The Case of the PKK: History, Ideology, Methodology, and Structure (1978 99)

In 1983 Turgut Ozal, the newly elected Prime Minister of Turkey, declared that the country would never go back to the dark days of the 1970s, a period when the country suffered great losses as a result of terrorist acts. However, in the mid-1980s, Turkey faced a dramatic surge in terrorist incidents and these increased during the 1990s. Nobody predicted such a situation, especially during the honeymoon period of the Ozal era in the early 1980s. Of the many problems which the government confronted in the period of political reconstruction after the military coup of 1980, none was as full of danger as the regional issue. Despite many difculties, by mid-1984 the democratization process of the country was largely completed and the newly formed institutions were functioning. However, in the spring of 1984 severe violence from a tiny Kurdish group, which was unknown to the large majority of the people, introduced the PKK to every Turkish citizen. Although Turkey was no stranger to the activities of a variety of terrorist groups, this time terrorism had a different nature than that of previous revolutionary terrorist organizations in that the newly emerging PKK was separatist in nature. The real extent of the problem was best explained in a speech given by Suleyman Demirel, the longest serving Prime Minister during the multi-party era. He said: Opening the Kurdish problem to discussion would lead to the disintegration of a country in which people from 26 different ethnic groups live. That is why I say dealing with the Kurdish problem is playing with re.95 Could it be possible for all the parties to break the deadlock in combating terrorism within the framework of democracy, something that they had failed to accomplish three times in the past three decades?

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In this context, this part of the paper charts the course of PKK violence from its minor beginnings in 1973 to its dramatic heights in the 1990s, examines its aims and support, and assesses the threat it posed to the nations unity and democracy. In other words, the secrets behind PKK terrorism and its ideology, and its methodology and survival until 1999 when its leader, Abdullah Ocalan, was captured and imprisoned by the Turkish authorities, are the main foci of this section.

Evolution of the PKK

Kurdish participation in the political arena under the democratic umbrella of the Turkish Republic satised a large proportion of the Kurdish community. However, during the second half of the 1960s, Turkish Marxists and socialists, as well as some Kurds, began to question democratic rights and the level of public participation in decisionmaking. In the late 1960s, the socialist Turkish Labour Party (TLP) raised the question of the Eastern provinces of Turkey and criticized the government for ignoring the economic development and the educational, social, and health problems of the people in that region.96 In general, from the rst appearance of the Kurdish issue until now,97 two major viewpoints have predominated, which are largely associated with two communities of Kurds traditionalists and socialists. The rst argues for wider participation in power-sharing in the government as well as in all aspects of political, social, and economic life, while the second rejects all ties with the state and advocates armed struggle. This division was rst seen, though to a lesser extent, between tribal leaders and religious sheikhs. The sheikhs mainly sided with the government although some, such as Sheikh Ubeydullah in 1880 and Sheikh Said in 1925, rejected the authority and in some cases renounced the legitimacy of the government.98 During the multiparty era, traditional Kurdish groups were almost completely integrated into the rest of the country and even enjoyed the benets of constitutional government, a democratically elected and sovereign legislature, and established civil and political rights. The major division in the Kurdish community emerged in the late 1960s and early 1970s between the traditionalists and socialists. Kurdish conservatives and liberals (traditionalists) advocated participating in the democratic life of the country and taking advantage of democratic institutions to raise their demands. The socialist and extreme leftist Kurdish organizations, on the other hand, rejected peaceful dialogue, preferring armed struggle against what they perceived to be an imperialist and fascist Turkish state.99 The second group was originally fostered by the Turkish extreme left and gradually gained some support in the Kurdish community.100 Among many organizations supporting this view, the PKK proved to be the strongest and most widely known. Nevertheless, the PKK was not the rst extreme leftist

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Kurdish organization. Most notably, there was the Eastern Revolutionary Cultural Hearth (DDKO), created in 1969 by Kurdish intellectuals in Ankara. Members of the DDKO and a number of Kurds were active in the TLP and there was a sort of overlapping in the representation of the left wing of the emerging Kurdish movement. Another group emerged during the 1970s around the journal Rizgari (Liberation). This group differed somewhat from the DDKO, especially in terms of its relations with the Turkish left and not providing support to the centre left Republican Peoples Party (RPP) in the critical 1977 elections. The differences between the Rizgari group and DDKO were actually strategic rather than ideological, for while the DDKO kept a strong faith in working with the Turkish left, the Rizgari group dismissed it. They declared that: The Kurds had nothing good to expect from the Kemalists; as colonized people, they should be more concerned with their own liberation than with the political problems of the colonized nation. This liberation will be achieved through a socialist revolution under the leadership of the Kurdish proletariat.101 There were a number of other active Kurdish organizations between 1970 and 1980, but these groups had little effect on Turkish political life and do not warrant further discussion. The question of what the PKK represents evokes different answers from various sections of the Turkish nation. However, the confusion about the extent, effect, and the nature of the organization, as well as the role of its leader, is not shared by Ismet G. mset, who has been described by Gunter as I one of the most knowledgeable people on the PKK.102 mset explained that: I The history of the PKK, which has established itself as not only the strongest and most ruthless outlawed guerrilla organization in Turkey but in all of the Middle East region, dates back to the early 1970s and closely depends on the activities of the organizations leader Abdullah Ocalan.103 Abdullah Ocalan is, without any doubt, the sole leader and creator of the PKK.104 Ocalan was born in Omerli, a small town in southeast Turkey, as one of seven children in a Kurdish peasant family. After years of poverty, he moved in 1970 to the capital, Ankara, for his university education. In this period, Turkish radical leftist groups were very inuential among university students. Ocalan rst joined the Turkish left-wing movement, the Revolutionary Youth, in 1970. The following year he became a member of the Ankara Higher Education Association and also a supporter of the DDKO, where he studied Marxism and laid the foundations for his views on Kurdish nationalism. After serving a seven-month prison sentence in 1971 on charges of demonstrating illegally for the cause of Turkey independent from imperialism, Ocalan began communicating with the members of the Higher

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Education Association in the southeast region about the idea of forming a movement on behalf of the Kurdish people. In a short time this led to the rst meeting of Ocalan and his associates, which nally resulted in the establishment of the National Liberation Army in 1973, possibly the nucleus of the PKK. Birand,105 mset,106 Dilmac,107 and other sources indicate that in terms of I ideology, the organization dates back to the early 1970s, though the name PKK did not appear until November 27, 1978, when, in the village of Fis in Diyarbakr, the nucleus of the PKK was established and the rst draft party program was announced.108 Although the organization itself used the name National Liberation Army in 1974 and changed it to PKK in 1978, they came to be known among the local people as vicious Apocus,109 especially during the late 1970s.110 In order to create a legend and to make its name heard among the people, the organization targeted famous people in the southeast region. The rst shocking attack of the PKK was carried out in 1979 against Mehmet Celal Bucak, who was a Deputy for the Justice Party from Sanlurfa province. His son, Fatih Bucak, explained the reasons behind the attack: They started their campaign initially with an attempt to assassinate my father who was a Member of Parliament from the Justice Party at the time, and followed this with Ocalans indiscriminate terrorist activities in the region, which rapidly managed to spread fear, panic, and frustration among the people. This led to the use of the name vicious Apocus after the leader of the organization Abdullah Ocalan.111 A tribal leader, Mehmet Artuk also stressed the same point: We were aware of the Apocus in 1978; they were attacking our villages, children and elderly, in short everybody they could get. And even our property, just to intimidate and scare people.112 While Ocalan and his comrades were ghting and establishing their name, they did not have a well organized and disciplined military force.113 Therefore, terrorism was seen as the best way to recruit new recruits for the organization. As a Marxist-Leninist group, the PKK was struggling to promote a Marxist-Leninist ideology in the sourtheast region of the country. A repentant PKK member, who asked not to be identied, explained that: We could not explain our ideas to the ordinary people of the region. In any case, we did not have enough eligible people to teach our ideology.114 Van Bruinessen, one of the most respected scholars in this eld, observed that Ocalans group was the only Kurdish organization whose members were drawn almost exclusively from the lowest social classes, half-educated village and small-town youths who wanted action rather than ideological sophistication.115 Thus violence became one of the main characteristics of the PKK, as its leader believed that force and violence were the only ways to mobilize

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the public and achieve a National Liberation Movement.116 Ocalan defended the use of violence against civilians and argued that it was necessary to gain public support for the national war of liberation through fear of violence, rather than expecting the public to understand the PKKs aims or seeking public consent for it.117 He believed that the public was ignorant, illiterate, feudal and that the labour force was not large enough to generate a proletarian front against imperialist Turkey.118 This justication was similar to many others that defended or advocated terrorism. The PKK struggled to explain its ideology, as did other radical leftist groups in the 1960s and 1970s. It was difcult for a Marxist organization to nd enough support in a region in which people were largely religious, traditional and still tribal in nature. It is a well known fact that the people of the southeast and eastern parts of Turkey value religion more than those who live in other regions. This was probably the most important reason why the PKK faced major problems in explaining and establishing a Marxist-Leninist mentality in the region. Ocalan himself, in his secret documents to the high command, admitted that up to now [], one of the major mistakes has been not paying enough respect to the religious values of the region. Even more costly was to actually attack those values.119 Ocalan came to understand that the traditional, religious, and conservative nature of the region was one of the main obstacles before the radical leftist and separatist PKK. As a result of this, he modied the policy and the ideology of the organization in the late1980s.120 Unlike ETA in Spain, and to some extent the IRA in Northern Ireland,121 the PKK did not enjoy the support of traditional and religious people of the region. As Ben-Ami explained in relation to the Spanish case: Indeed, modern Basque nationalism can be explained as a response by traditional society to the tortuous road leading from tradition to modernity. In the process, the old Catholic integrist and foralist tradition always respectful to the historical unity of Spain gave way to a secessionist and anti-Spanish brand of Basque nationalism.122 On the contrary, traditionalist and religious sections of the Kurdish community enjoyed broad participation in the democratic life. This view is strengthened when one considers that a large percentage of the southeast Anatolian people supported centre right parties during the multi-party elections after 1950. Many of the tribal and religious leaders joined centre right political parties and were elected to the Parliament. As Bilge Criss noted, Ocalan spent much of his time between 1974 and 1978 studying theories of Marxist revolutionary activity and methods of mobilizing the Kurdish groups under the so-called Independent Kurdish Movement.123 Ocalan also absorbed the methodology and strategy of the radical leftist terrorist groups both within and outside the country, particularly the Shining Path of Peru. Despite many obstacles, the organization was

