is very widespread among Kurds.45

On 12 September 1980 came the most ferocious coup d’état. It determined the fate of the leftist movement in Turkey – a fate that would differ for Kurdish and Turkish leftists. As journalist Ruşen Çakır pointed out, in the years following the 1980 junta, the Kurdish movement rose from the ashes and became a prominent political actor, not only in Turkey but also in the wider Middle East.46 Concurrently, the Turkish socialist left, once an important force, shrank and vanished from the political scene. Disappointment and a sense of defeat prevailed, since many of the actors of the Turkish left had either disappeared or been jailed. It was after this that the PKK decided that the only way to accomplish its goals was through guns. The fraternity between the Kurdish and Turkish left had gradually been eroded. Young Kurds had lost interest in Turkey-wide socialist projects and focused more on Kurdish identity and the Kurdish issue. However, close ties between legal Kurdish parties and Turkish parties of the left have continued to this day.

After the military takeover of 1980, Diyarbakır Prison No. 5 became a place in which to crush the Kurdish activists with the use of unspeakable torture that included electric shocks, Palestine hanging,47 beating with a plastic hose, pulling teeth and being forced to eat faeces. The late Felat Cemiloğlu remembered one of his experiences while there:

One day I was told to stand on one foot. After a while I collapsed. This meant I had to be punished. They made me open the lid of the sewage near the wall and take a handful of excrement and put it in my mouth.48

Cemiloğlu had spent eight months in Diyarbakır Prison No. 5 on a cooked-up charge that he had given money to PKK members. When he was finally allowed to go back to his cell, he extracted all his teeth, which were already loose because of severe beatings. ‘I had washed my mouth out but no matter how hard I tried, I felt the smell. I couldn’t bear it.’49

As Murat Paker, a professor of psychology at Bilgi University put it, ‘In Diyarbakır prison they wanted to crush Kurdishness.’50 The roads to civil resistance were not only blocked once again for the Kurds but also strewn with unconscionable dangers and barbarities.

A high official of the PKK explained to me the initial decision to take up arms:

We did not take up guns to defeat the Turkish army or destroy the state. We did so to defend our existence and rights as Kurds. If we had been given our rights, what would we have needed guns for? The PKK’s approach is to force the Turkish Republic to solve the Kurdish problem.51

A more draconian state had risen from the 1980 junta. Its first attempt to curb Kurdish culture was to prohibit the Kurdish language in 1983. From then on, all things Kurdish were, in effect, banned. Martial law was imposed in the region, followed in 1987 by a state of emergency rule that would last until 2002. Not only had living in the region become intolerable, but so had travelling to western Turkey. Kurdish author Şeyhmus Diken explained in his book what it meant to be an ordinary citizen from Diyarbakır:

When we drove to the west of the country with our car plate numbered 21, which showed that we were from Diyarbakır, we were stopped by the police and searched. We thought that changing our plate would save us from this misery. But no, every time we had business in any government office, we were treated badly. We learned to police ourselves, concealing signs that would indicate our Kurdishness and thus irritate the government. That was what being from Diyarbakır was like.52

Kurdish cities and towns were renamed. By 1986, 2,842 out of 3,524 villages in the region had new Turkish names.53 Prisons had become a second home for Kurds, and were the places where the PKK and the Kurdish movement were revived for the second time. A poignant story by the influential Kurdish writer Musa Anter (Ape Musa) shows how arrests and prisons played a role in the Kurdish movement. It was the beginning of the 1990s. Musa Anter bought a bowl of rice pilaf from a street vendor in front of the AKM (Atatürk Cultural Centre) in Taksim and began to eat it. The vendor boy, who realized that his customer was Musa Anter, yelled in Kurdish at the other pilaf vendors lined up ahead of him, ‘Ape Musa hat!’ (‘Uncle Musa is here!’). Quickly, they all pushed their stalls towards him, and as Ape Musa finished his pilaf and headed to a shuttle bus, they accompanied him in a convoy, holding up the traffic. Ape Musa kissed them all on the forehead, and got on the bus. Astonished, the driver asked, ‘Uncle, how are you related to all these guys?’ He replied, ‘They are all my sons.’ The driver persisted, ‘Uncle, are all your sons rice pilaf vendors?’ ‘No,’ explained Ape Musa, ‘these are only the ones I have here. The others are in jail, there and over there.’

