Blood and Belief: The PKK and the Kurdish Fight for Independence

"This is by a wonderful journalist named Aliza Marcus. It’s an account of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, known as the PKK, the most prominent Kurdish movement in Turkey and one of the most difficult for us to wrestle with. It’s the story of how a party founded in Turkey in 1978 has waged a 35 year insurrection against the Turkish state. The PKK was declared to be a terrorist organization by Turkey, by the European Union and by the United States. In the case of the European Union and the United States, this is a political designation aimed to appease Turkey. The PKK is not like what we think of as terrorist organizations, such as Al Qaeda or the Islamic State. The leader of the PKK, Abdullah Öcalan, has a cult-like following, which Aliza describes. He began as somebody seeking to create an independent Kurdish state based on Marxist principles, with himself as a leader rather in the model of Joseph Stalin. In fact, the younger Öcalan bore an uncanny physical resemblance to Stalin. After Turkish special forces captured him in 1999, he underwent a transformation in beliefs. While in prison, he read the works of a Vermont philosopher named Murray Bookchin who advocated secularism, gender equality, radical environmentalism and communitarianism. These ideas were picked up by Syrian Kurds. In Northeast Syria, there is strict gender equality in all official positions and in order to make it work, the Kurds have created two positions for each executive job. There are co-prime ministers, co-mayors, and co-party leaders, one male and one female. There are women generals in the Syrian Democratic Forces and many of the fighters are female. The SDF was the main force fighting the Islamic State. In my last visit to Northeast Syria, I visited a TV station where everyone from top management to the cleaning staff, including all the anchors and all the reporters, are women. Marcus’s book, although a little dated–it doesn’t include what’s happened in Syria–is one of the few definitive works on this unique ideology and the history of the PKK. He’s swallowed Erdogan’s line on the PKK, that the Syrian Kurds are nothing more than PKK terrorists. They’re not. It’s true that they were influenced by Abdullah Öcalan and there are people who were in the PKK, but the Syrian Kurds created their own statelet and there’s been no evidence of a single terrorist act on Turkey originating from Kurdish-controlled Syria. There is, however, plenty of evidence of Turkey facilitating infiltration of terrorists into Syria. I’ve interviewed quite a number of ISIS fighters and family members and every one got to Syria by going through Turkey. That’s because the Turks intentionally looked the other way. When Trump says “they are no angels” it’s just a way for Trump to excuse himself for having betrayed an ally who lost 11,000 lives fighting the Islamic State on our behalf."