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established on November 27, 1978, in Lice near Diyarbakr under its new name, the PKK.124 The PKK unveiled its rst manifesto in 1978: All communists who are the recognized defenders of the internationalism of the proletariat and of patriotism! Let us organize the ranks of the PKK, which aims at (. . .) operating under the guidance of scientic socialism.125 The rst program of the PKK was also drafted in 1977 and was put into practice following the declaration of 1978. Donmez summarized the program as: The structure of the revolution will be a national democratic revolution. The minimum objective will be to establish an independent non-aligned Kurdistan State in the region. The maximum objective will be to establish a state based on Marxist-Leninist principles. The proletariat will be the pioneering force of the revolution. The peasants will be the major force of the revolution. The main alliance for the revolution will be the alliance between workers, peasants and intellectual youth. [. . .] Propaganda activities will be supported by armed violence.126 The outline of the PKKs program clearly indicated that the nal objective was to establish an independent Marxist-Leninist Kurdish state. In order to achieve this objective, peasants and the proletariat were to form the pioneer force. However, the organization did not indicate how it would recruit members or obtain the support of these groups. How far the PKK succeeded in its objectives will be considered later in this study. For now, it is important to note that the obstacles cited by the PKK in achieving its goals were: Fascists, the agents and state-supported network, feudal landlords and natural collaborators.127 Among these groups, the largest and most problematic were the traditionalist landlords and natural collaborators.128 According to Ocalan, anybody who opposed the PKK were collaborators with the Turkish government and betrayers of Kurdish freedom, whatever their ethnic origins or political aspirations for the Kurdish groups were.129 To achieve its goals, the organization declared its strategy as the immediate formation of a revolutionary Marxist ideology in the region combined with armed struggle against the Turkish government. As mentioned earlier, the rst signicant PKK attack was against the Bucak tribe in 1979.130 After this, the PKK waited until 1984 before carrying out more serious attacks. Initiating separatist warfare based on Marxism was difcult at rst for two reasons. First, it was clear that the public was not ready for such a struggle. Second, the military coup of 1980 made the conditions for the existence of the organization more difcult.131 Under the active anti-terrorism measures

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of the Army, almost all terrorist organizations collapsed and many terrorist leaders were forced to leave the country. Not many Turkish ofcials foresaw the danger posed by the timid PKK that survived to become the biggest terrorist organization in the Middle East. Abdullah Ocalan summarized his own escape abroad in the following manner: By the end of the 1970s it was evident that a military regime was coming. Meanwhile, our resources to develop the partys central structure and its armed struggle were running out. Our going abroad is closely related to these developments. We had to go out and create the resources, which would feed our struggle whatever happened.132 Ocalan himself said to Birand: We were the only lucky organization that sensed the coup detat beforehand and escaped from Turkey.133 The organization began to leave the country in 1980, heading through Syria for the Bekaa Valley in Lebanon. Although the Syrian government have always rejected providing support to the PKK, it is obvious that no such organization could have survived in Syrian territory without at least tacit acceptance by the authorities. Having avoided the coup detat with minimum casualties, the PKK faced the new task of reorganizing itself and implementing terrorist attacks from Syrian-controlled Lebanese territory. Ocalan organized the rst PKK congress in Syrian Lebanon in 1981 and a second congress was held in the same territories in 1982.134 These two congresses identied the basic structure and strategy of the PKK. The basic decision that was taken in these congresses was that a war of independence in the so-called area of Kurdistan was to be carried out in three stages: strategic defence; strategic balance; and strategic offence.135 The rst major terror campaign began in 1984 and targeted civilians as well as the security forces. It is more appropriate therefore, to categorize the PKK as a terrorist organization rather then a guerrilla organization.136 In a war for national independence, guerrilla warfare is commonly used as the primary method and is based on the consent and support of a large proportion of the people. The PKK however, lacked that support and relied on a small minority, some of whom were forced to support the organization. In addition to deciding on the strategy, these two PKK congresses also created a network of new branches, which were to extend the organizations inuence in southeast Turkey in the late 1980s. Consequently, the PKK set up a professional leadership structure and a central committee. Under the leadership of Abdullah Ocalan, the central committee consisted of two main sub-committees: the ERNK, the Liberation Front of Kurdistan (Eniya Rizgariya Netewa Kurdistan), which was established on March 21, 1985, and the ARGK, Kurdish Liberation Army (Artese Rizgariya Gele Kurdistan). After determining its ideology and political objectives, the PKK completed its basic organizational structure in the mid-1980s, although some changes were made subsequently.137

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In summary therefore, there were three major phases in the history of the PKK. First, the PKK started as a small terrorist organization in the late 1970s, unnoticed by Turkish ofcials, in the southeast of Turkey. Second, after the coup detat of 1980, its leader and a limited number of militants managed to cross the border to Syria. With the generous help and contrivance of that country, the group reorganized itself and formalized its structure, developed its training skills, and in 1984 began hit-and-run terrorist attacks from abroad.138 Third, although the PKK was not highly successful in carrying out these attacks, the no-y zone area created in northern Iraq by the Allies following the Gulf War became the PKKs new training ground and the most appropriate territory from which to enter Turkey and carry out its attacks.139 Consequently, following the Gulf War, the number of attacks conducted by the PKK rose rapidly and, during the following years of active combat, on average, over a thousand people lost their lives each year.140 While the PKK started as a group of about twenty militants in 1978, its number rose rapidly and was estimated at around 15,000 in 1994. However, after the introduction of tight security measures in 1998, the number decreased and was estimated at between 5,000 and 7,000.141 The following sections will concentrate on the evolution of the PKKs ideology, structure, strategy, and methodology. These areas will be examined in light of Ross and Millars142 actor-based typology, in consideration of data obtained from a survey and eld study, as well as from ofcial documents gathered from the relevant departments of the Ankara Police Force Library and Archives and the Diyarbakr Supreme Governors Archives.

Ideology
Ideologically, the PKK evolved through three stages. The rst stage was from 1969 to 1978, the period in which the nucleus of the PKK was nally established. The second stage was between 1978 and 1989, and the third phase from 1989 onwards. These ideological phases were shaped by the circumstances under which the PKK operated, political developments within the country, and the PKKs own pragmatism. In the late 1960s, a revolutionary Marxist approach was developed in Turkey by a number of groups mainly led by Mahir Cayan and Deniz Gezmis.143 They believed in armed struggle in what they perceived was a revolution of proletariat against bourgeoisie within Turkey and imperialist powers outside the country.144 As mentioned above, this development mainly resulted from the disappointing results that the TLP got in the 1969 general elections and the implausibility of introducing a communist state peacefully. Ocalans own ideology was greatly inuenced by these revolutionary Marxist groups and particularly by Deniz Gezmis and Mahir Cayan as well as the DDKO.

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The DDKO focused on the social and economic backwardness of eastern Turkey and believed that this problem could be solved through a communist revolution. Members of the DDKO were operating in solidarity with the Turkish Revolutionary Youth and Revolutionary Path. They perceived the problem in the east not as a separatist and ethnic issue but rather as an issue of independence from outside imperialist forces and the bourgeoisie, that is, common to both the Turks and the Kurds. This was the general political outlook in Turkey at the time when Ocalan moved from his native southeast Anatolia to Ankara to complete his university education in 1970. Ocalan, admiring leaders of the Turkish radical left, became an active member of both Turkish and Kurdish radical leftist organizations. During the second half of the 1970s his ideology shifted from revolutionary Marxism to separatist revolutionary Marxism, which eventually led to armed violence between the groups of the radical left and Ocalans group. As Imset observed: Ocalans debate with the Turkish left gradually took the form of armed clashes. Soon, the rural areas of southeast Turkey were almost totally deserted by left-wing organizations controlled from Ankara and Istanbul, and replaced by Ocalans small-scale but relatively powerful forces [at the end of 1978].145 During the 1970s, Ocalan began developing his own ideas on revolutionary warfare, which were quite similar to those of Perus Shining Path group, and between 1974 and 1978 he established the PKK. At that time, the ideology of the PKK was Marxist-Leninist, separatist, anti-religious and anti-traditionalist and sought an independent Kurdistan through violence.146 The third stage of ideological development began during the second half of the 1980s. This development was mainly brought about by opposition to the original ideology of the PKK by the Kurdish groups in southeast Anatolia. These groups were mainly traditionalist, religious, and tribal as noted earlier. Pelletiere described the PKK militants and their understanding of revolution as: The PKK comprised mainly lower-class ghetto youths, self-styled Marxists. This was the time of the Maoist Revolution, and youths throughout the world were embracing Chinas conception of Marxist ideology. Like a lot of other youth groups at that time, the PKKs understanding of Marxism was dim as evidenced by its program, which called for little else than emancipating southeastern Anatolia. As to what would occur once Liberation was secured, the PKK cadres seemed unsure.147 Members of the PKK had a reputation for being illiterate or semi-educated and many of them had poor family backgrounds. A survey conducted in 1996 by the Turkish National Police Counter-Terrorism Department in Ankara

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with 262 convicted PKK militants clearly indicated that this characteristic of PKK members was true. According to these data, 9 percent were illiterate, 12 percent pre-school educated, and 39 percent had left school after nishing only primary school.148 In total, more than half of the PKK members in prison were either illiterate or poorly educated.149 In its early days, the PKK mainly targeted feudal landlords and radical leftist groups, but during the 1980s, the PKK broadened its targets to include Turkish nationalists, Turkish and Kurdish radical left-wing groups, and state collaborators.150 Among these groups, local feudal landlords, what Ocalan liked to call state collaborators, and religious people proved to be the biggest obstacles to Ocalans success in providing popular support for the Marxist-Leninist movement.151 Putting its ideology into practice in the southeast and trying to establish a Marxist-Leninist ideology amongst its poorly educated members, the PKK faced considerable resistance from the people of southeast Anatolia. This resistance was also evident in a survey conducted by the authors in 1993: 28.6 percent of the respondents identied themselves with a religion such as Muslim or Sai, rather than a particular ethnicity (Appendix 1.Q1). More importantly, the majority of the respondents (78 percent) who described themselves as either Muslims or Kurds said they perceived the PKK as a terrorist organization and believed that if the PKK ever created a free Kurdistan it would be a communist state, which they would not be happy to support (Appendix 1.Q 7). It is clear from the survey results that the pious people of this region did not support the establishment of a communist Kurdistan, and they did not approve of the PKKs ideology. This outcome was not surprising since even in the more liberal western parts of the country, people were not eager to support Marxist-Leninist movements during the 1970s. Even at the peak of the extreme leftist movements support in 1977, popular support was still only 3.9 percent.152 As for the religious communitys views on the activities of the PKK, the view of the most widely known religious order in the region, the Naksi order, was of utmost importance. In 1993, when the authors asked Sheikh Mahmud, a senior gure in this order, about his views on the PKK, his answer was straightforward: Anti religious, communist indels. He was not happy about the Turkish governments treatment of them, but he added; there is no common ground between us.153 It is obvious that the regions large religious population did not sympathize with the PKKs Marxist-Leninist ideology. Furthermore, the traditionalist and feudal nature of the people in the region did not contribute to the establishment of a Marxist ideology. The nature of the Kurdish community was strongly feudal and tribal, a fact that was acknowledged by Ocalan in his writings, and to which he attributed his failure to gain popular support.154 Ocalan attacked these groups in every possible media appearance and in his own writings as collaborators with imperialist Turkey. Anybody that rejected the political thoughts and