In a climate of fierce government suppression, the PKK returned to Turkey and its main target became the Turkish state, starting in August 1984 with an assault on Turkish security forces in the Kurdish towns of Eruh and Şemdinli. The clash between the PKK and Turkish forces, which used all the tools of conventional warfare, continues to this day. As part of the government’s counterterrorism policy, a village guard system was created, which by 1993 had supplied almost 35,000 villagers with arms to fight the PKK.

Meanwhile, on the PKK front, the rules of the game were changing too. The 1991 Gulf War added to the PKK’s military strength. After Iraqi Kurds were given an autonomous region, the PKK started using the territories under their control and acquired heavy weaponry. The establishment of Qandil Mountain and adjacent lands as the headquarters of the PKK dates back to that period. From then on it ‘began to act more like an army rather than guerrilla bands’.54 ‘The leadership endorsed carnage and showed a willingness to even sacrifice its own rank and file to prove the PKK’s ability to act forcefully.’55

The PKK was ruthless, but so was the government. Between 1984 and 1999, 5,828 Turkish security officials, 5,390 civilians and 19,786 PKK guerrillas were killed.56 Around 4,000 villages were evacuated from 1987 to 1995. According to the Human Rights Research Commission of 2014, 386,000 villagers were relocated, but many scholars estimate the number to be closer to 4.5 million.57

A 1996 report by the Republican People’s Party’s (CHP, the main opposition party) East and South-Eastern Turkey Commission claims that between 1993 and 1995, on the orders of local police chiefs and village guards, thousands of Kurdish people were displaced from their houses because of an alleged link to the PKK. The same report also revealed that people’s vacated houses, fields and barns were burnt down and their lands confiscated by the state. The government had been oblivious to the needs of those forcibly displaced, such as for healthcare, education and shelter.58

The presence of Turkish soldiers and gendarmerie had become constant, their numbers rising to more than 200,000. There were extrajudicial killings of Kurdish businessmen and activists. The disappearance of hundreds of Kurdish people has been deemed a human rights violation by the European Court of Human Rights, which has also issued a condemnation of the Turkish government. Every Saturday, mothers of those who disappeared in the late 1980s and 1990s, the so-called ‘Saturday Mothers’, gather in central Istanbul’s Taksim Square to remember and remind others of their sons and daughters. Undoubtedly, both Turkish and Kurdish civilians were victims of the relentless battles between the two parties.

In the mid-1990s, the PKK announced a new programme, according to which women became a crucial part of the PKK insurgency and a generator of the cultural revolution that was dreamed of by some in the Kurdish region. By that time, the PKK had realized that it needed to attract international attention to the Kurdish issue to achieve any of its goals. It used the only method it knew worked: violence. The PKK embarked on a spree of collective protests and bombings of Turkish commercial interests, mainly in Europe. But the real shift in the organization’s policy came about after Abdullah Öcalan was arrested and sentenced to life imprisonment in İmralı. Although his arrest was greeted by mass protests and in some cases attempts at self-immolation by protesters, there were also serious defections from the organization.59 According to the Turkish armed forces, the PKK’s guerrilla force had been reduced to 6,000 from around 50,000,60 even though Öcalan continued to communicate with the high cadres of the PKK through his lawyers.61 Öcalan’s arrest represented a shift in the PKK’s rhetoric and ideology, as he stated in 1999: ‘A broad struggle for brotherhood and sisterhood, peace and democracy must be the foundation of all activities inside and outside the country. We want real peace and real democracy for Turkey.’62

The evolution of the PKK

Occasionally my Western colleagues, trying to make sense of the PKK’s violent actions, which seem to contradict its rhetoric, have asked me things like What is the PKK doing? What is the point it’s trying to make? My first simple response is usually that there is no logic in war. But then I point out that it is a complicated organization, both in structure and in culture. It differs from other militant insurgency groups as much as it does from any political party.

A major transformation occurred in the early 1990s, when Öcalan spoke passionately about the participation of women in the Kurdish movement. ‘The twenty-first century must be the era of awakening; the era of the liberated, emancipated woman,’ he wrote. ‘This is more important than class or national liberation. The era of democratic civilisation shall be the one when woman rises and succeeds fully.’63 As the liberation of women had become one of the fundamental discourses of the PKK, joining the organization meant the unleashing of Kurdish women from patriarchal family and gender roles. The PKK leadership’s rhetoric was that the more women fight, the more they become liberated. In 1990–1, women from universities and from both rural and urban areas joined the PKK in huge numbers. By 1993, women represented 3.1 per cent of the mountain team of the PKK. The number of women recruits steadily increased over the years.64 As of today, women make up 40 per cent of the PKK’s armed and political structure.

