December 1997

Contents

Pragmatic rule in Congo-Kinshasa

Are Menem’s days numbered?

Southeast Asia feels the chill

The aftermath

Mission impossible

A setback for America’s anti-Saddam crusade

Disarming the markets

Winds of war ruffle the Middle East

The bottle that kills

The expulsion of the Palestinians re-examined

A trump card for Turkey’s Kurdish guerrillas

The fine art of giving

Intellectuals and workers close ranks

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A farm somewhere in the Middle East, not far from Turkey and the Kurdish mountains, finds us in a camp of the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK): some permanent buildings, a few army tents, a swimming pool, a playing field. Guerrilla leaders come here to complete their political training with their leader, Abdullah Oçalan. In the garden, the student guerrillas chat in the shade of the trees. History, politics, religion, language and literature, arts and social sciences, all have a place in their education. Students stay for several weeks, maybe several months. Then they go back to their bases in Turkey or northern Iraq, where they seem to be well established.

"For us," 20 year-old Nilan (1) explains, "there are not two Kurdistans, one in the north, the other in the south; one in Turkey, the other in Iraq. It’s all one country." Small, her long brown hair tied back, and wearing a combat jacket, Nilan is a captain. She joined the guerrillas at the age of thirteen. Born in Cizre close to the Iraqi border and won over by the Young Kurds’ revolt in the early 1990s, she was trained in the PKK camps of the Bothan-Badhinan region where Turkey joins Iraq. She is experienced, having won her stripes in battle. "In Turkey, our guerrillas move in small groups of about ten, at night. We attack convoys and military posts and sabotage economic targets. Southern Kurdistan (in Iraq), on the other hand, is virtually a liberated area. Apart from when we are under attack from the Turkish army, we gather in camps of 50 to 200 combatants, out in the open, in touch with the people."

Ahmad Bamarni, a former deputy in the Kurdish Parliament in Arbil and spokesman for the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) (2), says: "In the area of Iraqi Kurdistan controlled by Massoud Barzani’s KDP (Kurdistan Democratic Party), for anyone who opposes it, the PKK has become the only alternative". According to the KDP’s Ankara spokesman, Safin Dizaye, the PKK has signed up 3,000 young people in the Arbil region, trying to make itself into the biggest Kurdish party in Iraq, though it does not belong there (3). The claim brings a smile to Oçalan’s face. "Three hundred young people have joined the guerrillas there", he says, "and we have thousands of sympathisers in southern Kurdistan, where we are probably the third largest force after the PUK and the KDP."

In the aftermath of the Gulf war and the Kurdish uprising of spring 1991, those two parties seemed to be the sole masters of northern Iraq, relegating Oçalan to the role of spectator in the birth of the Kurdish autonomous region (4). Following violent confrontations with the KDP and PUK, in October 1992 the PKK renounced its separatist claim for a Kurdish state in favour of a federation with Turkey. On the advice of PUK chief Jalal Talabani, Oçalan even announced a unilateral cease-fire in March 1993, seeking in vain to open negotiations with Ankara.

But in the meantime, a fratricidal struggle had broken out for control of the autonomous region (5). This suicidal war between Kurds has resulted in thousands of deaths and undermined PUK and KDP hegemony. "The Kurdish leadership in Iraq failed to take advantage of a unique historical situation, so the younger generation are turning to us," Oçalan confidently claims. On the defensive, Massoud Barzani now has to rely on Saddam Hussein’s forces to support him against the PUK and on Ankara’s troops to help him drive the PKK out of the Barzan region, his clan’s traditional fiefdom. Barzani justifies this, claiming that the PKK is being manipulated by the Syrians and the PUK supported by Iran and its army. To which Oçalan retorts that neither Syria nor Iran intend to invade southern Kurdistan, but that Ankara does so regularly.

The very traditional Barzani is now having to deal with the PKK, a movement that is rapidly breaking with tradition. "We have two armies in southern Kurdistan, a mixed army and an army of women", says Zeynep, aged 27. The daughter of a well-to-do family, she joined the PKK in 1991. An assimilated Kurd, she relearned her language and rediscovered her culture with the guerrillas. "The new society we want to build involves women getting together", she explains. The Movement of Free Women of Kurdistan was founded at a PKK congress in 1995; and the women’s army is entirely female, from fighter groups up to the central committee. "In the past, the Kurdish people treated their women as slaves," Zeynep continues. "The Movement is a real revolution within the revolution; and it makes our links with Kurdish women easier."