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operational policies of Ocalan was condemned as a state collaborator, including PKK members themselves. In order to appease religious values and traditions in the region, the PKK pragmatically attempted to shift its ideology in the late 1980s and softened its anti-religious and anti-traditionalist tendencies. After 1988, there was a clear indication of this shift in the activities of the PKK, thus signalling the advance of the third phase in the evolution of the PKKs ideology. Religious themes were injected into the PKKs ideology in order to try to win the support of the large religious community.155 The early 1990s saw the establishment of the Imams and Alawite associations. These associations were intended to build closer ties between the PKK and religious leaders.156 However, they failed to achieve the same level of popular support that the Basque separatist ETA enjoyed from the Basque Catholic Church. Although the PKKs ideological framework did not differ greatly from what it had been in its early days, the Party Politburo did make an important secret declaration to its comrades: In the realities of the Middle East, there is no way of leading a successful revolution without taking account of the importance of the peoples religion. Ignorance of religion causes a counter-revolution, which inevitably prepares our defeat. [. . .] In that respect, every mosque must become a centre of propaganda and public uprising.157 It took 20 years of experience for Ocalan to redene the operational policy of the PKK in a manner different from the political ideas inspired by the Turkish Marxist-Leninists Mahir Cayan and Deniz Gezmis. At the beginning of the 1990s, PKK members were forced to study the Koran instead of Marxism and to collect Hadith literature, containing the words of the Prophet Mohammed, within the context of national struggle and liberation. The reason behind this new policy was the recognition of the defeat of the Marxist teachings in the region; the PKK had to rely on Islamic inspiration to get public support for its activities.158 The question of whether the PKK was at this stage moving away from the Marxist-Leninist ideology towards Arab socialism, which became popular with Gadda and Nasir during the 1960s and 1970s, is worth considering. Some have argued that during his time in the Bekaa Valley and Syria, Ocalans political thoughts may have been inuenced by Arab socialism, as his idols Cayan and Gezmis were also inuenced by Arab socialism.159 However, the apparent embracing of Islam was not a genuine policy change by the PKK but rather a supercial change in its policies to try to attract the traditionalist and religious people of the region. Ultimately, the core of the PKKs ideology remained the same but with window-dressing, applied in order to win over sections of Kurdish society. It can be said that the third phase of the development of the PKKs ideology dated from the appearance in their propaganda of Islamic beliefs

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during the late 1980s, after the failure of the Marxist approach during the early parts of the 1980s. This was followed by dropping the claim for an independent Kurdistan in 1993, and replacing it with demand for a Federation of Kurds and Turks in Anatolia. To summarize, the ideology of the PKK was a mixture of the theories of Marx, Lenin and Mao, and the interpretation of these theories was shaped by the circumstances in southeast Turkey. In developing his ideology, Ocalan regarded the region as semi-feudal, and also as a colony ruled by an imperialist and fascist Turkey, that itself was deemed a semi-colony of the capitalist western world.160 Ocalans views on the social, economic and political structure of the region, were similar to those of Abimael Guzman Reynoso, the ideological leader of the Shining Path guerrillas of Peru. Ocalan regarded himself as picking up the mantle of Marx, Lenin and Mao, not only intellectually, but also by being in the vanguard of the international communist revolution seen as a scientic-historical inevitability betrayed by revisionists in the hands of reactionary imperialists.161 Ocalan was also strongly inuenced by so-called Turkish revolutionary Marxism and observed other Marxist and Maoist movements throughout the world. These observations led to his creating of the Ideology of the PKK, which attempted to take into account the realities of both the Middle East and Turkey.162 It can be said however, that Ocalans understanding of Marxism and its implications in southeast Turkey did not lead to many successes, particularly amongst the traditionalist, religious, tribal and liberal people of the region, and cost the lives of many civilians as a result. The next section analyzes the extent to which the PKK managed to achieve its objectives between 1978 and 1999, in this troubled and backward region of Turkey. The structure of the PKK must be examined in some detail to assess structural effects on the organizations strategy and methodology.

Structure
Although the PKK was established with only a handful of terrorists in 1978, the organization developed over the following years to become one of the most comprehensive and deadliest terrorist organizations in the Middle East. Its administrative structure has generally had three branches. At the top, the politburo or the central committee is under the command of Ocalan and is the only existing body that dates back to the creation of the PKK, although its functions and structure have developed over time (Appendix 5). The ERNK, its political wing, was created in 1985 and the ARGK, the Armed Propaganda Wing was created in 1986.163 The ERNK was divided into two main sections. The rst, the Domestic Central Ofce, consists of dozens of sub-committees, such as the Association of Patriotic Kurdish Workers, the Association of Patriotic Kurdish Youth and the Association of Patriotic Kurdish Teachers. The second section of

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the ERNK organized itself in foreign countries under the administrative name of the ERNK Foreign Central Ofce, and was mainly responsible for the nancing of the organization and lobbying for acceptance of the PKK as a legitimate political organization ghting on behalf of the Kurdish people.164 In one of the most respected studies of the PKK, Imset explains the activities of the ERNK in two areas: Europe and Turkey. The ERNK unit in Europe was responsible for the following: (1) liaison with the PKK leadership; (2) contacts with terrorist groups in Turkish territory such as the Revolutionary Youth; (3) contacts with the PKK bases in Syria, Iraq, Iran and Greece; (4) all propaganda activities inside and outside Turkey; (5) collecting money and information for the PKK; (6) staging demonstrations and protests to attract attention to the PKK, (7) nding new recruits and training them for the ARGK; and (8) camouaging ARGK militants.165 The ERNK unit in Turkey was mainly responsible for: (1) generating recruits for the ARGK; (2) coordinating and organizing PKK activities in urban and rural settlements; (3) information and intelligence gathering for the PKK; (4) collecting money for the organization; (5) organizing mass riots, urban rebellions and small-scale military attacks; (6) trying to take on judiciary-police responsibilities in areas where there was a vacuum of authority, showing the PKKs strength to the public and trying to act as a government; and (7) carrying out Islamic activities and propaganda on behalf of the PKK, which became important after the failure of Marxism.166 This last duty was issued to the ERNK after the publication in 1990 of the Book of Institutions of the Urban Revolution. 167 This work outlined how to counteract the anti-religious image of the organization, after recognizing the strong religious tendencies amongst the people in the region.168 The second main committee under the Central Committee was the ARGK. This committee originated in 1984 under the name of the Kurdistan Freedom Unit, HRK (Hazen Rizgariya Kurdistan). Following the third congress of the PKK, the name of the unit was changed to the ARGK on 30 October 1986. It was mainly responsible for the armed struggle and for carrying out terrorist activities. The PKK divided up the southeastern part of Turkey into six military regions169 under the ARGK committee, calling them operational bases. These areas were Guneybati, Orta Eyalet, Serhat, Botan, Mardin and

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Dersim.170 Structurally, the PKK was closely based on the Shining Path of Peru. The ARGK, like the Shining Path, had three kinds of militants: principal forces, local forces and base forces.171 Unlike the Shining Path, however, the principal forces of the PKK were based outside the country, in northern Iraq, the Bekaa Valley and in Syria. Each of the operational bases was supposed to have a local force. It was also planned that each town and village would have a base force, but the PKK remained a foreign-based terror organization rather than a local and national guerrilla organization. Plans concerning overall strategic political and terrorist objectives were drawn up by the Central Committee of the PKK, the decisions being taken by Abdullah Ocalan.172 In summary, surprising as it may seem, the PKK started out as a MarxistLeninist organization in the conservative southeast part of Turkey, where religious and tribal characteristics were very strong. Although the ideological aspects of the organization did not take root in the region, the PKK nevertheless managed to establish a structure which can be described as comprehensive, as a result of the congresses held between 1981 and 1986. The following section examines the PKKs ability to mobilize the masses to further its aims of an independent Kurdistan in this troubled part of the country, highlighting the extensive use of terrorism as the organizations main tool for obtaining its political objectives.

Strategy and Methodology

It is well known that terrorist organizations use indiscriminate violence as their main instrument to further their objectives. Ross and Miller observe that terrorism is a form of communication. With this approach, they note, terrorists deliver their communiques to the authorities and the general public 173 both directly and indirectly. The PKK was a typical example of this, having used communication by means of violence from the very beginning. As a former PKK militant noted: The best method to spread Marxist-Leninist ideology was armed propaganda.174 The PKKs use of violence consisted of both internal violence against the organizations own militants and external violence conducted against state authorities and the general public. In this section, the PKKs external violence will be examined in depth as a means of communication to reach its objectives, while the internal violence of the PKK is addressed in the following section. The PKK directed its tactical violence rst against radical left groups and local tribal leaders. This strategy was designed to cause fear in the community and to dissuade other terrorist organizations from being active in the region. Therefore, the reaction of the victims families and the general public against the tactical use of violence by the PKK was very important, for the PKK and other radical left terrorist organizations and for the state. As noted earlier, the PKK had succeeded in driving the radical leftist Kurdish and Turkish terrorists from the region. However, achieving the same success against local

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tribes proved to be different story. In 1979, the PKK started its major armed assault against one of the largest tribal leaders, Mehmet Celal Bucak of Siverek in Sanlurfa, an MP for the Justice Party. Although the assassination attempt failed, Ocalan stated that it was an important assault, for it was noted by many people and made the PKKs name known to a large community.175 This was a kind of propaganda by death in order to publicize the terrorists cause. It also served as a show of strength within the region, which is a strategy used by many terrorist organizations. Ross and Miller quite rightly describe terrorist acts as a communication of terrorists with their opponents, the public, the international community, the state, and the immediate victims.176 When the authors asked Fatih Bucak, the second in command within the Bucak tribe, why they were at the top of the PKKs list, he replied without hesitation: If the PKK had succeeded against us that would have meant a victory against the strongest tribal leader in the region, which would ultimately form a way for the terrorists to establish authority in the region. We dont agree with their proposals or objectives. They describe us and virtually everybody in this region [Sanlurfa and Siverek] as a state collaborator. We believe that they are a communist and foreign seed, planted in our lands.177 From the reactions of the Bucak tribe, it is evident that their anger was directed against the terrorist organization instead of the state, and eventually, following a number of assaults against this particular tribe, they started lobbying to obtain weapons from the government to defend themselves. As Ross and Miller indicate in their typology, these types of response as witnessed in the Bucak tribe case, are common from the families of the victims of terrorist attacks.178 As a result of lobbying, the Bucak tribe, which was estimated to have 100,000 members179 managed to get government support and to defend themselves from the PKK. They provided the largest number of members for the village guard (local people who voluntarily defend their villages against terrorists), the total number of which was about 60,000 in 1998. With the establishment of the ERNK and ARGK in the mid-1980s, the strategy of the PKK can be summarized as two-pronged: units of ERNK were engaging in a campaign of propaganda in order to gain national and international support, whilst the ARGK was trying to establish the partys authority in the region by using violence. To support these efforts the PKK adopted the following tactics: (1) carrying out a show of strength; (2) terrorizing the people into supporting the organization; (3) killing civilians indiscriminately as a priority and clashing with the military;

