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| Iraq |
| 2003-05-11 |
| It's an article from the Observer on the PKK in northern Iraq. Edited for brevity. She is five foot nothing in her trainers with hair pulled into a ponytail that reaches the small of her back and a multicoloured thread round one slim wrist. She is wearing green combat fatigues with a radio antenna sticking out from one pocket of her well-worn, olive-drab jacket. She has an AK47 over one shoulder and she is talking about killing men. All for the good of the Revolution, no doubt ... Comrade Gulbar is a military commander, in charge of a unit of 30 young men and women of the Partiya Karkeren Kurdistan (the Kurdish Workers Party or PKK). Her struggle, she tells me, is twofold. She is fighting for the Kurdish people and for the liberation of women. She says that the two issues are inextricably connected. All part of the Armed Struggle(TM) no doubt To those who have suffered most from their activities, the PKK is a brutal, criminal terrorist organisation given to indiscriminate attacks on civilians and motivated by a fanaticism paralleled only by Osama bin Laden's Islamic militants. Birds of a feather ... To many Kurds, either in the diaspora or in the heartland Kurdish areas of southeastern Turkey, western Iran, northern Iraq and eastern Syria, the PKK are freedom fighters, battling for a homeland, or at least better rights, for a people without a nation. Up to half the PKK are women and, throughout the group's 30-year history, the 'struggle for women's freedom' as Comrade Gulbar terms it, has been an integral part of its campaign. The PKK's ideology is, to coin a phrase, very last century. Were it not for its propensity for extreme violence, self-immolation, bombing towns and kidnapping journalists and tourists, there would be something quaint about its talk of dialectic materialism, the struggle against imperialism, false consciousness, the alienated capitalist self and so on. When you talk about 'gender issues' with PKK members (they don't have cadres, I am told, but volunteers), you are suddenly returned to agitprop feminist debate, circa 1980. Take the issue of marriage. PKK volunteers are not allowed to marry because truly free gender relations are impossible given the oppression inherent in the capitalist world system that is currently dominant. In that system, individuals and their emotions are reduced to commodities and so marriage, a bourgeois concept based on ownership, can only aid the continued dominance of patriarchal (and imperialist) power. As no truly power-free gender relations are possible (and here the revolutionary Marxism shades into French existentialism) until capitalism is replaced by a system which allows truly free relations between individuals, no marriage between PKK volunteers is permissible. Instead, all must strive for the revolution. As an added incentive, sex is banned, too, also until the revolution. It is 'not included in the programme plans of the party'. Looks like Occalan's was reading 1984 when thought up his mob Such sophomoric Leftism is understandable given the origins of the movement. The PKK was formed in 1974 by Abdullah Ocalan, a charismatic Kurdish political activist from Turkey. They were based in Syria through the 80s, but moved to their current bases in the mountains of northern Iraq in the chaos following the first Gulf War of 1991. With the local Kurdish parties weakened by the war on Saddam Hussein and by internecine rivalry, the PKK was able to hack out a substantial and effectively self-ruled feifdom. The early and mid-90s saw horrific violence in southeastern Turkey as the Turkish state attempted to force the PKK out of its enclave and to crush dissent among its own restive Kurdish minority. Both sides committed terrible atrocities, burning villages and killing civilians. Around 40,000 people died and the Turkish government's brutality was condemned by a series of international human rights organisations. The PKK took to suicide operations and explosions in Turkish cities and swiftly earned themselves a place on British and American lists of banned terrorist organisations. Did the same human rights groups that condemned Turkey also condemn the PKK? Nah, they get a pass like the Paleos cause they have an Armed Struggle(TM) A series of military operations during the 90s involving thousands of Turkish troops backed by Kurdish groups and auxiliaries failed to dislodge the group from its mountain stronghold. Once again, casualties on both sides were heavy. In all, Ankara says, more than 20,000 PKK fighters have been killed and several thousand Turkish soldiers and security militia men. In 1999, there was something of a breakthrough. Abdullah Ocalan was captured in Kenya and, from his Turkish prison cell, issued a directive saying that the military strategy pursued by the PKK hitherto had been misguided. The PKK renounced violence, except in self-defence. Last year, it renamed itself Kadek, the Kurdish Freedom and Democracy Congress, and the hammer and sickle was dropped from its flag, though the red, yellow and green motif featuring a five-pointed star remains. Kadek now says it wants to pursue Kurdish and women's rights through democratic means. They all say that, just until the shooting starts ... Up in its enclave, it exacts customs duties and taxes on the local people, builds roads and the occasional clinic, runs a standing army of about 10,000 fighters, directs a sophisticated international network of activists and fundraisers (and extortionists) and overall acts like a mini-state. Most of us Westerners call that a "kleptocracy." Sounds a lot like Chechnya back during the good old days ... 