Initially, the men in the PKK were somewhat hostile to this view. Then they were forced to acknowledge how good the women’s groups were in combat. The same went for the KDP’s peshmergas who, to begin with, could scarcely believe their eyes.

One of the features of the PKK is its high proportion of female fighters, whereas the peshmergas of the KDP and PUK are men. They are family men and the pay they receive goes to the people back home; the death of a peshmerga in action is a tragedy for his family and his whole village and it affects the morale of the troops. But a PKK guerrilla is unpaid and most of them have had no contact with their families for years. Their deaths go unreported. Abdullah Oçalan maintains that "morale is the guerrilla army’s decisive weapon". But arms count too. Having recently acquired Russian SA-7 missiles, in May 1997 his guerrillas shot down two Turkish army helicopters in northern Iraq. That was a serious blow for Ankara, whose troops returned to northern Iraq in October 1997 for their umpteenth "final mission". They are still there, openly supporting the KDP forces against the PUK.

"The guerrillas defeated? Come off it! We control the entire range of mountains from Mus to Bingol, from the Mediterranean to the Black Sea (6)." Short-haired and in his thirties, Dr Ali commands the PKK forces in the region of Diyarbakir, capital of Turkish Kurdistan. He took to the mountains eight years ago, after being arrested and tortured by the police. Ali and his troops have been holding the Turkish forces in check for eight years. "The region’s very patriotic; 90% of the population support us" (7), he says. But the years of confrontation between the guerrillas and the army have turned the countryside into a virtual desert. The guerrillas have destroyed the small military outposts that covered the region and the army has destroyed the villages that were held to support them. Hundreds of thousands of people were forced to flee to the towns where the army is firmly in control (8).

In short, the PKK rules, but over a desert. Contact with the population, which has taken refuge in the major urban centres, has become more difficult. The guerrillas spend the winter in underground refuges and caves, and for months communications are impossible. When the snows melt, the fighting resumes. On 4 and 5 July last, the PKK sabotaged the powder magazine and arsenal at Kirikkale; the fire raged for three days and killed three people, and rebuilding will take three years.

"The guerrillas can’t defeat the army, but the army can’t crush us either," the doctor says. "We can go on for years, but we don’t believe the Turkish government will hold out that long. The only solution to end the conflict will be a political one". And Abdullah Oçalan confirms that, "If the Turkish government says it is seriously prepared to negotiate, we are ready to call a cease-fire and start negotiations."

At five o’clock Dr Ali switches on the television. The screen shows the test card of Med-TV, Kurdish television. "This is the first Kurdish national institution", says Oçalan. "It enables Kurds to have control over their language and culture and forge national unity. Developping such an institution without the PKK would have been impossible. But Med-TV’s not the PKK. Any ideology or opinion or cultural minority can have a voice there. Med-TV is trying to offer an alternative to the populist chauvinism often displayed on Turkish channels."

Three thousand kilometres away in Denderleeuw near Brussels, the Globe Centre houses the studios of Roj-TV, the Med-TV production company. Programmes are sent to London by satellite and rebroadcast by Eutelsat, covering both Turkey and Iraq. Med-TV demonstrates day by day that the Kurds are capable of producing their own cultural programmes and news bulletins, a permanent counter-propaganda to the "official" picture of the conflict ravaging the east of the country. Ankara has tried to prevent Med-TV from broadcasting by putting pressure - sometimes successfully - on countries like Poland and France that give it a channel, then by trying to jam the transmissions rebroadcast by Eutelsat.

Its organisers say it is financed by Kurdish businessmen and also gets subscriptions from viewers both in Diyarbakir and in Europe; and they claim it reaches around ten million Kurdish homes. The news in Kurmanji (a Kurdish dialect) is presented by Zana Serin, 27, a Kurdish journalist who fled to Sweden some while back. "Getting news by telephone or fax, with no direct contact with the reality we are describing, may seem like attempting the impossible," he admits. "But Turkish journalists give us information they can’t publish in their own media. And our underground correspondents keep us informed. People call us to tell us what’s happening where they are." Med-TV journalists also know Kurdistan first-hand. Seles, once a woman fighter in the mountains of Diyarbakir, where she lost both hands to frostbite, explains: "We try to check every piece of information, without exception. That’s very important, because we’ve got a lot of credibility with the local population."