From the late 1990s, and particularly after Öcalan’s arrest, the PKK pledged freedom, democracy and cultural rights to the Kurdish people. It has evolved ideologically from merely demanding an independent Kurdish state to promising democratic autonomy within Turkey’s borders. But it has not ceased using violence. While adopting the tactics of civil disobedience campaigns and political lobbying, it started at the same time to use suicide bombers to gain international attention. This may look like an irreconcilable dichotomy, but pursuing dual strategies has been common throughout the PKK’s history. More interestingly, these contradictions have not caused the organization to lose social ground and support – because even when it shifted its methods from violence to civil disobedience or changed its discourse and ideology, one thing remained the same, namely being a fierce advocate of Kurdish identity and rights.

The continuing denial by the Turkish state of Kurds’ rights had helped the PKK retain legitimacy and relevance in the eyes of the people.65 ‘They say that if the PKK goes away, the problem will be solved. The PKK is not a problem. It is a power that was born as a result of a problem,’ said Duran Kalkan in an interview given to Firat News Agency in February 2013:

You solve the problem, and the PKK will no longer be the current PKK: if you don’t solve the problem, you won’t change the PKK, no matter what you do. There is a limit to what the PKK can do. It is the state, the government that has the responsibility for generating a solution. The rulers of the PKK have no ambition to govern Turkey or Kurdish society.66

Years of violence, ferocious attacks, collateral damage involving civilian victims and tens of thousands of deaths have failed to erode the wish among most Kurds for the PKK to endure. No matter what its ideology or methods, the group has been seen as a defender of the Kurds against the state. Its raison d’être is alive and well, and will remain so as long as the Turkish government pursues its current policies.

Thomas Friedman once wrote in his New York Times column that ‘just trying to figure out the differences among the Kurdish parties and militias in Syria and Iraq – the YPG, PYD, PUK, KDP and PKK – took me a day.’67 He was right. It is indeed hard to follow Kurdish politics, since there are so many groups and there is much fragmentation on the political spectrum and in every part of Kurdistan. The PKK occupies a special place on the scene in that sense, because it has a tendency to rename itself, establish umbrella organizations and found new political entities. It does so first out of a desire to reinvent and adapt the organization through different ideological phases. Second, it wishes to accommodate as many people as possible within the movement. It is difficult to involve non-violent activists and public figures in an armed group, but easier to do so through different assemblies and organizations. That is why Öcalan gave decorative names to new organizations, many of which are not even remembered today. But this aspiration caused confusion and an eruption of abbreviations that failed to serve the purpose. The PKK renamed itself first as KADEK (the Freedom and Democracy Congress of Kurdistan) and then as KONGRA-GEL (the Kurdistan People’s Congress), before eventually returning to being the PKK, since the other names did not stick with the constituency. In 2005, the PKK formed another executive and legislative organization called KCK (Koma Civakên Kurdistan, which means Group of Communities in Kurdistan), which included Iran’s and Syria’s Kurdish organizations of the same ideology, the PJAK and the PYD, respectively.

In his meetings with officials of the main Kurdish party, the HDP, during the peace process in February 2014, Öcalan offered a brief explanation for his founding of the KCK:

They say that the National Intelligence Organization [MIT] founded the KCK. I told Mr Emre [Emre Taner, former chief of MIT] that we needed another organization, because the PKK is illegal. I wanted the KCK to be the legal branch.68

In addition, he believed that his dream of a democratic confederalism could be realized through an umbrella organization like the KCK. This was an ideology he had derived from political theorist Murray Bookchin’s work.69 According to the rationale for the KCK, which Öcalan had written,

The democratic confederalism of Kurdistan is not a state system, it is the movement of the Kurdish people to found their own democracy and organize their own social system, it is the expression of the democratic union of the Kurdish people, who have been split into four parts and have spread all over the world.70

The Turkish government interpreted the KCK as the ‘urban structure of the PKK’ and launched a campaign of arrests of acting mayors, academics, lawyers and journalists in 2009. In the two years that followed, 4,000 people were arrested or detained in this anti-KCK operation, many of them supporters of the legal Kurdish party BDP (the former HDP). The government’s aim was to ‘obstruct the continued socio-political institutionalization of the Kurdish movement and to prevent Öcalan’s democratic confederalism from taking shape’.71

Criminalization of Kurdish politicians was not a new tactic: it had been used against the movement since the 1970s. Moderate Kurdish politicians were not allowed to become part of the political process. The People’s Labour Party (HEP) was banned, as were its predecessors. Leyla Zana, the first Kurdish woman to be elected to Parliament in 1991, caused a furore by speaking in Kurdish at the end of her parliamentary oath and was imprisoned for ten years as a result.

