The Turkish government and army were blamed for this, but it was simply not an easy question, and the Kurds themselves did not know what the answer was. In the end, this had to do with a more general failure, that of the Turkish Left. It had had its chance in the 1960s, and it was even not far from power in the 1970s, when Ecevit ran things. However, it did not know what to do with the Kurds, regarding them as a weird amalgam of Armenians and gypsies. It did not help that Kurdish society (many parts were much less than that whole) was significantly different, in that Şafi Islam reigned, harsher than the Turks’ Sunni version. Ordinary Kurds (there were many extraordinary Kurds) behaved differently towards women, especially, who did not rate very highly: polygamy went on, though given religious rather than legal sanction, and there was a great demographic problem. This imposed a terrible strain on every sort of infrastructure, and matters were again complicated because the south-east of Turkey worked by dry agriculture. The State had responded with a scheme for great dams to divert the water of the two biblical rivers, the Euphrates and the Tigris, towards irrigation and hydro-electricity, but this would take time, and in any case the profits went towards the tribal chiefs, the Agas, who mainly ran affairs in these parts, clan-fashion. The Turkish Left were no good at these matters, and bear some responsibility for the troubles that followed. Sprigs of Istanbul grandee families, Henri Barkey or Çağlar Keyder, thinking beardedly about their own local version of Eighteenth Brumaire and looking to jobs in America, could hardly be bothered, at the Ankara School of Political Science, with some hairy peasant from Siverek called Abdullah Öcalan.
Öcalan was a megalomaniac, given to comparing himself with Mao and Lenin. His family background was not entirely unlike Stalin’s, in that he had a weak, henpecked (sılık) father and a bossy (Turkish) mother. His first enthusiasms (like Stalin’s) were religious. His first intention was to work in the State, but as a student he encountered Kurdish nationalism. This had complicated origins. There had always been uprisings by Kurds against the State but they did not have a nationalist side until late in the day. There was no doubt a vague idea of Kurdishness, but the realities were religious and tribal. The Republic, declared in 1923, was secular, and the last Caliph was dismissed in 1924. In 1925, and again in the 1930s, there were Kurdish uprisings, the last one (in Dersim, from 1936 to 1938) put down with much harshness. On all occasions, the State used tribes against each other — they had fought all along, whether over access to water, or over some hereditary grievance such as sheep-stealing, and in any case some were strictly Moslem, adhering to the Şafi version of Islamic law, which required its adepts to perform ritual ablutions if they had been in the same room as a foreigner or a woman, while others were Alevi. By the later sixties, Kurdish banners figured in student demonstrations. In 1969 ‘eastern revolutionary cultural hearths’ were set up in Kurdish towns, but after the coup of 12 March 1971 the organizers fled to Europe.
Öcalan went on to a surveyors’ school and then the department of Political Science at Ankara University, which had been a training ground for the bureaucratic elite of republican Turkey (it was called Mülkiye, after an Ottoman equivalent, but the original inspiration had been the modernizing École des Sciences Politiques in Third Republican France, also a country that took a very robust view of peasant dialects). As the university civil war of that period got under way, he was associated with the Left (and spent seven months in prison after the coup of 1971) and took up with his Krupskaya, Kesire Yıldırım; but no-one remembered anything much about him. The university Left, usually products of the professional class and as likely as not to regard themselves as way above village Kurds with a background in surveying, probably played its part in driving him towards Kurdish nationalism. They seem to have regarded him as a possible police agent as he talked ‘in a very gauche [toy] way’ about a Kurdish state, and the Turkish Left hardly bothered to include Kurdish banderoles.
The custom, at that time, was for small student groups to gather at the Çubuk reservoir park outside Ankara, where families might go for excursions at weekends — reservoir parks, as with Rooken Glen outside Glasgow, being a hallmark of progressive towns, but in this case out of sight of the police. There, on 21 March 1973, the PKK appears to have been founded, although its formal establishment came a few years later, in a village of Lice district, in the south-east, in Diyarbakır province, on 27 November 1978. Before this, Öcalan sent off representatives to the Kurdish east, there to spread the word, and setting up assorted protection rackets. For this, they used the grievances of one tribe against another, such as, for instance, the government’s grants of agricultural machinery to one rather than another — in this case, on the Syrian border, the Süleyman and Paydaş clans, respectively for and against the government.
PKK propaganda is entirely predictable, written in wooden language, and based on the analysis of almost any Third World Communist movement of the era. There is ‘imperialism’. It has local supporters, the ‘comprador class’, among the bourgeoisie of the State; in the particular locality there is ‘feudalism’, in this case the Kurdish tribal leaders and their hangers-on. Women are oppressed. Religion is regarded as part of the oppression. There are rivals on the Left, but they are potentially treacherous — they might just come to terms with ‘imperialism’ or at any rate show no sympathy for the cause of national liberation. The Turkish Left, in this case, was dismissed as ‘social chauvinism’, another well-worn phrase (it went back to the 1920s) — ‘feudal petty bourgeois and children of family’, meaning Henri Barkey and Çağlar Keyder. And now, in 1978, came the ‘First Congress’ of what is almost the last National Liberation Front of the old school and this time round there were Palestinian (and Bulgarian) connections. Öcalan’s outfit elected its central committee, its organizational and political bureaux, and had its officials for media affairs, military affairs, etc. The name was now changed to ‘PKK’ and its manifesto was issued. It invoked a version of Kurdish history, going back to the Medes, and emphasized the Indo-European as against Turkic origins of the people; it talked of ‘Turkish capitalism’ in the 1960s, referring to toprak ağaları (‘landowners’) ve kompradorları, and developed a version of the Vietcong programme, for a ‘national democratic revolution’ in which the ‘working classes’ would take the lead; these, it was claimed, were emerging from the peasantry; the enemies were ‘feudal, comprador exploitation, tribalism, religiosity [mezhepalık] and the slave-like dependence of women’.
Here are Dostoyevsky’s Demons: a gathering of perhaps two dozen people, most of them vaguely educated (Selim Çürükkaya, an interesting defector, says he was very impressed by Öcalan’s reading: he himself had struggled up from a village, and Alevi-Kurdish, Zaza-speaking, background, and had managed to graduate from sheep-watching to a high school at Mersin on the south coast; another was a schoolteacher of Laz background, i.e. Moslem Georgian, from the Black Sea coast). Of the original members, seven were killed on Öcalan’s orders as ‘agents’, five fled, and were denounced as traitors, and another five, though not classed as traitors, were downgraded. Two committed suicide, and another was murdered by a rival group in northern Iraq. Öcalan’s own wife fled, with another of the originals, and set up a rival PKK (‘Vejin’, though, here, for translation, the Indo-European is not helpful) in Paris. The first action occurred in July 1979, at Kırbaşı, a village in Hilvan. The area was run by a tribal chief, Mehmet Celal Bucak, who was also deputy, for the Justice Party, of Siverek. The PKK’s strategy — following the Maoist one — was to ally with one tribe against another; the Bucaks, strong in the Urfa region, were at odds with the Türks. The PKK blamed ‘feudalism’ for the plight of the Kurds, and decided to make an example. In the event, they attacked a Bucak during an iftar, the fast-breaking dinner celebrated in Ramazan, and wounded the chief, though they also killed a maid and a small boy. The main activity thereafter was partly to fight the Turkish Left, but also to levy a tribute on the timber trade of a government minister. At the turn of 1979-80, as the military stepped up arrests, Öcalan became alarmed, and before the coup of 12 September 1980 he moved to Syria. At this point the PKK became heavily involved in the politics of the Middle East.