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(4) training new terrorists; and (5) carrying out attacks with the aid of local supporters.180 The terrorist activities of the PKK intensied against civilians as well as the security forces during the second half of the 1980s. The PKK made its standpoint clear, declaring We will not tolerate people who betray the Kurdish cause.181 The people referred to here were particularly the Kurdish ethnic groups who did not agree with the strategy or the ideology of the PKK, particularly the conservative and traditional families. As a result, indiscriminate killings took place and houses were burned (Appendix 4). The targets selected by the organization and hit in night-time raids were almost always civilian, not including relatives of the terrorists. The logic behind this kind of atrocity puzzles many ordinary people and was evident also when the Real IRA killed 28 ordinary people in the centre of Omagh in County Tyrone in Northern Ireland, on the 15 August 1998.182 The terrorists justify their actions as a means to a greater end. Ocalans orders to his militants were clear in this respect: One must be able to say patriotically that he supports the PKK. If one is courageous and self-sacricing, he must be able to walk out of his house and propagandize PKK ideology to his neighbours and friends; if he is courageous enough, he must kill the traitors in his village with a knife, axe or burn their houses. [. . .] Some places require blood, courage and self-sacrice, and these must be shown when necessary.183 Between 1984 and 1990 the PKK took the lives of 199 children, 160 women and 399 men.184 Another security document suggests that the PKK intensied its attacks against civilians between 1987 and 1993 when the civilian death toll, according to the Supreme Governors statistical bureau, was 1,242 men, 178 women and 246 children.185 This outcome could be explained in two ways. First, the PKK needed to create safe zones for the terrorists after hit-and-run operations, because after every attack it was difcult for the terrorists to travel the long distances to Iraq and Syria, and therefore the PKK intended to intimidate the public into supporting the organization. Second, the PKK hoped to achieve an increase in nationalism and group identity, which would ultimately result in stronger Kurdish nationalism and greater public support for the PKK. They hoped to achieve this by hitting civilian targets and in return expecting a deep division in the society. The PKK planned that as a result of these attacks people would accuse others, thus the society would divide between PKK supporters and others. Increased public support had to be achieved in order for the PKK to begin the second phase of the party program. In this phase the aim was to attain a strategic balance or a degree of public force to iname popular public uprising against government forces.186 Although Ocalan maintained his belief

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in the systematic use of murder to terrorize individuals, groups and communities to create public support for the organization by fear,187 172overall, this strategy had little success. The legacy of the PKKs ten years of extensive terrorism in the region was revealed in the authors survey which showed that 64.3 percent of the respondents described their feelings about the PKK in terms of worry, terror, hatred and disgust, while only 5.2 percent replied using favourable terms such as love and hope (Appendix 1.Q4). In the period 1987 93 the PKKs campaign of violence claimed 1,666 civilians lives, but only 5 percent of the population declared their support in the survey. According to Ross and Millers hypotheses, when the general public experience anger, outrage and fear, the possible public responses are: an increase in nationalism; more lobbying; sharpening of group differences; greater loss of government legitimacy; greater amount of fear, greater amount of physical and psychological problems; the greater the amount of fear, the more the amount of demographic change.188 As Ross and Miller noted, these responses will vary according to the country, the type of regime, the kind of terrorist organization, and the victims reactions.189 In the Turkish case, as a result of PKK terrorism, lobbying increased, many people moved to western parts of the country,190 and national consciousness increased within the Kurdish community. However, instead of agreeing with the PKK, people in the region increasingly began to defend themselves, leading to the Village Guard system, which was originally established in April 1985, with the number of guards rising to 40,000 in 1995 and 60,000 in 1998.191 In fact, the Village Guard system was not an entirely new concept. A similar scheme was used during the period of Sultan Hamid in the 1890s, when the Hamidiye Regiments were set up in eastern Turkey, as discussed. Almost 90 years after Sultan Hamids establishment of these regiments, public demand for self-defence against the PKKs violent campaign created the conditions to establish temporary Village Guards in areas where levels of violence required a state of emergency. It is therefore not surprising that the Village Guard from its beginning was at the top of the PKKs hit list. According to Minister of Interior Abdulkadir Aksu (1988 91), the terrorist organization began to panic when the population started to battle against them on the side of the government.192 The PKK had to overcome this resistance to give credibility to its claim that it was ghting on behalf of the Kurdish people. Aksu pointed out that it was a contradiction that on the one hand the PKK was killing Kurds who were resisting the PKKs challenge, while on the other hand it was claiming that it was ghting on their behalf.193 Besides the general public, the PKK targeted the business community and public investments in the region. Its strategy was to force the business

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community out of the region and increase the pressure on the government by means of the lobbying business community. It seems that the PKK was relatively successful in implementing this strategy. Following frequent attacks by the PKK, the business community reacted in a number of ways: more investment in security, which led to special training of staff against such attacks; new technology security systems; employment of anti-terrorism experts; and lobbying by the business community over government policies to combat the terrorism. During the second half of the 1990s, different business communities started to employ more security personnel and experts, but many of the businessmen ended up paying a ransom to the PKK, particularly in southeast Turkey.194 In 1995, big business confederations such as the TOBB (Turkish Union of Chambers) asked experts to examine PKK terrorism and nd possible solutions to it. The resulting report became known as the TOBB report and aimed to inuence some of the government policies on terrorism. Thus the PKKs strategy to force the business community to inuence the government produced some success, but not to the extent that the PKK was hoping. Reactions to the TOBB report will be discussed later in this study along with the governments response to terrorism. Another strategy of the PKK was to disrupt the relations and communications between the people of the region and the government, as well as disrupting the democratic system within the region. To achieve this aim, the PKK targeted public servants, local political party bureaus, and media representatives. They also burned and removed ballot boxes and threatened people who cast votes in the elections.195 The PKKs challenge against Turkish democracy is elaborated on later in this work, but for now it can be noted that the PKK deliberately targeted local party members, threatened people not to go to the ballot box, and prevented the public from using the normal channels of democracy. Other PKK strategies of drug trafcking and establishing foreign alliances are also examined in following sections. As has been noted, the PKKs overall strategy was much like that of the Shining Path of Peru. Marks observed that the Shining Path has a threephase strategy identical to the PKK. These three stages are: strategic defence, strategic balance and strategic offence. The reasoning behind these three stages can be illustrated by the PKK leaders explanation. In the rst stage, the Turkish security forces were strong and effective and the PKK was relatively weak. In this period, the organization had the view that the extensive use of terrorism would garner new recruits for the organization and that the local people would be forced into supporting the armed struggle.196 The security forces would then face a political dilemma, chaos would ensue and nally the balance of the power would change in favour of the PKK in the southeastern parts of the country.197 In the second phase of the strategy, the organization would seek to develop its authority in the region in order to start a larger-scale guerrilla war. It was seen as essential to mobilize the populace

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into backing their cause a difcult challenge in a society in which feudal and tribal authority have dominated for centuries. The third stage of the strategy is to aim for conventional warfare with the total contribution of the people in the region.198 The three-stage plan which the PKK adopted for its strategy is similar to that described by Crozier,199 Wardlaw200 and Jenkins,201 who explained that terrorism is the rst stage of a three-step development, which progresses onward through guerrilla warfare to conventional warfare. To summarize this section, the PKK used coercive and indiscriminate violence as its main method to establish an independent Marxist-Leninist Kurdistan. In order to reach this goal, it is evident that the organization used different types of strategies, which are summarized by adopting the typology of Ross and Miller.202 These are: (1) attacking the general public, in order to show the strength of the organization, force the public into supporting the organization, undermine the legitimacy of the government, and consequently to increase the legitimacy and operational ability of the PKK; (2) attacking the business community in order to increase this communitys pressure on government policy, to force them to pay money to the PKK, and to increase the costs of the business as a result of expensive security investments; (3) to target government workers, institutions and investments, particularly in southeast Turkey; and (4) to develop an ethnic and nationalist consciousness within the Kurdish community. Analyzing the three-phase strategy of the PKK, it is evident that the organization was unable to proceed beyond the rst phase of the three-part strategy. Since its early days, extensive use of terrorism prevailed. Lack of popular public support did not allow the PKK to establish safe areas in southeastern Turkey for its members to settle down in and start the second phase of its strategy, which would have entailed a guerrilla warfare to claim more legitimacy and diminish the government authority, thereby leading to conventional warfare.

Internal Violence and Isolation of the PKK over Civilian Killings

As a result of PKK attacks, 1,278 civilians were killed from 1984 to 1991 and 3,736 were killed between 1992 and 1995. By the end of 1995, the death toll had reached 20,181 in total including security, civilian and PKK casualties (Appendix 4). Including casualities of security members and terrorists, the death toll from 1984 to the end of active military engagement, reached about

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30,000. The use of violence by the PKK, particularly targeting civilians, was aimed at polarizing society along Kurdish and Turkish lines. According to the views of Ross and Miller, the greater the amount of anger as a result of terrorist attacks on the general public, the greater the likelihood this will lead to increased nationalism; and the greater the anger, the higher the possibility of sharpening group differences.203 Although some ethnic consciousness did develop within the Kurdish community in Turkey as result of the PKKs violence, as illustrated earlier, this did not reach the level that the PKK was hoping for, nor did it result in widespread support for the organization. As the Turkish Democracy Foundation observed, after each funeral of a victim, people tended to condemn the PKK rather than show resentment towards the Turkish state.204 Social polarization and deep divisions between Turks and Kurds also did not occur. In contrast, the indiscriminate use of violence by the PKK against civilians exacerbated the tension between the pro-Kurdish organizations, other radical left revolutionary groups and the PKK. This method also raised criticism within the organization, which ultimately resulted in using violence against the organizations own comrades, including senior gures within the PKK.205 As noted earlier, the coercive violence carried out by the PKK during the 1980s, under the strategy of armed propaganda, did not generate the popular support for which the PKK had aimed. Indeed, the PKKs bloody campaign seems to have tarnished the partys image, and adversely affected its relations with other Kurdish and extreme left Turkish groups. Signicantly, the most violent terrorist groups of Turkeys pre-military period, the Revolutionary Path, the Road of the Turkish Revolution and the Turkish Workers-Peasants Liberation Army, agreed to ght the PKK on its own grounds if it continued to attack civilians.206 This joint decision was taken in Paris during the winter of 1987 88, and was approved at a meeting held in Munich.207 Another serious setback to the PKK came from Barzanis KDP (Kurdish Democrat Party of Iraq). As Gunter noted, relations between the two had been cooling since 1985 because of the PKKs violent tactics against women and children.208 In May 1987, referring to the 1983 agreement they had signed as required under the principles of solidarity, the KDP made its views clear: It is clear they [the PKK] have adopted an aggressive attitude towards the leadership of our party, towards its policies, and the friends of our party. Continuing, Barzanis party denounced what it termed, terrorist operations within the country and abroad and their action to liquidate human beings [. . .] The mentality behind such action is against humanity and democracy and is not in line with the national liberation of Kurdistan.209 The termination of the relationship between the PKK and the KDP came about because of differences that appeared between the two groups in both methods and ideology. The KDP believed that the solution to the Kurdish issue was to be found in the democratic and political arena that exists in Turkey. With this approach, Barzanis KDP secured Turkish sympathy.