In 1995, HADEP (People’s Democracy Party) was formed. Its leader and members were constantly harassed by the police and judiciary apparatus until the constitutional court decided to shut the party down in 2003 on the grounds of their organic link to the PKK. The DTP (Democratic Society Party), which was led by Ahmet Türk and Aysel Tuğluk, was established in 2005, only to experience the ill fate of its predecessors four years later. The DTP, which had 20 deputies in parliament and 99 mayorships in the Kurdish region, was closed down in 2009. Many of these acts were not justifiable in the eyes of the European Court of Human Rights, which concluded that the closures were in breach of the Convention. However, the government’s persecution of the Kurds added to its negative image and served only to bolster the PKK’s position, rather than diminish it. It is fair to say that the PKK, despite its own violent actions, owes much of its popularity to the Turkish government. Kurdish political parties also enjoyed a fair share of that popularity, despite state harassment. In 2014, the BDP (Peace and Democracy Party), the predecessor of the HDP, received the majority of the votes in the region, becoming the largest party and being rewarded with 97 elected mayors.

The Öcalan phenomenon

It is impossible to grasp the true significance of Abdullah Öcalan for the Kurdish people and movement without walking on the streets of Diyarbakır, Hakkâri or Şırnak. Similarly, it is impossible to discern people’s boundless devotion to him without seeing his posters hung next to Sheikh Said’s in most of their living rooms or hearing five-year-olds shrieking in Kurdish, ‘Biji Serok Apo’ (‘Long live President Apo’). ‘Do you know what Kurds think when they think of Öcalan?’ a Kurdish politician once asked me. Answering his own question, he went on,

I didn’t exist. My identity was rejected. I was ashamed to say that I was Kurdish. I was in danger of losing my language. I was being ill-treated. I was being ostracized. I was deprived of a national consciousness. I felt like a vacuum in space. Now I no longer feel like that. And that’s all thanks to Öcalan.72

For more than a decade now, the PKK has been governed by ‘The Leadership’, that is, Abdullah Öcalan. He is referred to not as ‘the leader’ but as ‘The Leadership’ (Önderlik), a very unusual usage of the word in the Turkish language. Loyalty to Öcalan in the Kurdish movement is never publicly questioned and criticizing him can only be done off the record, behind closed doors, in discreet murmurs. Öcalan’s political, ideological and organizational leadership is not open to discussion in the PKK. In 2005, the party statute made him unassailable: ‘The highest ideological and theoretical organ of the party is The Leadership. The Leadership determines the party’s strategy, mentality and notional policies. The PKK considers comrade Öcalan and his thoughts as its own and accepts him as The Leadership.’73

In the same statute, ‘to make Leader Apo’s life and freedom his or her own life’s purpose’ is cited as the first task of a PKK member. It is out of the question for the Kurdish movement to even think about challenging Öcalan, let alone replacing him. As he has not been elected to the position of ‘The Leadership’, he cannot be replaced through any democratic process.

In the early days of the formation of the PKK, Abdullah Öcalan was just one of the founders, one of the ‘older brothers’. He was in fact one of the oldest, better educated and more articulate than the others, but did not possess any significant, distinctive trait that would elevate him to the position of undisputed leader. He did not even speak Kurdish, only Turkish. Öcalan himself acknowledged this in 1987: ‘I had neither held a gun in my hand and been a militant nor wandered among the crowd. But my fierce loyalty to organizational tasks made me a constant powerful figure.’74

The cult of personality is very common in the leftist tradition of the twentieth century, where the PKK has its ideological roots. Vera Eccarius-Kelly, author of The Militant Kurds, finds similarities between the PKK and the Peruvian Maoist organization Shining Path (Sendero Luminoso) in that sense, since both groups relied on the inspiration of an omnipotent leader who enforced a rigid system of hierarchy and control.75