'We are not terrorists. We are a liberated people in a liberated land,' said Comrade Gulbar. Many disagree. The PKK is still banned almost all over the world. Funny how suicide bombings'll do that to you Given that the Americans are committed to a 'war on terror' and are now in power in Baghdad this is an important point that seems to have escaped the notice of most PKK cadres. Gotta love the scare quotes. The PKK seems to be primarily a Kurdish mess though, so let the PUK and DPK clean knock them up. They sure cleaned Ansar al-Islam's clock in short order. I had first tried to see the PKK in 1991. The group was in the process of launching its guerrilla war against the Turkish security forces and meeting them had proved too difficult and too dangerous. Twelve years later, back in Kurdistan to cover the US-led war on Baghdad, things were easier. As Kadek, the group is keener on media exposure. We were told the days of kidnapping journalists are long gone. Contacts in the northeastern Iraqi city of Sulaimania carried our request up to the mountains and came back with an invitation. She explains that in almost all of the Middle East women are repressed. Their basic human rights are denied and they are treated as the property of their husbands. To fight the repression of women in the Middle East and in the world more generally, Actac says, is a significant part of the PKK's mission. 'Our revolutionary struggle means that here men and women are equal, standing shoulder to shoulder,' she says. 'Only in our party is this the case and so we are an example of how men and women should work and live together. Our role is to inspire and mobilise. When women see us they will understand that there is an alternative to the way they are forced to live their lives.' Until a decade or so ago it was the Soviet Union that performed this role, Actac says, until the leadership's 'deviation into dogmatism' caused the Communist regime to collapse. Actac is adamant. 'The failure of the USSR is one of the main reasons for the continuing reactionary ignorance among the masses, both the dominant men and the unconscious women,' she says. 'We have to be the standard bearers of liberation now.' So does that mean the hermit kingdom over in North Korea has dropped the ball? Spending time with the PKK is disorientating. It is impossible to get a firm grasp on what is going on. One moment they resemble a joint girl guides/boy scouts summer camp led by someone with a worrying interest in rifle-shooting, the next they are back to talking, seriously, of martyrs, self-immolation, death and the struggle. The combination is disconcerting. Even moments of levity - a girls' game which involves hurling a ball at each other and screaming with high-pitched giggles if hit, a surreptitious cigarette out of the commander's sight, a fit of bashfulness when faced by a Western photographer - are tainted by an underlying darkness. Who are these teenage cadres? Why do they make their way to the mountains in the knowledge that to go back to their homes will be, given the attention of the security services in their own countries, very hard? Few are in contact with their families. All profess a willingness to kill and die for the cause. All have made huge sacrifices, though they may not know it yet. All appear to be having tremendous fun. The day I stood at the memorial, Jay Garner, the retired general appointed by Washington to govern Iraq, arrived in Baghdad. The implications of this do not appear to have sunk in up in the Qandil mountains. Comrade Jamal was very sanguine about the prospects for Kadek. Capitalism was entering its final stage, he told me. All other forms of government were being swept aside. The autocracy in Iraq had gone. The monarchy in Saudi Arabia was next. Then would come the oligarchy of Turkey. The maps of the Middle East were being withdrawn and the old borders of the colonial era dissolving. This was a tremendous opportunity for the party, he said. Victory was drawing close. Uh-huh. You just wait have to wait it out like the Ruskies did and then it'll all fall apart ... There is another reading of the current situation of the PKK. The PKK is a terrorist organisation. It exists on a piece of land which is now directly governed by America. America is in the middle of a war on terror. Turkey and the other local Kurdish groups are, despite occasional differences, strategic allies. In short, it is only a matter of time before the US, with willing auxiliaries, moves to destroy the PKK, Kadek, its mountain enclave and comrades Gulbar, Rosa, Chedam and everyone else. And good riddance to them. |
| Posted by:Dan Darling |
| #5 Reminds me of the Kymer Rouge and we know what happen to Cambodia(Campuchea). Don't know if it's related,but caught a glimpse(on tv-news)of young ladys17-22)training in weapons,1 group traning with a tank.They were very pretty! Wonder if this is where Mommar got his b-gaurds? |
| Posted by: w_r_manues@yahoo.com 2003-05-12 07:09:34 |
| #4 I can applaud that as long as they keep their marxist drivel at home, not likely tho'. Some groups need to proselytize/coerce at the point of a gun, non? |
| Posted by: Frank G 2003-05-11 16:58:33 |
| #3 Just for sport, let's reassign these young women to security detail for a network of battered womens' shelters in Afghanistan ... those Afghan machistas deserve a worthy opponent. |
| Posted by: Sassafrass 2003-05-11 16:40:56 |
| #2 Yoah days ah numbahed, hunnah... |
| Posted by: Ptah 2003-05-11 13:57:51 |
| #1 "so let the PUK and DPK clean knock them up" heh heh Freudian slip Dan? I'd like to see the reporter ask Comrade Gerbil: "Do you think your fondness for AK47's represents penis envy? " They sound like an armed Smith College alumni meeting |
| Posted by: Frank G 2003-05-11 12:37:45 |