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The best example of this was witnessed after the Iraqi bombing of Kurdish towns and villages in Northern Iraq, which led to the government of Turkey opening her borders to the Iraqi Kurds in 1988. Some 60,000 Iraqi Kurds were allowed to enter Turkey in what Prime Minister Ozal called a humanitarian gesture to Turkeys brothers across the border. More signicant pressure came from other Kurdish groups such as KAVA, and SPTK, in response to Ocalans violent tactics against civilians, which they described as unacceptable and brutal.210 Ocalan, desperate for new allies, was severely criticized for his call for active unity, when the other Kurdish groups of Turkey had reportedly already established an alliance against the PKK called the Kurdish Liberation Operation.211 In addition to these setbacks, the PKK did not enjoy popular support in southeastern Anatolia because of its violent methods. When the authors enquired whether the people of the region agreed with the killings carried out by of the PKK, the results indicated low levels of support for the terrorist organization. When asked Are the killings of the PKK ever justiable?, 83 percent of respondents said they did not agree with the political killings under any circumstances. Only 7.1 percent of respondents said attacks against military targets might be acceptable and only one person replied that any target could be legitimate, as outlined further in appendix (Appendix 1.Q5). Thus it can be seen that a clear majority of respondents did not support the killing of civilians by the PKK. This nding is supported by the TOBB report that half of the respondents to the question what did they not support among the PKKs activities, disagreed with the PKKs extreme acts of violence and their attempt to stop democratic debate.212 However, the campaign of violence carried out by the PKK militants, achieved some success in that the PKK secured nation-wide publicity, with newspapers giving extensive coverage of terrorist incidents. By the end of the 1980s, the PKK had became a major problem for the Turkish government, despite the governments claim that they were a merely bunch of bandits. The reputation that the PKK created with its tactics of propaganda by death, did not, however, win it any sympathy. Moreover, while failing to develop the support base in southeastern Anatolia, the organization lost instead its main radical left Kurdish and Turkish allies as well as the support of Barzanis KDP. The question of who was responsible for the weakening image of the PKK led to an internal crisis within the PKK. Some members began to doubt the hitherto unquestionable position of Ocalan as leader of the PKK. Ocalans methods of dealing with internal opposition, however, were brutal. According to a Middle East Report based on information from former members of the PKK, reading of anything outside of the PKKs own publications was forbidden, friendships were undermined by a policy of encouraging everybody to suspect their comrades as possible agents, and criticism of the partys policies was regarded as betrayal. In the report it was also added

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that some 20 members of the organization had been killed for defecting from the party or disagreeing with its policies.213 Ocalan thus used violence not only against civilians and security personnel, but also against his own comrades. Amongst the dissident voices from within the party, the most notable were Ocalans wife, Kesire, and his so-called right-hand man, attorney Huseyin Yildirim, who disagreed with Ocalan over policies of indiscriminate violence. The Turkish daily newspaper Hurriyet reported the Kesire incident as a bloody division within the PKK.214 Another daily paper, Milliyet, reported that the division was due to criticism from a splinter group in the PKK camps abroad, regarding their ruthless methods.215 This group was also reportedly strongly opposed to the way Ocalan dealt with internal critics. Some reports claimed that at least 38 senior PKK leaders had been killed on Ocalans orders in a period of less than a year, following a revolutionary trial during 1987 and 1988.216 Ocalans wife, who had been among the top ranks of the PKK since 1978, also strongly opposed Ocalans brutality within the party, as well as the killing of civilians. The criticism almost cost her life when she was put under detention in Bekaa. Later, with the help of friends, she was smuggled out of the camp, and managed to escape to Sweden where she reportedly joined Huseyin Yldrm.217 During the authors eld study in Diyarbakir, a former PKK member who did not want to be named said everyone was scared of each other, because Ocalan said one word could be more than enough to be charged by the revolutionary court and then sentenced to death, which I have witnessed more than twenty-ve times in Mahsun Korkmaz Training Academy in Bekaa Valley alone, in a period of three and a half years.218 Imset noted several examples of the internal violence within the party. In the PKK controlled Mahsun Korkmaz Academy in Bekaa, some 20 high ranking PKK members were placed under arrest, tried, found guilty of betrayal, and executed. In June 1989, a PKK hit-man attempted to assassinate attorney Huseyin Yildirim in Holland near the Belgian border and Yildirim was severely wounded.219 Amongst the number of dissidents who managed to escape from Ocalans harsh policies were Sari Baran, Chairman of the Military Council, Abdurrahman Kayikci, head of security, and Mehmet Sener, the former politburo secretary of the PKK, who took refuge with the KDP in Iraq. In an interview with the popular left-wing weekly Ikibine Dogru on May 1 15, 1990, Sener accused Ocalan of running the party as a dictatorship and criticized the PKKs violent strategy. Although the main divisions started within the PKK, rival organizations echoed the accusations in the European and Turkish press. Ocalan answered with more bloodshed. He started the so-called rival cleansing operation in the late 1980s by denouncing dissidents as Turkish agents and traitors, and accusing rival organizations of plotting with the Turkish authorities to destroy the Kurdish revolution.220 It was obvious that Ocalan was not going to tolerate

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criticism of any kind. In the publication A Guerrillas Handbook, Ocalan explained his use of violence to quell dissent within the PKK: The provocative activities carried out by agents who inltrated the party by various methods, are the reason why the people turned away from identifying themselves within our movement in Kurdistan. As for the KUK [Kurdish National Liberators], almost all their activities have been directed towards the [PKK] party. As for the DDKD [Revolutionary Eastern Culture Association], they passed on intelligence and information [to Turkey]. [. . .] Middle-of-the-road revolutionaries, who do not recognize the party revolutionary line, or, who, rather than abide by it, try to gain the leadership of the party, have narrow views, which are not able to get around a captive peasantmentality. It has clearly been seen what sort of provocation these traitors have come to.221 According to Ocalan, people who left the PKK were either intelligence agents of Turkey, provocateurs, collaborators, or they simply did not understand the PKKs policies. This is the same argument, which Guzman of the Shining Path has used.222 However, it is known that many of the members of the PKK accused of such behaviour served in the top ranks of the organization. Examples include Sari Baran, Abdurrahman Kaykc, and Mehmet Sener, who occupied positions of great power in the party for years, while Kesire Ocalan and Huseyin Yldrm were Ocalans foremost deputies and were amongst the founding members of the PKK in the late 1970s.223 It is not reasonable to suggest that these people were enemies of the PKK, rather they represented opposition to what Huseyin Yildirim called the atmosphere of terror that the PKK was generating for the innocent people of southeast Turkey and for members of the party itself. Nevertheless, Ocalan dealt with rivals and dissidents by the familiar methodology of terrorism and more bloodshed. As a result, propaganda by death survived as the main policy of the PKK under the absolute leadership of Ocalan. The effects of violence as a main policy of the PKK can be summarized as follows. First, it did help to create some Kurdish ethnic consciousness, but it did not create major divisions between Turks and Kurds. Second, a number of radical left groups, pro-Kurdish groups within and outside Turkey and, more importantly, some members of the PKK itself, criticized the use of violence against civilians. Consequently, the PKK became isolated from these groups and in desperation the organization resorted to more violence, including violence against its own militants. Third, lack of popular support meant that mobilizing Kurdish groups against the Turkish government under the name of a national independence war or, a popular guerrilla warfare with the consent of the people could not be achieved by the PKK. As noted, the use of indiscriminate violence cannot be justied in liberal democracies. In the case of Turkey, it is not defensible to suggest that the use

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of indiscriminate violence to obtain political objectives is the only way left to the opposition. Although there are some coordination problems in meeting peoples demands and some misinterpretations of democratic values and their implementation in practice, over the years Turkey has been gradually developing a better practice of liberal democracy. The PKK has remained one of the strongest terrorist organizations in the Middle East even after the capture of its leader, Abdullah Ocalan. Its active members were estimated in 1999 at between 5,000 to 8,000, although this number varies from time to time and depends on the source that reports it.224 The organizations continued existence raises the question of how the PKK managed to survive and keep its strength. The next pages of this study will concentrate on the nancial support and foreign dependency of the PKK.

The Survival of the PKK

Foreign Support Research on the PKKs 15-year campaign of propaganda and violence clearly shows that the terrorists achieved neither public support nor the establishment of liberated zones in southeastern Anatolia.225 Given this lack of success, the PKK survived remarkably well. Statistical data supplied by the Turkish security departments, along with the media coverage of terrorist incidents, indicate that the activities of the PKK still ourished despite prevention of terrorism being the rst priority of the government.226 Two major factors contributed to the survival of the PKK: strong foreign support and involvement in drug trafcking and extortion, both of which are important in nancing its operations. Despite a number of setbacks that the PKK faced in Turkey, Syrian, Iranian, Iraqi, Greek, and Russian support for the PKK remained strong.227 There are three groups of countries, which, it can be argued, supported the PKK for different reasons. The rst group is Turkeys southern neighbours, whose support stemmed in part from their unhappiness over the water dispute. These were Syria (which had the additional grievance of claiming the Turkish province of Antakya), and to a lesser extent, Iraq.228 The second group is Iran and Russia, whose support stemmed mainly from the issue of the inuence of Turkey in the Middle East, Central Asian Republics and the Caucasus. The third group is Greece and Greek Cyprus, whose support was related to the Greek expansionist policy in the Aegean Sea and the future status of Cyprus. Since the early period following the 1980 military coup, the PKK received its greatest support from Syria. According to security sources, Abdullah Ocalan had, until his arrest, been living in Damascus, a privilege accorded no other terrorist leader.229 Pelletiere explains this development: The PKK, after being purged by Turkeys army, ed to Syria where Assad took it under his protection. In 1983, he selected this group to participate in, and ultimately to lead, the terror war against Turkey.230 As noted earlier, the PKK had not only