There were two pivotal events that cast Öcalan in that role. The first was the evolution of the PKK as mainly an armed organization, rather than a political party, despite its name. Ensuring the adherence of recruits to the PKK required a steady figure and an irrefutable hierarchy. Öcalan becoming ‘The Leadership’ met that condition. His reference to the guerrillas who lost their lives as the only ones – other than himself, of course – epitomizing the true Kurdish revolutionaries stemmed from this commitment. Even though the organization is governed by a personality cult and lacks an internal democratic process, self-criticism is customary, in accordance with its Marxist–Leninist origins. The minutes of PKK Congresses over the years show that criticism bordering on hostility among the members is commonplace. Only Öcalan was exempt from this institutionalized self-criticism. Many of the high-ranking guerrillas, including those who currently lead the PKK from Qandil, had to go through that process of expressing self-criticism (özeleştiri vermek, in PKK jargon) and paying for it in one of the PKK prisons, either in the Bekaa Valley or in Qandil.

The second incident that made Öcalan a larger-than-life figure was his arrest in February 1999. Until 1998, he was based in Syria, but after Turkey’s pressure on the Syrian government to extradite him, Öcalan fled to Kenya, where he was captured. This turned him into a self-sacrificing hero in the eyes of the Kurdish people. Now he was no longer just the chief of an insurgent organization but also the leader of a social, cultural and political movement. When I asked Murat Karayılan, one of the highest-ranking members of the PKK, why they had built the institution of ‘The Leadership’, he replied,

Look, we have a party culture, a collective culture. It took a long time, but finally it has been established. Whatever the joint decision is, everyone sticks to it now without raising any objections. However, this should not be perceived as a culture of obedience. If the decision has been discussed at length, why should anyone raise an objection, right? This is a new practice among Kurds. What was the trouble with the Kurdish movement for years? Not being able to pull together. That is why we unite so strongly around The Leadership. All the Kurdish movements were internally fragmented and weakened. The PKK is a synthesis of it all; it is a governance structure born out of all the fragmentation.76

For the Kurdish people, however, ‘The Leadership’ has a more emotional meaning than the pragmatic explanation given by Karayılan. Fırat Anlı, acting mayor of Diyarbakır, who served time for being a member of the PKK in 2009 and later, in 2016, after the peace process failed, elucidates why Öcalan is held in such affection among the Kurdish people:

Öcalan is a phenomenon. He is almost like a mythological character for a considerable number of Kurds. He is extremely influential. Let’s not forget that hundreds of people set fire to themselves for him and thousands of others went on hunger strike when he was arrested. That is why, no matter what, Kurds will always accept that ‘The Leadership must know something if he has made this decision.’77

Kurdish activists went on hunger strike to protest for Öcalan every time he was kept in solitary confinement and his communication with his family and lawyers was cut off by the government. The latest of those strikes was in 2012. Several of the 500 strikers had sent me inconsolable letters from prison, explaining their vain attempt to be heard. One of them said,

We have been on an irreversible hunger strike since 12 September 2012. We are doing this because a nation is being ignored once again, a nation in the person of Abdullah Öcalan, whom thousands of people refer to as the voice of ‘our will’. The only means of achieving social peace in this land is revoking his interdiction.

Another wrote,

The fact that the state turns a blind eye to our demands for the right to receive education in our mother tongue and to the right to freedom of the leader of PKK is a red line for the Kurdish people. A lot of my friends in prison went on hunger strike because of that. If any harm comes to them, it is the government that should be held accountable.

On the 68th day of the strike, the government let Abdullah Öcalan see his brother, ending a month’s isolation. Through his brother, Öcalan requested that the strike be ended, ‘since it had achieved its purpose’.78 It was only then that hundreds of people called an end to the strike.

According to Abbas Vali of Boğaziçi University, an Iranian Kurdish scholar, if it had not been for the erroneous policies of the state, the PKK might never have elevated him to such a high level:

For the Kurdish intelligentsia and political actors, Öcalan was always Öcalan. Yet his imprisonment made him a recognized leader of the Kurdish people. You can imprison a political leader, but you cannot put the leader of a political movement behind bars.79

It took the Turkish government a long time, but in the end it realized that Öcalan can be demonized, fought militarily and even captured, but he can be neither ignored nor disregarded. It used to be deemed a crime to address Öcalan by the title ‘Mr’. Many Kurdish politicians and activists were fined on the charge of endorsing crime or praising a criminal, until in 2013 the European Court of Human Rights ruled such utterances to be freedom of speech. It was in the same year that the latest peace process began. From banning Mr Öcalan to making him the main negotiator for peace, the government had taken a giant step in terms of recognizing the nature of the Kurdish problem. At least, this was what many of us enthusiastically reckoned in the spring of 2013. ‘Serok Apo’ (‘President Apo’ in Kurdish), as he was known among the Kurds on the street, ‘The Leadership’ to the Kurdish political movement, and ‘the master terrorist’ to the Turkish government, was about to call for peace on 21 March 2013, the day of Newroz.

