ABDULLAH OCALAN IS THE MANDELA OF OUR TIME

In such a dark period, signs that give hope are more precious than ever

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We live in the midst of a dark period in which even the words our big media use to describe ongoing horrors mystify the situation in a ridiculous way. When, recently, the US accepted 59 Boers from South Africa, the official justification was that they were escaping a genocide against Boers occurring there, while the actual full-scale genocide in Gaza is qualified as (excessive, maybe) Israel’s self-defense. In such a dark period, signs that give hope are more precious than ever.

One such event was the unanimous decision of the PKK (Kurdistan Workers’ Party) on 12 May to follow the advice of its leader, Abdullah Ocalan (imprisoned for over two decades), to engage in the total dissolution of the organization. The PKK is a militant political organization and armed guerrilla group primarily based in the mountainous Kurdish-majority regions of southeastern Turkey, northern Iraq, and northeastern Syria. It was founded in 1978 and was involved in asymmetric warfare in the Kurdish–Turkish conflict (with several ceasefires between 1993 and 2013–2015). Although the PKK initially sought an independent Kurdish state, in the 1990s its official platform changed to seeking autonomy and increased political and cultural rights for Kurds within Turkey. In recent decades, the PKK has not only moved closer to a peaceful solution; Ocalan himself, studying in prison, has also engaged in deep reflections on issues like feminism and philosophy. In short, the PKK became a movement that was fully part of the modern Left.

The effects of this reorientation were felt also among Kurds outside Turkey. What went on in Iran in 2022—the so-called Mahsa Amini protests—had world-historical significance. The protests, which spread to dozens of cities, began in Tehran on September 16, 2022, as a reaction to the death of Amini, a 22-year-old woman of Kurdish origin who died in police custody. She was beaten to death by the Guidance Patrol, known as the Islamic "morality police," after being arrested for wearing an "improper" hijab. The protests combined different struggles (against women’s oppression, against religious oppression, for political freedom, and against state terror) into an organic unity.

Iran is not part of the developed West, so Zan, Zendegi, Azadi (“Woman, Life, Freedom,” the slogan of the protests) is very different from the MeToo movement in Western countries. Iran’s protests mobilized millions of ordinary women and are directly linked to the struggle of all, men included—there is no anti-masculine tendency, as is often the case with Western feminism. Women and men were together in it; the enemy was religious fundamentalism supported by state terror. Men who participated in Zan, Zendegi, Azadi knew that the struggle for women’s rights was also the struggle for their own freedom. The protesters who were not Kurds also saw that the oppression of Kurds put limits on their own freedom—solidarity with Kurds is the only way towards freedom in Iran. Iranian protests thus realized what Western leftists can only dream about. They avoided the traps of Western middle-class feminism by directly linking the struggle for women’s freedom with the struggle of women and men against ethnic oppression, religious fundamentalism, and state terror.

So what about the reproach that the PKK nonetheless began as an agent of violent struggle? The PKK just followed here the general rule of resistance: if one is to be taken seriously, one has to begin with the threat of violent resistance. When a peaceful negotiation wins over armed resistance, armed resistance is inscribed in the result. Our media like to mention as the two successful negotiated solutions the rise of the ANC to power in South Africa and the peaceful protests led by Martin Luther King in the US—in both cases, it is obvious that the (relative) victory of the peaceful negotiations occurred because the establishment feared violent resistance (from the more radical wing of the ANC as well as of American Blacks). In short, negotiations succeeded because they were accompanied by a superposed, ominous threat of armed struggle.

The surprise (for our Western eyes) is: how could this happen in Kurdistan? Kurdistan is still generally viewed in the West as a place of brutal tribal warfare, naïve honesty and sense of honor, but also superstition, betrayal, and permanent cruel warfare—the almost caricatural barbaric Other of European civilization. If we look at today’s Kurds, we cannot but be surprised by the contrast to this cliché—in Turkey, where I know the situation relatively well, I noticed that the Kurdish minority is the most modern and secular part of society, at a distance from every religious fundamentalism, with developed feminism, etc. (Let me just mention a detail that I learned in Istanbul: restaurants owned by Kurds have no tolerance for any sign of superstition…) In his first term, Trump tried to justify his betrayal of Kurds (he condoned the Turkish attack on the Kurdish enclave in northern Syria) by noting that “Kurds are no angels”—of course, since, for him, the only angels in that region are Israel (especially on the West Bank) and Saudi Arabia (especially in Yemen). However, in some sense, they are the only angels in that part of the world.

The fate of the Kurds makes them the exemplary victims of the geopolitical colonial games: spread along the borderline of four neighboring states (Turkey, Syria, Iraq, Iran), their (more than deserved) full autonomy was in nobody’s interest, and they paid the full price for it. Do we still remember Saddam’s mass bombing and gas-poisoning of Kurds in the north of Iraq in the early 1990s? More recently, when ISIS dominated large parts of Syria and Iraq, Turkey played a well-planned military-political game, officially fighting ISIS but effectively bombing Kurds who were really fighting ISIS. And should we be surprised that a strong part of the Kurdish forces – Peshmerga, “to stand in front of death” – were composed of women who achieved a legendary status as snipers?

In the last decades, the ability of the Kurds to organize their communal life was tested in almost clear-cut experimental conditions: the moment they were given a space to breathe freely outside the conflicts of the states around them, they surprised the world. After Saddam’s fall, the Kurdish enclave in northern Iraq developed into the only safe part of Iraq with well-functioning institutions and even regular flights to Europe. In northern Syria, the Kurdish enclave centered in Rojava was a unique place in today’s geopolitical mess: when Kurds were given a respite from their big neighbors who otherwise threatened them all the time, they quickly built a society that one cannot but designate an actually existing and well-functioning utopia. From my own professional interest, I noticed the thriving intellectual community in Rojava where they repeatedly invited me to give lectures – these plans were brutally interrupted by the military tensions in the area.

But what especially saddened me was the reaction of some of my “leftist” colleagues who were bothered by the fact that Kurds also had to rely on US military protection – what should they have done, caught in the tensions between Turkey, the Syrian civil war, the Iraqi mess, and Iran? Did they have any other choice? Should they sacrifice themselves on the altar of anti-imperialist solidarity?

That’s why it is our duty to fully support the resistance of the Kurds and to rigorously denounce the dirty games Western powers play with them. While the sovereign states around them are gradually sinking into a new barbarism, Kurds are the only glimmer of hope. And it’s not only about Kurds that this struggle is fought, it’s about ourselves, it’s about what kind of global new order is emerging. If Kurds are abandoned, it will be a new order in which there will be no place for the most precious part of the European legacy of emancipation. If Europe turns its eyes away from Kurds, it will betray itself. The Europe which betrays Kurds will be the true Europastan!

One should thus conclude that Abdullah Öcalan is nothing less than a Kurdish Nelson Mandela: his proposal that the PKK should dissolve itself is an authentic, courageous act of engaging oneself in the struggle for peace. Apart from him, one should mention at least Marwan Barghouti, the Palestinian Mandela who also sits in an Israeli prison for two decades. What will come out of the self-dissolution of the PKK depends on the Turkish government – will it embrace the offer with a sincere counter-gesture? Strong international pressure on Turkey is urgently needed here, and it is the duty of all of us to engage in it.