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managed to establish itself in Syrian controlled Lebanon, but also received Syrian military assistance.231 Imset summarizes the facilities provided to the PKK by Syria as follows: To give living places to PKK militants who had managed to escape from Turkey; to provide money and false identication for militants travelling into Lebanon for guerrilla training; to provide PKK militants with necessary permission to travel in Syria without hindrance; to create a joint front against Turkey along with Turkish extremist organizations; to allow for the party congress to be held within Syrian territory [most of the PKK congresses and conferences were held in Syrian-controlled Lebanese territories;232 to provide weapons and ammunition for the PKK; to allow the printing of organizational documents and material in Syrian printing houses; to base the PKKs famous centre, the Mahsun Korkmaz Academy in Syria; and to assist PKK militants travelling to Europe and Iran on false passports.233 It can be seen that the PKK received every possible type of support from Syria. These facts explain why 81 percent of the respondents in the authors survey reported believing that the PKK relies on foreign support and direction, and not believing that the PKK worked for the interests of the Kurds (Appendix 1.Q11). But what was the reason behind Syrias enthusiastic support for the PKK? The reason for Syrias support of the PKK began with the fact that Syria, along with Iraq, Iran and Russia, has Kurdish groups within its borders. As Mango234 noted, not one of these countries provides the Kurds with the same rights as Turkey does, especially in electoral and democratic terms. It is therefore not evident that these countries are sympathetic to Kurdish rights. Syrian support for the PKK was driven by two factors. As Muslih235 noted, Turkey had been building a major dam over the Euphrates River for the southeastern Anatolian Project GAP, and Syria had long claimed that this dam might reduce the ow of the Euphrates below 500 cubic meters per second, although Turkey had guaranteed this level to Damascus. The second reason Muslih noted is that Syria considered Turkish sovereignty over Hatay (in the province of Antakya) as illegitimate. The extent of Syrian support for the PKK ultimately went so far that it was even argued that the PKK lost much of its organizational freedom.236 Such a loss raises the question of the legitimacy of the PKK in terms of whether it was ghting for the Kurds or acting for Syrian interests in the Middle East. In answer to question 10 of the authors survey, some 21.4 percent of respondents believed that the increase in terrorism in Turkey could be attributed to the attempts of some countries to undermine Turkeys inuence in the Middle East (Appendix 1.Q10). During the eld study, the authors encountered a considerable number of people who said that Syria did not want a powerful Turkey and that the same could be said for Iraq, Iran, Greece and Russia.

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Indeed, some 38.8 percent of the respondents in the survey believed that certain foreign powers were trying to destabilize the economy and foreign policy of the country, and that this was one of the major causes of terrorism. At the same time 81 percent of respondents (Appendix 1.Q11) believed that there was foreign support for the PKK. Indeed, Gunter noted that: The Kurdish factor has also curtailed Turkeys ability to play a stronger role in the Balkans unfolding on its western door, as well as restricting severely the opportunity to make gains in the Caucasus and Central Asia by taking advantage of Russias problems in Chechnya.237 According to the Ross and Miller typology,238 the greater the cooperation among states, the less the amount of terrorism. Cooperation was essential for the Turkish case, in order to ght against terrorism. In an unstable part of the world, Turkey had to work at overcoming a number of problems with neighbouring countries before having a realistic chance of cutting the PKKs foreign support. From the beginning of 1985 throughout the 1990s, there was much diplomatic trafc between Turkey and Syria in which the PKK was undoubtedly one of the major topics of discussion. As the reports of Middle East and Turkish ofcials suggest, Syria used the PKK as a trump card in negotiations over Turkeys project to dam the Euphrates River and use the water supply for the demands of the southeastern Anatolian project.239 One of the Turkish negotiators, Aksu, reported: Although we showed all the evidence to the Syrian ofcials about the support provided to top comrades of the PKK by this country, including the presence of Ocalan in Damascus, Syria repeatedly either refused or ignored our arguments until . . . president Asad acknowledged the reality and promised that they will suspend all the aid, which has been going on so far. However we are aware of the fact that Syria has never kept her promises to us.240 Syria until 1999 used the PKK as a balancing card against Turkey. When it needed Turkey more than it did the PKK, and when it realized that it could not deal with the Turkish military threat, Syria left the PKK alone. Although the PKK did not receive the same hospitality from Saddam Hussein of Iraq, after the Gulf War in 1990, an area of northern Iraq was declared as a United Nations safe haven for Iraqi Kurds, eventually leading to the collapse of any kind of authority in the region. The honeymoon period between the two main Iraqi Kurdish organizations, under the rival leaderships of Barzani and Talabani, ended in a bloody power-sharing dispute, which consequently left the area vulnerable to PKK operations. An analysis of the statistical data shows that the PKK took full advantage of this situation and increased its cross-border activities between northern Iraq and Turkey. These activities began in the spring of 1991 and the resultant terrorist activity claimed four times as many human lives annually as in the previous years.241

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In response, Turkey began conducting a number of hot-pursuit operations into this region. The success rate of these operations was believed to have been undermined either when information given to the Barzani and Talabani groups was subsequently passed on to the terrorists, or when intelligence gathered from some other countries was passed to them.242 In addition, the military operation conducted by Turkey in March April 1995 received heavy criticism from some western European countries, including France, Germany and Holland, which consequently brought about strong arguments for the need for international consensus in order to overcome the problems in northern Iraq.243 Nevertheless some countries such as the USA and the UK, showed some measure of understanding, declaring that they supported Turkish efforts to combat terrorism. Turning to Turkeys northern and eastern borders, Turkeys potential for becoming a major power in the Middle East was seen as a threat great enough to lead some neighboring countries to support terrorism in Turkey. Turkey was also seen as a potential model country for the newly emerging countries of Central Asia. As Andrew Mango noted: with its secular, democratic and liberal free market economy, Turkey is the best candidate to be a model for the newly independent central Asian Turkish states and Middle Eastern Muslim states.244 If the so-called Turkish model was to be possible, it had to maintain control over its internal and external stability. The competition with Iran and Russia over becoming a model to be imitated by nations in Transcaucasia and Central Asia, created circumstances in which Turkeys terrorists were seen as a valuable opportunity to curtail her effort in these areas. The interests of Tehran, Ankara and Moscow in Central Asia and Transcaucasia seemed to conict with each other, rather than leading to cooperation between these countries.245 Turkish ofcials argued that terrorists were ending up in either Iran or Syria after every hot pursuit operation conducted by the army on the borders of these countries.246 On the other hand, as mentioned earlier, Russia, in the early years of the 1990s, sent its military trainers to the PKK camps in northern Iraq and in the Bekaa Valley. The most obvious example of the Russian attitude towards terrorism in Turkey came after the Russian intervention in Chechnya. When the head of the Russian intelligence service paid a visit to Ankara, for the rst time in its history, he declared that if Turkey did not accept the fact that the ongoing war against the Chechnian rebels was a legitimate use of power by Russia in order to defend her integrity and interfered in the matter, they would consider the Turkish ght against the PKK in the same manner.247 In brief the Russian skepticism about Turkeys Cuacasian and Central Asian policies did not help in ending the PKK terrorism and the PKK enjoyed the Russian Turkish disagreement on terrorism. PKKs relations with Greece also remained an obstacle for Turkey. The relationship between Greece and Turkey became inamed many times over issues such as Cyprus, territorial waters in the Aegean Sea, air space over

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the Aegean Sea and persecution of the Turkish minority in Western Thrace.248 Disagreements between Turkey and Greece over these issues often resulted in Greek support for any terrorist organization active in Turkey. In the 1970s this support was focused on radical left terrorist groups. Later, Greece became one of the most enthusiastic supporters of the PKK. As recently as the late 1990s, a Time Internationalreport on PKK Greek relations noted that: The ERNKs induction ceremonies are just the tail end of the process for turning refugees into revolutionaries. The real indoctrination and recruitment goes on at place like Lavrion [A training camp where many radical Turkish left terrorist groups received training during the 1970s], 45 km southeast of Athens, one of about ve main refugee camps for the 100 or so Kurdish asylum seekers arriving each month. [. . .] In the US, such open PKK activities would be a breach of the Anti-Terrorism Act of 1996 and would bring prison sentences of up to 10 years for those perpetrating them. But in Greece, the PKKs terrorist re spreads virtually unchecked.249 Even after the PKK was classied as a terrorist organization by many democratic countries, such as the USA, Germany and France, Greece, like some other neighbouring countries, did not hesitate to use this organization as a political tool in its relations with Turkey. Western Support for the PKK Many Western governments declared that the PKK was one of the worlds most dangerous terrorist organizations, yet the PKK managed to receive considerable support from the West. First of all, anti-Turkish institutions and lobbying groups saw the Kurdish issue as an opportunity to weaken Turkeys position in the West. Second, the PKK helped to create a Kurdish diaspora in the Western countries. The PKK militants legally and nancially helped those who wanted to immigrate to the European countries for economic reasons. Then the organization tried to control these people in order to realize its political aims. In the 1990s there was a strong Kurdish diaspora in most of the European countries, and many of these people were under PKK manipulation. It can be argued that when the PKK could not create Kurdish nationalism in Turkey it exported its potential supporters abroad in order to create its own people.250 This Kurdish community naturally provided a suitable environment for the PKK in the West and affected public opinion. Political causes and power politics also shaped the Western governments Kurdish policies and some preferred to use the PKK as a balancing card against Turkey. The UK, Germany, France, and Belgium, for instance, allowed the terror groups TV station to broadcast PKK propaganda throughout the 1990s. The PKKs MED-TV broadcasted from London and made its TV programs in studios in France, Germany, Sweden and Belgium.251 The PKK abused the freedoms and

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liberties in the West. However it is obvious that the PKKs activities in the West were also tolerated (if not supported) in many Western states. Drug Trafcking and Extortion Connections Ross and Miller252 note that terrorists need resources to achieve their objectives. If the needs of terrorist groups for money and other resources are not obtained through donations from supporters, then terrorist groups may acquire them through illegal channels, drug trafcking, protection rackets, and extortion. Consequently, as suggested by the Ross and Miller typology, The greater the need for resources (in particular nancial ones), the greater the possibility that terrorist organizations will engage in criminal activities that generate income.253 It has already been shown that the PKK used indiscriminate violence to try to achieve its objectives. However, it was also noted that after a long campaign of armed struggle it did not manage to establish popular support. Therefore, the survival of the PKK was very dependent on foreign powers and also on its criminal activities in order to meet its costs. This became widely recognized by the world media after a number of successful operations conducted against the organization during the late 1980s and early 1990s. In July 1989, PKK militants Ylmaz S. and Ahmet Y. were caught in Belgium in possession of sixty kilograms of cocaine and in the same year PKK member Turgut S. was caught with ten kilograms of heroin in Istanbul.254 According to the Turkish weekly magazine Tempo, the PKKs involvement in major shipments of drugs to Europe continued and in November 1990 another member of the organization, Cengiz B., was caught in Arnheim, on the German Dutch border, with 48 kilograms of heroin. In May 1992, Mehmet A., described as a leading member of the PKK, was caught with 13.5 kilograms of heroin. According to the Tempo reports and also Fact Book I 1996, of the 41 narcotics operations carried out worldwide in 1991, smugglers caught in 23 of these operations were part of the PKK drug network and the drugs involved had come through Turkey and the Middle East. As Imset noted, despite other nancial sources such as voluntary donations, protection rackets, robberies: The most protable PKK nancial operation to date has been this organizations increasing involvement in the international trafc of drugs which, according to one ofcial, has provided the organization with an annual income of not less than DM 500 million [This number probably meant fty million] in the 1990s.255 Probably one of the largest hauls of drugs (4.5 tonnes) was captured in a PKK camp in northern Iraq by the Turkish army during a cross-border operation.256 After the operation some Western ofcials, including American drug experts, paid a visit to the area and conrmed that the PKK was not only selling drugs but also producing a large amount in northern Iraq.257 It is clear