The peace process starts

Newroz, a celebration of the new year in Kurdish and Persian culture, usually resonates with clashes in south-eastern Turkey. Celebrating Newroz was effectively prohibited until 2000, because it was a symbol of Kurdish identity and, like all expressions of Kurdish identity, was not welcomed by the Turkish state. But this time it was different. Newroz would be celebrated and a new era would begin. We, the people of Turkey, would vault over the bitterness of history, over all the ills we had done to one another in the past 30 years, and land in a bright new future. Newroz 2013 would be remembered as the day Turkey’s Kurdish problem was solved and the armed conflict between the PKK and the Turkish government came to an end.

The then Turkish prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, announced during a TV interview that MIT had started a dialogue with Abdullah Öcalan, who, after his capture in 1999, had been imprisoned for life on İmralı, an island in the Sea of Marmara. The Turkish public learned of the peace process through Erdoğan’s words, which were uttered in such a nonchalant way as to raise doubts about whether he was aware of the importance of the news he was giving. Erdoğan, known for keeping a tight grip on public sentiment, was certainly aware, and his nonchalance was premeditated. Knowing that what he was saying had the potential to stir huge public resentment, he decided to wrap it up in such a way as to suggest that it was routine procedure for the Turkish government to meet a man who had been portrayed as the greatest enemy of the state.

The meeting was not something new, but it certainly was not ‘routine procedure’. Encounters constituting quasi-negotiations between Öcalan and various Turkish governments had been taking place since 1993, usually through MIT or Turkish army officials. Former prime ministers of Turkey Süleyman Demirel and Necmettin Erbakan and the former president Turgut Özal had contacted the PKK leaders at various levels.80 From the time of Abdullah Öcalan’s capture in 1999 to 2006, only officers of the Turkish army had sat across the table from Öcalan on behalf of the government. From 2006 onwards, MIT took over this role. What made the 2013 initiative special was that this time it had been made known to the public from the start and elected politicians were involved.

Two days after his announcement, Erdoğan vowed to ‘drink poison hemlock’ if necessary to pursue the peace process,81 implying he was ready to go ahead regardless of the political costs. In the following weeks, the public learned that a letter from Abdullah Öcalan, who for decades had been called a ‘baby killer’ and a ‘master terrorist’, would initiate the process. The letter would be read by Kurdish MPs to a gathering in Diyarbakır and broadcast live throughout the country.

It would have been impossible even to dream of such an event 20 years earlier.

What was all the more surprising was that there was no public backlash, except from the leader of the nationalist party, MHP (Nationalist Action Party), then the third-largest party in the parliament, which did not have much of an impact. The CHP, which had positioned itself to be the sole defender of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk’s ideology and representative of the secular nationalists, saluted the attempt by the ruling party, the AKP, to solve the Kurdish problem.

Here we were, a country exhausted by a violent conflict that had lasted since the 1980s and claimed almost 40,000 lives, making peace at last. It was what the majority of the country imagined, believed and genuinely wanted. A poll conducted in the spring of 2013 revealed that 81.3 per cent of the respondents thought that a solution to the Kurdish problem would work for everyone’s happiness.82 Another poll, publicized by Prime Minister Erdoğan himself, revealed that 64 per cent of the people answered ‘yes’ when asked if they supported the peace process.83 Erdoğan, notorious for living by the polls he receives weekly, was overjoyed. ‘These numbers will skyrocket after Newroz,’ he claimed in the same interview.

On 20 March 2013, a day before Newroz, I had arrived in Diyarbakır, feeling naively cheerful. I had walked the streets of Diyarbakır in anticipation of finding Kurds’ feelings that matched mine, and had bumped into Tahir Elçi, chairman of the Diyarbakır Bar Association. I could see that he was as excited as I was.

‘I think this time we can do it,’ he said with a bright smile. ‘We are closer to peace than ever before.’

We gave each other high-fives like two teenagers.

At night, prominent journalists, directors of NGOs, politicians and activists were all gathered in a fancy five-star hotel called Liluz (‘tulip’ in Kurdish). As we were on the eve of a day that would be remembered in Turkish history, we needed to talk.