Broadcast in Turkish as well as in Kurmanji and Sorani, the two main Kurdish dialects, the news is the channel’s most important programme. It generally opens with home news: human rights in Turkey, Turkish army action in Iraq, events affecting the Kurdish diaspora. Inter-Kurdish conflicts are often in the headlines. How can they remain objective in such cases? Kerim, a Syrian Kurd who presents the magazine in Arabic, answers: "No-one can agree with the Turkish army’s intervention in Iraqi Kurdistan. Anyone who supports it would bring discredit on himself. It’s not for nothing that Massoud Barzani wants to get Med-TV banned, just like the Turkish government. Because the Kurds all know enough to judge for themselves." Ahmed Bamarni is more critical; he thinks Med-TV is "pro-PKK. Still, the station has played an important role in keeping Kurds informed in the areas Barzani controls when there are confrontations between the KDP and PKK."

Med-TV also has a great cultural impact. It provides a forum for all the Kurdish community’s artists, singers, musicians, writers and intellectuals. Every evening, children can watch Rinoo, a little furry character in brightly-coloured Kurdish dress, speaking to them in Kurdish with snowy mountains in the background. He was conceived by Barzan Shaswar, a Kurd from Iran, who says that "by creating a Kurdistan by satellite, in the sky, without cultural control, we’ve destroyed the frontiers that cut our people in four."

In the most recent official statement, Salih Yildirim, a Turkish minister of state in the government of Mesut Yilmaz, said that the war between the PKK and the Turkish armed forces had caused 27,000 deaths since August 1984, 10,000 of them members of the security forces (9). The cost to the Turkish state has been some $84 billion. Three thousand villages have been destroyed. Ankara still claims to be eradicating the guerrillas, making no concessions to Kurdish cultural or political aspirations. Evidently with little chance of success.

* Journalist, Berlin.

(1) With the exception of Abdullah Oçalan, the names of the members of the PKK in this article are pseudonyms.

(2) Interview given in Paris, 23 September 1997.

(3) See Turkish Daily News, Ankara, 27 May 1997. The latest edition can be accessed free of charge, back numbers for a fee, on the Internet at the following address: http://www.turkishdailynews.com.

(4) See "Carte blanche à l’armée turque", Le Monde diplomatique, October 1993.

(5) See Kendal Nezan, "Le malheur kurde", Le Monde diplomatique, October 1996.

(6) This autumn, the Turkish army extended the emergency measures to the north-east of the country, in the Black Sea region.

(7) In 1925 the region was the centre of the first Kurdish revolt, led by Sheikh Said against Kemal Attaturk.

(8) See Jean-Jacques Pérouse, "Terre Brûlée au Kurdistan", Le Monde diplomatique, May 1995.

(9) Turkish Daily News, 12 September 1997.

Glossary

KDP: The (Iraqi) Kurdistan Democratic Party is led by Massoud Barzani, son of Mustafa Barzani, a legendary figure of the revolt of the Iraqi Kurds. Supported by Turkey, he controls the east of the Kurdish autonomous region of Iraq. He controls trade with Iraq, imposing taxes which provide most of the autonomous region’s resources.

PUK: The (Iraqi) Patriotic Union of Kurdistan is led by Jalal Talabani, who controls the west of the autonomous region, bordering Iran. It was driven out of Arbil, capital of Iraqi Kurdistan, a year ago by the KDP and the Iraqi army.

PKK: Abdullah Oçalan’s Kurdistan Workers Party was formed during the guerrilla war in Turkey in August 1984. It has an Iraqi branch, mainly in the Bothan-Badhinan region on the border between Turkey and Iraq, where it is in confrontation with the KDP’s peshmergas.

Peshmergas: Term traditionally used to describe Kurdish fighters. The PKK uses the term guerrilla. Each of the three parties is generally considered to have armed forces of 10,000-15,000. Some experts claim that the PKK has only 5,000-6,000 fighters.