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that the PKK was an international drug trafcker as well as a terrorist organization. As a result of this, Western democratic countries, which are increasingly vulnerable to such trade, declared their opposition to the PKK. The former president of the US, Bill Clinton, was the rst to condemn the PKK activities and declared that it is the duty of all liberal democratic countries to ght against terrorism, naming the PKK as one of the most dangerous terrorist groups in this respect.258 Another source of money for the PKK was extortion. It is a known fact that the PKK practised extortion not only on businessmen in the southeast of Turkey, but also businessmen in Istanbul, Ankara and throughout the country.259 Even people outside the country were not immune from the PKKs threat and were forced into paying money to the organization. In particular, Turkish guest workers in Germany, France, Holland and the UK are among those who were forced to pay money to the PKK.260 The director of the Terrorism Research Forum in Germany discovered that 69 percent of the incidents of extortion in Germany in 1994 were in connection with the PKK.261 It seems clear that the lack of voluntary donations to the PKK led it to resort to criminal activities, which is the case for many terrorist organizations as Ross and Millers typology suggests. To sum up, the international nature of modern terrorism means that a countrys ght against terrorism is seldom simply an internal matter. In this study, it has been shown that as an international terrorist organization, the PKK was not only a threat to Turkish interests and stability, but also to the regional and world order. In order to overcome such threats to world peace, international cooperation and understanding between different nations is needed. The members of the world community should take a cooperative approach against terrorism, rather than using it for their political advantage under the guise of supporting freedom ghters. The following section of this paper concentrates on the internal reasons and causes of PKK terrorism and elaborates on these reasons in terms of the internal dimension of terrorism within Turkey.

The Causes of PKK Terrorism

Why Terrorism? Terrorism is seen as a convenient and feasible way to reach a political objective by some organizations, and it has been increasingly practised for more than two hundred years. The use of violence has developed and become a form of struggle justied as a weapon of the weak against powerful tyrants and dictatorial regimes. However, there are strong arguments that the use of indiscriminate violence cannot be justied, particularly in liberal democracies. Moreover, terrorism cannot be perceived as a legitimate weapon of the weak when there is considerable foreign involvement and manipulation of terrorist organizations. As noted earlier, some countries have

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used terrorist organizations for their own political objectives. This was seen in the Cold War period of Soviet expansion policies and in examples of Turkeys neighbours involvement with the PKK. In light of these developments, terrorism is sometimes a form of warfare between competing nations. It can be argued that the main reasoning behind terrorist activities is that regardless of moral considerations, violence can be justied as a pragmatic strategy in which the ends justify the means. As far as the Turkish experience is concerned, terrorist organizations have willingly resorted to violence. As Wilkinson262 notes, terrorism does not require many people to cause great disruption for states and countries. This was precisely the case with the revolutionary terrorist groups in late 1960s as well as for the PKK in the late 1970s, when it was comprized of only 20 members. Further, when the political history of Turkey is examined, it appears that the use of terrorism to achieve political goals has been one of the major methods of several organizations. Two major causes for the extensive use of terrorism in Turkey since the late 1960s can be identied. First, terrorist organizations refused to use the channels of democracy available to them and because of that attitude towards democracy, armed struggle was inevitable as a way for them to secure their political goals. However, as illustrated many times, this action does not necessarily reect the lack of democratic channels within the society, as the example in Omagh (N. Ireland) has showed. In the Turkish case, the best example of this came in 1969 when, after losing the general elections, a group emerged from the ranks of the Turkish Labour Party believing in the use of armed struggle to take power regardless of the availability of democratic channels within the country. Members of the extreme groups went underground, and started a so-called revolutionary war. A second example is that of PKK terrorism, in which Ocalan declared the use of violence as his main method, despite the fact that the majority of the Kurdish citizens of Turkey were participating in democratic life. With its experiences of both revolutionary and separatist Marxist terrorism in Turkey, it could be argued that the reactive approach taken by the Turkish governments exacerbated matters. Consequently, in both cases terrorists took full advantage of the situation and generated maximum propaganda. The reactive policies and lack of democratic experience, especially in the 1960s and 1970s, contributed to an escalation of the violence. This study argues that neither the decit of the democratic system nor the governments policies are the principal causes of the terrorism in Turkey; but the governments reactive measures following the terrorist activities did not help to reduce terrorism within the country, but rather inamed the situation. The second reason for terrorism in Turkey is rooted in the social and economic problems that existed within the country, educational disadvantages, and, as Fuller,263 Gunter264, Winrow and Kirisci265 and Barchard266 have

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noted, in the hesitation of the Turkish government to take the necessary steps and precautions to deal with root causes of the problem. Instead, they regarded it as purely a security matter. The combined effect of these factors made Turkish democracy vulnerable to terrorism and consequently, democratic life in Turkey has been disrupted on three occasions, as mentioned previously. The PKKs Willingness to Use Violence The PKKs use of indiscriminate violence and their reasons for doing so have already been discussed. These included the PKKs inability to persuade and mobilize the people of the region, its attempt to eliminate the other alternative Kurdish groups from the political arena, and an assault on the democratic integration of the region of southeast Anatolia.267 Moreover, the difculty of establishing a force of volunteer recruits and the rejection by local people of the Marxist-Leninist ideology also contributed to the PKKs use of violence against various groups and the public. Sometimes the level and extent of violence was such that entire families were killed (Appendix 6). However some authors, such as Bozarslan,268 excuse the PKK on the grounds that the PKK has been forced into armed struggle by military violence.269 It has been established from many sources, however, including the words of Ocalan himself that, from the rst day of the PKKs establishment in 1970s, and as outlined in the rst party program in 1977, it was the clear policy of the organization to use violence. Terrorist organizations resort to violence because they think that is the best, most convenient and quickest way to obtain their objectives. As Bakunin stated, wars kill many people, but with terrorism one can achieve maximum protability with minimum casualties. It is incorrect to suggest, therefore, that the PKK resorted to violence because of the Turkish governments policies. Nevertheless, it is also true that some of the policies adopted by the government contributed to further escalation of the violence. Van Bruinessen,270 one of the most respected scholars of Kurdish affairs, reported that Ocalans group was the only Kurdish organization whose members were drawn almost exclusively from the lowest social classes, poorly educated village and small-town youths who wanted action rather than ideological sophistication.271 This nding is backed up by the response to the authors survey. In answer to the question, From what kind of social group does the PKK get its support? 31.2 percent of the respondents said poorly educated, and another 29.9 percent thought poor people supported the organization. Thus, a total of 61.1 percent believed that poor or less welleducated sections of society provided support for the PKK (Appendix 1.Q8). These ndings underscore another aspect of the problem, namely that the PKK lacked educated recruits to promote its political aims. Consequently, the only way left for the PKK to achieve its goals was to terrorize the general public rather than use democratic means to persuade the public.

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Moreover, the ndings of the TOBB report also suggested that the majority of the respondents (70 percent) who wanted an independent Kurdish state were either illiterate or primary school graduates. It was not a coincidence that the majority of the PKK militants were uneducated village boys, concluded the TOBB Report (1995). As noted earlier, 60 percent of the convicted PKK members were either illiterate or primary school educated people.272 These ndings tend to show that lack of education was a major factor in PKK terrorist violence in Turkey. During the late 1960s and throughout the 1970s, terrorist organizations exploited the economic backwardness of the country in order to attract public support.273 The PKK was quick to exploit this position in southeastern Anatolia, recognized as the poorest and least educated part of the country.274 Although the governments public spending in southeastern Turkey has been proportionately higher compared to that of other regions, there has been a low level of private investment, partly as a result of terrorist attacks and partly because of the unattractive prot margins due to its mountainous terrain and poor communications.275 Winrow and Kirisci further note that the gross per capita income is lowest in eastern and southeastern Turkey compared to the other regions, and only six out of every 100 privately owned cars in 1991 were registered in the eastern and southeastern regions, which indicates the relative lack of prosperity in these regions.276 As a result of the depressed nature of the economy, there have been high levels of unemployment, particularly amongst the youth, with a gure of about 35 percent in the second half of the 1990s for this particular region, according to the Diyarbakir Chamber of Commerce and Industry. This contributed to the rise of terrorism and was one of the terrorists most well used facts in their propaganda. The Southeastern Report, prepared in 1990 by the parliamentary group of the Socialist Peoples Party, argued that socio-economic problems were the major cause of terrorism in this region and added there were 10.4 percent hospital beds per 10,000 people in the southeast compared to 23.7 for Turkey as a whole.277 The SHP report accepted that the difcult geography of the area meant there was little economic incentive to attract private investment to the region. However, the SHP believed that government investment could have been better used, and also that the ght against unemployment, which is the biggest problem in the region, should have been given top priority. The SHP report also noted that although southeastern Turkey accommodates 8.5 percent of the countrys population, it received only 5 percent of the total investment budget in the period 1981 85. These economic factors were of course affected by the terrorist presence in the region, and by attacks on investors, teachers and public servants.278 Another study, carried out by Besikci, argued that the regional backwardness of the country also fostered many social problems, which needed to be addressed.279 The authors own survey asked the question, There has been a dramatic increase in terrorist incidents since the second half of the 1980s. What reasons

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could there be for that? The most popular answer was low income and underdevelopment in regional economic growth, given by 28 percent of respondents (Appendix 1.Q10). It is evident that in this case economic backwardness was a key contributor to terrorism. The problem of foreign support for the terrorists was discussed earlier. As noted, it was one of the most important areas that the Turkish government had to address. Alongside other evidence, what is most important is that the survey respondents did not believe that economic reasons alone were responsible for the increase in terrorism. Responsibility was also attached to certain groups, both internal and external, who were seen as trying to decrease economic development in Turkey (15 percent of respondents) while 21 percent blamed foreign powers trying to weaken Turkish foreign policy in the Middle East (Appendix 1.Q10). The survey also indicated that a considerable number of people blamed the Turkish government for the incidents of terrorism. Some 26.6 percent of respondents argued that misguided government policies affected the rapid increase of terrorism during the second half of the 1980s (Appendix 1.Q10). Various aspects of policy have been criticized. As illustrated in the reports of the SHP, the lack of long-term policies intended to solve acute regional problems, in elds such as education, housing, unemployment, health and land reforms, were found to have had no success in satisfying the public demands.280 Second, the public was not satised with the way that the government handled the ght against terrorism. Terrorist incidents increased the severity of security measures and the public increasingly felt this, particularly in regions where the state of emergency was in force. As Ross and Miller suggest, The greater the passage of special enactment legislation, the greater the violation of human rights.281 Ross and Miller mainly focus on the type of governmental response following terrorist incidents. In this case, the government used police forces, military units, intelligence agencies, parliamentary units, numerous government-managed security outts and special anti-terrorist units.282 The operations of these units, under special amendments to the law (the Prevention of Terrorism Act), Article 8 of the Anti-terror Law, and the declarations of states of emergency issued in July 1987 in ten provinces in eastern and southeastern Turkey (now reduced to six provinces) inevitably imposed constraints on public life. They were the cause of many complaints by the public. As noted earlier, these kinds of special amendments to the law become necessary when there is an increasing level of terrorist oppression. Unal has noted that many advanced democracies in the west (including the UK and the USA) have enacted similar legislation.283 He further noted that along with Turkey, the UK, in its battle with the IRA, has been criticized at the European Court of Human Rights.284 It also should be noted that the US after the September 11 attacks has taken similar measures.