Our host was the owner of the hotel, Şahismail Bedirhanoğlu, a wealthy Kurdish businessman and the chair of the South-East Businessmen’s Federation (DOGÜNSİFED). He was known to be a moderate Kurd in terms of ideology, a supporter of Kurdish rights and yet also a good servant to the AKP government. He had been walking a tightrope, trying not to upset either side. Therefore, he was more than happy for negotiations to begin between the PKK and the Turkish government, which would save him from having to choose his words carefully, one breath at a time.

Fifty of us were sitting around big dinner tables under ostentatious chandeliers in the top-floor lounge of the Liluz. The topic of conversation was obvious: the new Kurdish peace process – or the Solution Process, as the AKP government liked to call it – and what Abdullah Öcalan’s letter to initiate the process would look like. It was around 9 p.m. when we heard that the co-chair of the main Kurdish party, the HDP (People’s Democratic Party), Selahattin Demirtaş, had just received the letter from İmralı through MIT mediators.

‘This is surprising,’ Demirtaş had said to fellow party members who were present in the room.

‘Surprising in a good way or a bad way?’ I asked Sırrı Sakık, one of the HDP MPs at the Liluz dinner.

‘I haven’t the slightest idea,’ replied Sakık. ‘Only three people have read it: Selahattin [Demirtaş], İdris [Baluken] and Sırrı [Süreyya Önder], and they will read the letter to the crowd in Diyarbakır tomorrow. “Surprising” is the only word we could get out of Selahattin.’

Mere common sense dictated that if, in that letter, Öcalan were calling on PKK guerrillas to fight the Turkish forces to the death, that would indeed be surprising in the context of a peace process, but of course there was no way that the Turkish government would let that letter reach the hands of the Kurdish movement. Therefore, Öcalan’s letter should be regarded as ‘surprisingly positive’, I reckoned. But how?

To understand Öcalan’s mood, I went over to talk to a man who had known him for decades and had just returned from visiting him in İmralı prison. A month before Newroz, the Turkish government had let two Kurdish politicians converse face to face with Öcalan on the framework of the peace process. Ahmet Türk – a prominent figure in the Kurdish movement – was one of the two.

The last time he and Abdullah Öcalan had met was in June 1993 in a town called Bar Elias in Lebanon. Öcalan, Türk and Jalal Talabani – the then leader of the PUK (Patriotic Union of Kurdistan) in northern Iraq – had all shaken hands and announced a ceasefire by the PKK against Turkey. Because the Syrian government had decided to close down the PKK bases in Lebanon, Öcalan had demanded that, if the Turkish government was to end its ‘policy of annihilation of the Kurdish people and military operations’, the ceasefire would be indefinite. However, the ceasefire never led to a negotiation process, since the Turkish government continued its anti-PKK operations.84

Almost 20 years later, the two politicians had met again, this time in a prison under the heavy surveillance of the Turkish government, and talked about a peace process. I sat down with Ahmet Türk at the dinner table in the Liluz to learn what he had made of his visit to İmralı. Türk, a tall, slim man with a grey moustache and a hunchback that hinted at his long-time involvement in challenging Kurdish politics, spoke calmly, as he always did.

‘He [Öcalan] has not changed much. He thinks as quickly as ever, and jumps from one topic to another, his eyes alight with fire. I am very hopeful this time,’ Türk said:

We will get rid of that terrorist stigma on Kurdish politics. From now on, our resistance will be a civil one. Our Turkish socialist friends should try to understand us. We are not ‘selling them out’ to the AKP. But we have gone through so many hardships. We have suffered a lot. Now there is this opportunity and we want to take a shot at it. Nobody should blame us for trying.

Kurds are known to be proud of their loyalty on different levels: loyalty to their neighbour, comrade and cause, whatever the context. On a night like this, on the verge of a peace process, Ahmet Türk’s mention of ‘socialist friends’ and his apologetic stance about negotiating with the AKP government were symptoms of that obsession with loyalty. Kurds would rather continue to suffer than be accused of ‘selling out’. But why would Kurds, or anyone, be considered as selling out friends by choosing peace over war? The answer is that the AKP government had already become increasingly authoritarian regarding civil liberties and Kurds negotiating with an authoritarian government perturbed many in the leftist intelligentsia. According to this perspective, no good or peace could come out of this government, and by negotiating with it, Kurds were not only legitimizing the AKP internationally but also breaking the ranks of a possible resistance that might emerge against this authoritarianism. The Kurdish movement was aware of these arguments and perhaps agreed with them to some extent. Nevertheless, they had to take their chances, not only because they owed it to their people, who had lost tens of thousands of sons and daughters, but also because there was a hope, however slight, that the process of resolving the Kurdish issue would set the government on a democratic track.

