[NYTr] In the Kandil Mountains with the PKK

[All the News That Doesn't Fit]

Counterpunch - Nov 9, 2007
http://counterpunch.com/patrick11092007.html

Among Ocalan's Disciples

In the Kandil Mountains with the PKK

By PATRICK COCKBURN

There are 100,000 Turkish troops just across the border preparing to
launch an invasion of northern Iraq in order to eliminate the
guerrillas of the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK). The US has labelled
the PKK 'terrorists' and the Iraqi government--in spite of the
arguments of its Kurdish members--has told the guerrillas to disarm or
leave its territory. Iran has denounced the Iranian wing of the PKK as
a pawn of Israel and the US, and intermittently shells its camps in the
Kandil mountains. The PKK, which led the failed rebellion of the
Turkish Kurds between 1984 and 1999 and had been largely forgotten by
the outside world, is suddenly at the centre of a new crisis in Iraq
that may culminate in a Turkish attack.

The PKK guerrillas are surprisingly easy to find, but that is because
they want to be found. For the first time in years journalists want to
talk to them. All year Turkey has been threatening to send its army
into northern Iraq as a result of pinprick attacks by the PKK inside
Turkey. But an invasion is about the last thing Erdogan wants: it would
achieve little against the PKK and discredit him with Turkey's 15
million Kurds, many of whom voted for his moderate Islamist party in
July's general election. Even a small war might deflate Turkey's
economic boom and strengthen the power of the army within the state.
But the fighting is getting more intense. A PKK attack early in the
morning of October 21 killed 16 Turkish soldiers; eight others were
captured. Erdogan has talked tough, but so far avoided ordering the
Turkish army across the frontier. If another PKK attack of similar
magnitude takes place, he may be compelled to act.

The PKK headquarters are in the Kandil mountains, which run along the
Iraqi side of the border with Iran. They form one of the world's great
natural fortresses. The mountains, which will soon be covered in snow,
are broken by deep gorges and hidden valleys. Aside from a few army
supply roads, built by Saddam's engineers during the Iran-Iraq war, the
only way to travel in the region is on foot or in four-wheel drives on
tracks that disappear entirely where streams have washed them away. At
the end of October I hired a driver and a four-wheel drive and drove
from Arbil, the Kurdish capital, two and a half hours east of the
Kandil to the village of Sangassar in the plain just below the
mountains. I was worried that the Kurdistan Regional Government, under
pressure from the US to sort out the PKK, would have ordered the
soldiers at its checkpoints to stop journalists passing through. At one
police outpost soldiers in green camouflage were hauling concrete
blocks to construct a new building. The last time I was here, the
Kurdish police had been quick to say that the Kandil was under PKK
control. After a talk with his superiors on the phone, Lt Col. Ahmad
Sabir of the Frontier Guards had said we could go on but that 'we have
no control beyond this point and no responsibility for what happens to
you. You may meet PKK, Iranians on the border or shepherds with guns.'
This time, though, the police just glanced at our passports and wrote
down our names. The road, one of those built by Saddam, zigzagged up
the side of a valley between steep hills covered in small oak trees
before reaching the top of a pass where a solidly built PKK outpost
stood. On the mountainside a mile away, picked out in stones painted
black and yellow, was a gigantic picture of the PKK leader, Abdullah
Ocalan, who was captured and imprisoned by Turkey in 1999. The PKK in
the Kandil must be one of the few guerrilla movements which can be
detected from space.

The PKK soldiers, wearing traditional Kurdish uniform with loose baggy
trousers and carrying Kalashnikovs and grenades, looked relaxed but
disciplined. They told us to drive to a village called Kurtak; the idea
was not tempting because there were only a few dangerous-looking paths.
The Turkish air force would have no difficulty striking the village
thanks to the PKK's habit of building megaliths. On the hillside above
Kurtak large stones had been gathered and painted to spell the words
'APO', meaning 'People's Protection Force' -- one of the many names of
the PKK. Earlier this year, in another part of the Kandil, I saw an
exotic mausoleum to the PKK dead (3o,ooo are said to have died during
their 15-year-liberation war but the real figure is probably twice as
high). The mausoleum is built on a small plain deserted except for a
herd of grazing cattle; penned in by soaring mountains, it looks like
an advertisement for holidays in Switzerland. The outside walls are
painted white and red and guarded by a couple of PKK soldiers. Inside
the gates are ornamental ponds and flowerbeds overlooked by a
3o-foot-high white column on top of which is a miniature yellow star,
the symbol of the PKK. The cemetery, built in 2002, holds 67 ornate
marble tombs with the names of very young male and female fighters
inscribed on them. Further north, closer to the Turkish border, they
have hidden a museum at the bottom of a gorge; a gold-painted statue of
Ocalan, still regarded with devotion, stands in the forecourt.
Fountains spray water into the air through nozzles made out of the tops
of lethal Italian-made mines that hop into the air when touched and
explode at waist height.