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However, during the early 1990s, the severity of the security measures and their effects on the public was one of the main issues complained about. When asked why they did not abolish the emergency law, although it had been lifted in all other parts of the country following military rule in 198083, ex-Minister of the Interior Aksu admitted that the use of the extraordinary powers given to the security forces by this law caused anxiety. However, he likened the situation to the chicken and egg conundrum: Which comes rst? The law is there because terrorism is there.285 Turkish government policies for combating terrorism can be divided into three categories. First, there were proactive measures against terrorism, such as socio-economic policies and education programs. Second, there were reactive policies such as security measures, and nally, there was the democratization project. The government of Turgut Ozal (1983 91) seemed to realize the importance of economic development in combating terrorism. The biggest public investment in the history of the Republic, the Southeast Anatolian Project, better known as GAP (Guneydogu Anadolu Projesi), was given priority. The project comprises a sprawling network of hydroelectric power plants and irrigation schemes spanning the Euphrates and Tigris rivers along Turkeys borders with Iraq and Syria. According to the GAP Department of the State Planning Organization, the total cost of the project was 32 billion US dollars when it was pojected286 The original objective of the project was to redress the imbalance of the countrys poorest region, creating jobs in an area facing endemic unemployment, the countrys highest population growth, and social and economic deprivation, all of which were seen as major contributors to the years of terrorist incidents. The economic output and social impact of the project remains promising: when complete it will increase Turkeys irrigated farmland by a third and power from the dams will double the countrys electricity capacity. Spanning eight provinces in the region, the GAP is envisaged as being the economic catalyst for a multitude of ancillary economic activities from seed manufacturing to textile production.287 Two other objectives of the GAP were to stop the ow of migrant workers, which had put strains on public services in cities such as Izmir, Istanbul, Adana and Ankara, and most importantly, to win the support of the regional peoples and thereby undermine support for the PKK through the promise of jobs and a better life.288 An important question was whether the GAP would help attract peoples hearts and minds in undermining and isolating terrorists and minimizing their support. What effect would GAP have on Turkeys battle with the terrorists? When asked in 1993, Do you think that the southeast Anatolian Project will have any effect on the activities of PKK? local responses showed support for the GAP, with 62 percent of the respondents believing that the project would undermine and weaken the PKKs efforts, while 14.9 percent thought that no changes would result and 13 percent arguing that it would increase the power

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of the PKK (Appendix 1.Q12). A minority (14 percent) predicted a rise in terrorist activities as a result of economic investment. This groups priority might be ethnic interests and cultural rights rather than economic development of the region, which has to be looked at from a different perspective. Evidence that terrorism may arise in developed regions can be found in the example of the ETA, which developed in more prosperous Spain.289 Even as early as 1993 the authors witnessed an illustration of this outcome. In a small coffee shop in Kocakr (a small town near Diyarbakr), a conversation took place during which it was said that more money may create new resources for the terrorists, who are already nanced by a considerable amount of money taken by force from the regional people. The governor of the town, Selim Cebiroglu, explained his worries: You can see much half-nished work around here, which has been heavily subsidized by the government under the plan of priority of the project for the underdeveloped regions. Where is the project and where did the money go? I have heard many times that half of the money goes to the PKK and the other half to the fugitive businessman. If the government is not careful, every penny we pay will be of benet to terrorist organizations. So if we want to succeed against terrorism we have to sto p this pipeline.290 The views of people like this echoed the position in Spain after Franco, when economic development of the Basque region did not help to stop ETAs terrorism, but rather fuelled it. So it was not economic development alone but also, as Home Secretary Aksu stated, a package program consisting of economic, social and democratization developments that would be needed to achieve a long-lasting solution.291 However, in many respects the situation in Turkey was quite different from that of Spain. In April 1995, Turkey celebrated the ofcial opening of the rst irrigation tunnel resulting from GAP, which by that time had cost its economy 12 billion US dollars.292 Despite the high cost of the project, the government was hoping that GAP would remedy the economic and social imbalance between eastern and western Turkey. However, it was not just the nancial costs of the project that Turkey has had to cope with, but also the strong criticism from its neighbours Syria and Iraq, and the PKKs attacks on public investments in the region (which the organization claimed were further deceptions by Turkey perpetrated on its Kurdish population). To give an illustration of terrorist opposition to GAP-funded work in the southeast, in 1993, a total of 477 public works vehicles and 408 private works vehicles were destroyed, while 439 public service buildings and factories and as many as 1,012 private houses and economic investments and factories were destroyed.293 Although there are no data available about the actual cost of these economic losses, it is not unreasonable to suggest that the PKK severely

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damaged an already depressed regional economy. Turkey had to invest more in order to prevent its economic investments from becoming terrorist targets and to simply maintain its level of public investment in the region and thus prevent issues such as housing, unemployment, education, health and so on from becoming breeding grounds for further terrorism. Guneri Civaoglu, the editor-in-chief for the Turkish daily newspaper Sabah, summarized the nature of Turkeys effort to overcome the economic backwardness of southeastern Anatolia and its effect on the people, following the opening ceremony of the GAP: On the way from the city of Urfa to the Ataturk Dam with two journalist colleagues Yalcin Dogan and Yavuz Donat (both columnists for Milliyet), our young Marxist guide from the region was saying Turkey is an occupant here and you are a bourgeoisie. But the same boy, as the journalists passed through the grassy plain of Harran said: This is my familys land. The waters of the Ataturk Dam will reach here. Our land will be valued hundreds of times more than it is now. I will be so rich and I will buy a summerhouse in Bodrum and houses in Istanbul.294 The surprised journalists looked at each other and said: Where did the young boys Marxist speech and Kurdish nationalism disappear? All the way along the journey he was talking about them and how fascinating was the change in the boys mind, getting rich in the grassy plain of Harran and buying a house in Istanbul and Bodrum.295 It is generally accepted that in any instance of social turmoil, economic and social factors will either contribute to terrorism or prevent it, depending on the how far the public is satised by developments and the governments awareness of the public need. Guneri Civaoglu quite rightly stated that the solutions to separatist terrorism such as that of the PKK, are: better standards of living, better public service and more effective democracy.296 Turkey celebrated the opening of the GAP irrigation tunnels on 10 April 1995, and the following day nearly all the papers were discussing how much the project would contribute to the national economy and how effectively terrorist incidents would be prevented. The consensus was that rich and economically satised people of the eastern Turkey would head for the sunny beaches of Bodrum, Marmaris, and the business centres of Turkey rather than become recruits of the PKK. It was clearly hoped that effective government policies to curb the social and economic problems would undermine the claims and propaganda of the PKK. Among Turkish government policies for combating terrorism, the adoption of various security measures were the most contentious. Critics of these policies have mainly been from two camps. The rst group, such as Barkey and Fuller,297 Winrow and Kirisci,298 and Gunter299 have argued that the Turkish government perceived the matter as simply a security issue.

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The second group of critics, such as Criss,300 Dilmac,301 and Bal and Aytac,302 argue that although it was necessary to have some degree of security measures, their implementation had to be considered very carefully in order to avoid public dissatisfaction and abuse of civil liberties. They argue however, that as in any other democratic country where public life and order are threatened by terrorists, it was inevitable that the government would take security measures that would impact on civil liberties. As noted earlier, terrorism does not require many militants or large-scale public support to cause disruption to democratic societies. This was witnessed on August 15, 1998, when 28 civilians in Omagh Northern Ireland were killed by the Real IRA, whose total membership was thought to be no more than one hundred. As many expected, new security measures were carefully introduced by both the Irish and British governments. The lesson that may be drawn from these past experiences is that it is essential that such security measures should not be counter-productive; the terrorists must not benet from them. In other words, the level of security measures in terms of their effects on individual freedoms, the attitude of the security forces towards the people, and their accountability to relevant institutions within a democracy, all need to take account of local sensitivities to win local support. Once the terrorist incidents began increasing in the Turkish case, security measures were stepped up and the military took the decision-making role. Although the military has a valuable and important role to play in any country where security concerned, it needs to be accountable to elected governments. It is a fundamental principle of liberal democracy that, as with any other problem within the society, elected governments are accountable and responsible for any special measures or initiatives. In the case of the Turkish ght against PKK terrorism, while the government appeared to be winning the war against terrorism in the 1990s, they were in danger of losing public condence and causing an increase in nationalist consciousness within the Kurdish community in Turkey. In general, it is important that security operations take place within the rule of law, in order to avoid public complaints and dissatisfaction with the security forces. Otherwise there is a danger that a government will gradually lose its legitimacy and public support in ghting terrorism. Government policies on the prevention of terrorism must aim to minimize the negative effects on the general public. As noted in Ross and Millers303 typology, the severity of security measures can weaken public condence in the government and may lead to the legitimacy of the governments actions being undermined. As can be seen from the Turkish experience, a considerable number of the southeastern Anatolian people, were not happy with the way the government handled the situation. As Wilkinson304 notes, the peoples backing of the governments ght against terrorism is essential. The use of terrorist violence by the PKK to obtain a political goal did not necessarily reect the inability of the system to satisfy all parties in Turkey.

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Although Turkey adopted the most liberal constitution in its history in 1961, including the free discussion of socialism, some radical groups at that time resorted to violence, believing that it would be the most appropriate and feasible way to achieve their objectives. As a result, tough legislation was enacted to tackle the terrorism and nally the Constitution of 1982 was created partly as a response to the revolutionary terrorism of the 1970s. The PKK adopted the same method that radical left groups had done, instead of using the channels of democracy it used the weakness of Turkish democracy as propaganda material for its terrorist cause. There are issues mentioned in this section, which demanded carefully planned government policies, and provided the basis of propaganda for terrorist groups to manipulate and weaken the governments position. Drawing on the experiences of more than two decades of PKK terrorism, it can be said that still today the Turkish government needs to take further action to solve the southeast regions economic and social problems, particularly concerning housing, unemployment, health, and education. The severity of previous security measures clearly handed propaganda material to the terrorists, thus any considerations of future security measures should be selective within the rule of law and made to be accountable.