On 21 March 2013, I was one of the million people who had gathered in the Newroz arena in Diyarbakır, a city in south-eastern Turkey considered by the Kurdish movement as the capital of ‘North Kurdistan’.

It was as hot as hell but it felt like heaven for the crowd, all of whom wore something red, green or yellow, traditional colours of the Kurdish movement. We were about to hear ‘The Leadership’ speak.

There were banners in Kurdish and Turkish, all addressing Öcalan. One of them read Savaşta da Barışta da Seninleyiz Ey Serok (We are with you at war and in peace, President). After several songs and rounds of halay dance, HDP MPs Sırrı Süreyya Önder and Pervin Buldan went up on stage. Önder was to read the Turkish version of Öcalan’s letter, while Buldan read it in Kurdish.

Somewhere in the middle of the letter, it became obvious that the target audience of the letter was not those Kurds who were filling the Newroz arena, but the ordinary, conservative Turkish people who make up the majority of the country. In his years of fighting it, Öcalan had come to know the Turkish government very well. Hence, he believed he needed to help it prepare public sentiment for the peace process. That was precisely the reason he made several references to Turkish–Kurdish kinship under Islam in the letter.

However, the most compelling part of the letter was the call for an end to armed struggle:

Witnessed by the millions of people who heed my call, I say a new era is beginning; an era where politics gains prominence over weapons. We have now arrived at the stage where we should withdraw our armed forces outside the borders. I believe that all those who have championed this cause are sensitive to the possible dangers of the process. This is not an end, but a new beginning. This is not abandoning the struggle – we are initiating a different struggle. The creation of geographies based on ethnicity and a single nation is an inhuman fabrication of modernity that denies our roots and our origins.

Nobody was expecting that the Turkish public would embrace Öcalan as a peacemaker. The best possible outcome would be not to have any negative reaction. That never happened.

Nevertheless, there were mixed feelings on the Kurdish side. The letter had come as a shock, because the Kurdish audience had been expecting an announcement of a ceasefire but not a declaration of the end of armed struggle. What have we gained that makes us ready to give up the armed struggle? they wondered. But mostly they kept the shock and the frustration to themselves.

Both Turks and Kurds opted to wait and see how the process would develop, because we were an exhausted nation longing for peace. Years of war had turned us against one another. Kurds and Turks had long been finding joy in one another’s agony, seeing the other’s mourning as though it were a wedding, and a wedding as a cause for mourning. We had lost our humanity. How were we to heal that wound in the east and west of Turkey now? A peace process, a likely disarmament, meant people would no longer get hurt. This was a good start. And then we could try and mend one another’s wounds too. That was what the majority of a nation contemplated in the spring of 2013.

If only we had known.

‘Naivety is the new realism,’ say some of the contemporary optimists. It did not work for us. We were naive, but the reality did not match up. After two years of a stumbling but somehow working peace negotiation and a ceasefire with almost no deaths on either side, the peace process collapsed in June 2015. This failure created its own masterpieces of mayhem in the country.

Among the hundreds of civilians who lost their lives was a person who was very dear to the democrats of the country. He was the one that I had optimistically high-fived on the day before the peace process began.

Tahir Elçi was a democrat, human rights activist and a relentless optimist. He was one of the founders of the Turkey Human Rights Foundation. He had defended the Kurds who had been forcibly displaced or whose relatives and friends had been lost or killed since the mid-1990s.

Elçi is gone now – assassinated on 28 November 2015 in the district of Sur, on a small historic road next to the one in which we had exchanged our hopes for the future two years earlier.

‘We don’t want guns, clashes and military operations here. This is a historic area, which has been the cradle of many civilizations.’85 These were his last words. He was caught in a gun battle between Turkish police and the PKK’s youth wing (YDG-H), which began right after he had given a press conference. Previously, on a TV show, Elçi had said that, even though he denounced violence, he would not call the PKK a terrorist organization, which had got him into trouble with the government following the collapse of the peace process. He had subsequently received countless death threats on social media and faced trial on charges of disseminating terrorist propaganda.

His death epitomized everything that had gone wrong with the Kurdish peace process and how abruptly the political climate could return to one of conflict and hostility.