The monuments may have been built after most of the fighters of the PKK
retreated from Turkey to Iraqi Kurdistan in 1999 on the orders of
Ocalan, who had just been snatched by Turkish intelligence agents from
a car in Nairobi. Originally a Marxist- Leninist party, the PKK was
founded by Ocalan and like-minded Turkish Kurds in 1978 with the
intention of launching an armed struggle against the Turkish state that
would end in Kurdish independence. Guerrilla war began in 1984 and by
1993 the PKK had won control of much of southeastern Turkey. But their
guerrillas were always vastly outnumbered by the Turkish army, which
destroyed some three thousand Kurdish villages and drove their
inhabitants into cities such as Dyarbakir or out of the region, to
Istanbul and eastern Turkey. Ocalan created a cult around himself as
the omniscient leader and eliminated all his rivals. He ran the war in
Turkey from a distance after fleeing to Syria in 1979 and later
established a headquarters in Lebanon's Bekaa valley. He was supported
for twenty years by Syria until Turkey forced Syria to tell him to
leave by threatening to invade. It was while he was looking for another
safe haven, in Kenya, that he was captured. At his trial in Turkey
Ocalan dismayed many of his supporters by his craven performance,
praising Ataturk, apologizing for his actions and expressing regret for
the Turks but not the Kurds who had been killed in the guerrilla war.
For all that, he has somehow remained the symbol of the PKK. He is now
held in a jail on Imrali Island in the Sea of Marmara, the only
prisoner there.

One might have expected the PKK to collapse after its defeat at the
hands of the Turkish army and the abject behaviour of the revered
Ocalan. It has survived as a powerful force among the Kurds of
south-east Turkey thanks to its strong and well-financed apparatus; and
because it had little choice but to go on fighting given that Turkey
largely refused any concessions to its large Kurdish minority. 'The
main reason for the PKK's hold was perhaps Turkey,' Aliza Marcus writes
in a well-informed study of the PKK. 'Instead of using Ocalan's capture
and the subsequent disarray inside the PKK to undercut the nationalist
group by making reforms and seizing the political initiative, Ankara
chose to claim victory and leave it at that.'

The PKK leaders I met sitting outside a group of small stone houses in
Kurtak were angry that their conciliatory actions towards Turkey--they
declared a cease fire on October 14 last year -- had been ignored. They
said they were fighting in self-defense and in retaliation against
attacks by the Turkish army. A woman called Mizgin Amed, introduced as
a PKK leader, said: 'Even an animal -- any living thing -- will fight
when it feels it is in a dangerous situation.' She and a PKK commander,
Bozar Tekin, denied that they were 'terrorists' and asked why less
attention was paid to the deaths of Kurds than to those of Turkish
soldiers. They claimed that an earlier attack, blamed on the PKK, in
which 12 Turkish Kurd village guards had been shot dead, had been
staged by the Turkish security forces.

The theory that factions in the Turkish army are fearful of losing
power to the civilian government of Erdogan and are stirring up the war
in south-east Turkey has many followers in Iraq. It is one of three
major conspiracy theories that attempt to explain the present crisis.
Its proponents argue that secular nationalist Turkish officers were
dismayed when Erdogan and his party were triumphantly re-elected with
47 per cent of the vote on July 22 and further dismayed when the army
failed to stop the former foreign minister Abdullah Gul, for whom they
reserve special contempt, from becoming president. Some officers may
think that an invasion of lraqi Kurdistan would be a good way of
exciting nationalist fervor in Turkey. With conflict under way the
influence of the Turkish army would once again increase. A second
theory, with followers among Iraqi Kurdish leaders, is linked to this.
Who, they ask, runs the PKK these days? in large part, it is still
Ocalan, but he is wholly under Turkish military control on his island.
Surely Turkish military intelligence is manipulating him and secretly
fomenting the latest PKK attacks.

A third conspiracy theory popular in Turkey sees the PKK as an American
surrogate. It calls itself PEJAK in the Kandil and seeks to foment a
liberation war among the Iranian Kurds. So far there have been
skirmishes along the border. It is true that the PKK and PEJAK want to
present themselves as potential allies of the US. Bozan Tekin rather
crudely claimed that Erdogan's moderate pro-business Islamist
government supports Hamas and al-Qaida'. Turkish ministers say that the
PKK often uses American weapons, though this proves nothing: much of
the American military equipment delivered to the Iraqi army is
immediately sold in the arms market. No doubt the CIA and maybe Mossad
would like to use the Iranian Kurds against the government in Tehran
but they are unlikely to use the PKK or its offshoots because of the
offence this would cause to the Turks. US officials
hypocritically--refuse to condemn PEJAK as 'terrorists', even when they
kill Iranian soldiers in forays identical to those the PKK makes into
Turkey.

