In fact his style became very much that of a Middle East dictator. The truth was that Öcalan himself despised the Kurds as zavallı, ‘poor mutts’, who could only be kept in place by Stalinist methods. In 1980, established in Syria, he took up links with one of the two large Kurdish factions in Iraq, Celal Talebani’s PUK, based on the Iranian side (and using its own language), and he opened up a training camp in the Bekaa valley in Lebanon, copying his ways from the PLO. Its attitudinizing leader, Yasser Arafat, had been allowed to address even the United Nations, generously conceding that he would deposit his revolver on the lectern as distinct from leaving it in its holster. Kurds: Palestinians? For Turks and most Kurds, unimaginable, but how should the problem be dealt with? Games were then played, the basic reality being that the Kurds moved in hundreds of thousands to western and central Turkey, and became assimilated. But the south-east remained a problem.
The Turkish state operated an alliance, never entirely reliable, with the other Iraqi Kurdish group, Mustafa Barzani’s PDK — Kurdistan Democratic Party — and four-cornered fighting might then develop; there were also problems, from time to time, with the Syrians, who sometimes opposed Saddam Hussein, with whom the PKK had, on the whole, good relations. In this atmosphere, Öcalan built up his own cult of personality, and ran affairs very strictly. One former close associate, Selim Çürükkaya, defected in the end, and wrote memoirs. He had come from a village, struggled up to the teachers’ training school at Tunceli, and spent eleven years in prison, there organizing hunger strikes. Then he was smuggled out, via Greece and Serbia, to Öcalan’s camp — the ‘Mahsun Korkmaz Military Academy’, where there was much marching about by young women in camouflage suits and boots. His estranged wife was there, and she had turned into a Rosa Klebb: she ticked him off for smoking, saying that no-one smoked when the Leader was present; she even ticked him off for crossing his legs, such informality being an offence against discipline. The camp was full of informers, and it had its own prison. The place was, generally, run by men who, in Turkish prisons, had not ‘resisted’, as Selim Çürükkaya claimed he had done, but had obeyed orders (a small version of the problems that arose in the satellite European countries after 1945, between Communists who had spent their time in Moscow and Communists who had been part of the anti-Nazi resistance movements). Öcalan himself was puritanical in sexual matters, though he did surround himself with a little group of fanaticized young women; the camp even had its own Orwellian language, imprisonment being called uygulama or ‘treatment’, and there were provisions for self-criticism sessions, with detailed questionnaires being served on people who had emerged from prison, as to their conduct before and during the imprisonment. There was even a version of the witch-hunt against Trotskyists in the Stalin era — one Mahmut Şener, then exiled in Germany. There was a grotesque leadership cult, Öcalan issuing a sort of catechism, comparing himself with the Mahdi, with evocations, in the Party Central School, of ‘The way of life of Apo, the way of work of Apo, the way of striking [enemies] of Apo’; after grandly named congresses (‘Congress of Victory’) there would be purges and liquidations. Apo was supposed, in Turkish, to mean ‘Daddy’, but it was also the name for the German terrorists of the seventies, Ausserparlamentarische Opposition (‘non-parliamentary opposition’), and the PKK’s prose was very Germanic.
The PKK learned its tactics from a school that, by 1984, was already quite venerable. It had a political wing, ERNK, which took twelve of the sixty-five seats in the exile parliament, a dummy body which reflected the Greek Communists’ ways in the Second World War, of ELAS/ETAM. But there were other instances. Mao Tse-tung had matched his Communist guerrillas with village politics, and General Vo Nguyen Giap in Vietnam had famously succeeded by similar methods. In the case of the PKK, tribal politics had a similar part, but this time there was a different element, in that small-town intelligentsia were recruited. Schoolteachers, emerging from the peasantry, had had a role in terrorism as far back as the Russian anarchists and the Armenians who had learned from them. The argument was that atrocity would cause counter-atrocity. The Turkish authorities would overreact against simple villagers, whose sympathies would then be with the rebels. Later, in the 1990s, there was also forced recruitment of boys and young men, just as had happened in the Greek civil war, who could be made to take the blame for an atrocity. It often happened that, upon capture by the army, they would spend time in Diyarbakır prison or elsewhere. There, they would receive lessons in Marxism. This had been a device of Balkan Communists between the wars, and, both in Greece and in Yugoslavia in the early thirties, the Communists took a fifth and more of the vote. In Greece, for instance, they took votes from the Macedonian minority, from the dock workers of Salonica, from the tobacco-growers of Thrace and from children of the refugees who had arrived from Anatolia. Add the sons of some rich and educated families, and you have a model for the Communism of the whole area. A great book, Eleni, describing how, in a village in north-western Greece, the locals could be made far more radical than they might otherwise have been, is the prototype and, curiously enough, after Orthodox services in Greece collections would solemnly be taken to buy rockets for the PKK. Its managers had learned from earlier practices, and they behaved atrociously. In 1985, in a village of Çatak district in Van, they killed a man and his two baby daughters, and then poured paraffin on the house to burn it down, with the wife and two children, of eight and ten. In February 1987, using Turkish uniforms as camouflage, they shot up four houses, in Şırnak, when the villagers guessed who they were, the women and children fleeing. Road ambushes, even stopping local trains, were frequent enough in Bingöl and Bitlis, the travellers being killed with Kalashnikovs. Another speciality became economic targets — the ferro-chrome works and their clerks. Obviously, from the PKK point of view, the more economic distress, the better. Another method was to prevent education by the simple enough device of shooting schoolteachers — over one hundred. In April 1990, in a village near Elazığ, they attacked a primary school, roped in the teachers’ wives and children, and shut them up in the headmaster’s room. Then they killed a teacher. His wife, pregnant, was spared, but when she said that she did not want to survive, they obliged. There was another element. In accordance with Kurdish ways, young men were married off very early, produced two or three children, did their military service, took a second wife, and then a third one. The boys of the first marriage found their mother last in the queue, old before her time; children of the more prosperous years were favoured. According to Turkish military intelligence, the PKK recruited such boys. Of these, there were many. Naturally, local poverty helped the PKK, which then perpetuated it — shooting up chicken farms, for instance.