WHO IS ABDULLAH OCALAN?
by Michael Radu
Foreign Policy Research Institute
On November 13, the Italian police arrested Abdullah
Ocalan, founder and leader of the Kurdish Worker's Party (PKK) at Rome's airport. He had
just arrived from Moscow with a false passport and, upon arrest, asked for political
asylum. Coming at a time when British authorities are detaining former Chilean president
Augusto Pinochet, who stands accused by a Spanish judge of terrorism and genocide, the
arrest of Ocalan on an outstanding warrant issued in Turkey promises to raise significant
questions about European politics, international legal standards, and the very possibility
of cooperation in combating terrorism.
Born in 1948 in a village in Eastern Turkey, Ocalan studied
political science at Ankara University, where he became a Maoist. By 1973 he had organized
a Maoist group - which initially included Kurdish as well as Turkish militants - whose
goal was socialist revolution in Turkey. After years of recruiting and indoctrinating
followers, the PKK was formally established on November 7, 1978. In the previous year, he
committed his first known murder, that of an ideological rival accused of working for the
government.
Since then, the group has evolved into a deadly insurgence
against Turkey, reaching a strength of some 5,000 by 1992. From his bases in Syria and
Lebanon's Bekaa Valley, Ocalan conducted a ruthless campaign, ostensibly for Kurdish
independence but, as widely available PKK internal documents suggest, the ultimate goal is
the creation of a Maoist state in areas of Turkey, Iran, and Iraq. (Skeptics are urged to
visit their website at http://burn.ucsd.edu/~ats/PKK/pkk.html.) Ocalan's ambitions were
clearly defined in 1995 at the Fifth Congress of the PKK, where the "Resolution on
Internationalism" stated that "By effectively arguing in favor of socialism and
by spreading socialist ideas to the people of the region, [the PKK] is the vanguard of the
global socialist movement." In 1984 the PKK was a founding member of the
Revolutionary Internationalist Movement (RIM), a sort of loosely structured Maoist version
of Lenin's Comintern that also includes Peru's Shining Path (Sendero Luminoso).
Indeed, the similarities between the PKK and the Shining
Path are striking: like the latter's founder, Abimael Guzman, Ocalan is a Maoist with
global leadership ambitions; their tactics are particularly bloody, even by terrorist
standards, and the main victims are civilians who refuse to submit to their groups.
Frequent targets include teachers, members of village self-defense groups, and elected
local officials. So far, since the beginning of its operations in 1980, the PKK is
primarily responsible for a war that has left some 30,000 people dead (compared with
25,000 for the Shining Path). In addition, the PKK was responsible for a number of murders
of Turks in Germany, which is the reason the German government has also issued a warrant
for Ocalan's arrest.
For almost two decades, Ocalan has operated from Syria and
Syrian-occupied Lebanon. However, last October, after Turkey very nearly went to war
against Syria, Damascus backed down, closed PKK camps and expelled Ocalan. First he fled
to Moscow, where he has enjoyed close relations for decades. While the Russian government
denied any knowledge of his whereabouts, on November 4 the Duma unanimously voted to
demand that he be given asylum. Two days later, 109 socialist and communist members of the
Greek Parliament - one third of the entire body - issued an invitation to Ocalan to come
to Greece as "leader of the world's most oppressed people." The collective
invitation, supported by Greece's deputy speaker, Panayiotis Sgouridis, was renewed by a
Greek Socialist parliamentarian in Rome, after Ocalan's arrest.
To its credit the Russian government, under pressure from
Turkey and the United States, expelled Ocalan, forcing him to flee to Italy. The terrorist
leader's choice was not accidental: Italy's government is dominated by ex-communists of
the party of the Democratic Left and supported by the unreconstructed ones. Sure enough a
prominent Democratic Left leader has already expressed support for Ocalan's request for
asylum, while leaders (and parliamentarians) of the Greens and the orthodox communists
became his lawyers. In fact, the orthodox communist Giuliano Psiapia, one of Ocalan's
lawyers, used to be chairman of the Italian Parliament's Justice committee. As the
influential Milan newspaper La Stampa put it, the communist Justice Minister, Oliviero
Diliberto, has a dilemma on his hands: "What would the Italian government do with
Abdullah Ocalan, leader of the PKK and the Kurdish resistance, a terrorist for the Turkish
and German authorities, who want him in their jails, and a patriot for the Italian Greens
and Communists?" Ocalan's arrest raises serious issues that include, but go beyond
that of dealing with terrorism. Judging by the number of victims, Ocalan is in rarefied
company in today's terrorist Pantheon - only Guzman himself and the other Maoist cum
nationalist Vellupilai Pirapaharan of the Tamil Tigers of Sri Lanka are in the same
league. That the dominant parties in the Russian Duma and NATO members Italy and Greece
openly support and lionize him is disturbing indeed. In Russia's case this suggests that
an eventual Communist replacement of Yeltsin could well bring back some of Moscow's worst
Cold War habits: support for large scale international terrorism. As for Greece, it
appears that the traditional reflexive support for any enemy of Turkey is reaching
dangerously provocative and irrational heights - not a good omen for the stability of the
Alliance's southern flank.
Italy already has had a bad record in dealing with foreign
terrorists: they routinely walk away from its jails, are given asylum or allowed to
transit freely. It is also important to see if the ex-communists dominating the government
in Rome have indeed become democratic or still share Ocalan's beliefs in "proletarian
internationalism," and put them above justice and good sense. Furthermore, an Italian
refusal to extradite Ocalan will irreparably damage Europe's already tense relations with
Turkey and make a further mockery of the European Union's pontifications about "human
rights" and international law. Indeed, if Ocalan goes free after a campaign that has
left 30,000 dead in the name of Maoism, while Pinochet is put on trial for the deaths of
3,000 in winning Chile's war against communism, then we will know that the European
capacity for political hypocrisy has not been exhausted by the fall of the Soviet Union.
Foreign Policy Research Institute
1528 Walnut Street, Suite 610
Philadelphia, PA 19102-3684
Tel: (215)732-3774