Elements of all these theories are probably true. The PKK and the
Turkish army have parallel interests. The existence of the PKK
justifies the size, political power and vast budget of the Turkish
military. The harsh grip of the army over south-east Turkey sends
Turkish Kurds into the PKK. Both Turkish soldiers and Kurdish
guerrillas were the losers in the last Turkish election. Erdogan's
administration is the most sympathetic to the Kurds in years. The
pro-Kurdish Democratic Society Party, which ran in July, won only four
out of l2 seats in the Dyarbakir region, traditionally a PKK
stronghold. When the new Turkish president toured Kurdish areas in the
south-east he was greeted with flowers and enthusiastic crowds. For the
first time in years, the PKK's political support looked as if it was
disintegrating. By returning to the battlefield they may calculate that
they can reclaim this lost support.

As a political organization the PKK may be sclerotic but they are still
skilful guerrilla fighters. The stone houses where they meet visitors
are far from their camps in the mountains. The nearest camp to Kurtak
is said by those who have visited it to be at the bottom of a gorge
that can be reached only by walking for seven or eight hours through
the mountains. The camps are very mobile, usually consisting of a
framework of wooden poles over which the guerrillas place plastic
sheeting they carry with them and then camouflage with grass and hay.
Every few weeks the plastic is rolled up, the poles left in place and
the guerrillas move on to another camp. Those who have traveled with
them report that they move two by two with a long distance between each
pair. Their only vehicles are tractors and the four-wheel-drives they
use to travel along the river beds when the water is low. Declarations
by the government in Baghdad that they are going to 'cut the supply
lines', of the guerrillas are meaningless: they have large stockpiles
of food and ammunition. if Turkey invades, its ground troops will be
able to move only slowly through the mountain ranges; helicopter-borne
raiding parties will not be able to find the small parties of rebel
fighters. 'Even Alexander the Great couldn't bring this region under
his rule,' Bozan Tekin told me proudly. 'Three out of five of our
fighters are hiding in the mountains in Turkey and if the Turkish army
can't find them there, it will hardly find them in the Iraqi
mountains,' Intikam another PKK fighter said. Erdogan himself points
out that the previous 24 Turkish incursions into Iraqi Kurdistan,
carried out under an agreement with Saddam, never did much damage to
the PKK.-

But Erdogan may not be able to resist the pressure for an invasion.
jingoism in Turkey is a potent force and becoming more aggressive.
Pepression of Kurds is not as severe as it used to be. It is common
enough now to hear Kurdish spoken in the streets of cities in western
Turkey, where, twenty years ago, the speaker would have been arrested
for using the language. 'It used to be when I went to a dinner party in
Istanbul and said I was a Kurd there was an angry reaction,' a Kurdish
financier told me. 'Now when I say that several other people around the
table say they are Kurds as well.' The change is partly due to the fact
that so many Kurds have fled the violence and poverty of the south-east
to settle in the more prosperous cities of the west. But the change in
attitude is not very deep. The financier said that although his Turkish
friends might accept that he was a Kurd, 'when I speak about the rights
of the Kurds and what they have suffered there is always an angry row.'
Racism may have intensified in the last few months. The Turkish army
has never made much effort to distinguish between non-political Kurds
and PKK supporters. There have recently been mob attacks on Kurdish
businesses in Bursa in eastern Turkey. In an ominous official
statement, General Yasar Buyukanit, the chief of the Turkish general
staff, said the army promised that 'those that have caused us
suffering' would 'suffer even more'. His words were directed against
the PKK but many Turks apply them to the Kurds in general. This feeling
will grow if Turkey invades Iraqi Kurdistan and there are Kurdish
demonstrations in favour of the PKK or against the attack.

Nationalist sentiment has grown in Turkey over the last month. The
annual marathon in Istanbul turned into a nationalist rally; many of
the runners carried red Turkish flags. At the same time, there was an
anti-PKK rally in the town of Bodrum on the Mediterranean coast. Many
of the demonstrators wore red tee shirts with the word 'Turk' on them.
One anti-PKK protes-tor brought his dog with him and, feeling his dog's
patriotic credentials should also be stressed, dressed him in the same
shirt. A photograph of the pair caused a furious reaction in the
Turkish press and the man has now been arrested and will be prosecuted
for insulting the Turkish nation.

[Patrick Cockburn is the author of 'The Occupation: War, resistance and
daily life in Iraq', a finalist for the National Book Critics' Circle
Award for best non-fiction book of 2006.]