INSIDE THE PKK

Imprisoned kurdistan workers party leader Abdullah Ocalan has called on his fighters to observe a cease-fire until Turkey's elections next sunday. But the rebels of ocalan's kurdistan workers party (known by the acronym PKK) are having none of it. They have retaliated for his february arrest by launching a campaign of bombings.

On sunday three soldiers and a civilian were killed by a bomb in southern Turkey. Earlier bombs killed a 13-year-old girl in southeastern Turkey, 13 people at a shopping center in istanbul and four in a provincial capital. Europeans, pointing to Turkey's imperfect democracy and its human- rights abuses, have long romanticized the marxist pkk as a "liberation movement." In fact, as i learned firsthand when i visited a pkk camp in northern iraq, the pkk is one of the most violent and antidemocratic movements of the middle east.

I went to the pkk's zap camp, perched 6,500 feet high in the mountains on the border between Turkey and iraq, in late 1996.

1 was covering turkish parliamentarian fethullah erbas's contact with the rebels in his attempt to negotiate the release of eight turkish soldiers held by the pkk. A pious man from the pro- islamist welfare party, mr. Erbas had become a spokesman for turkish families whose sons were captured by the guerrillas during their military service. Through private channels, the pkk had promised to release the soldiers if mr. Erbas came to their camp.

He did so, accompanied by the soldiers' families, including two elderly mothers.

At the time, the pkk held considerable military strength in the semiautonomous enclave created after the gulf war. Outside baghdad's reach, northern iraq provided an excellent terrain for attacks on turkish soil. And the pkk attracted many young iraqi kurds, who saw it as offering a fresh nationalist vision that sharply contrasted with, the bitter tribal rivalries dividing up iraqi kurds. Today, however, the zap camp has been taken over by the turkish army. The pkk, largely stripped of its logistical support inside Turkey and northern iraq, has nowhere near the military might it did in the early nineties.

Zap was a training camp for 550 men and women who had learned to live and eventually die with the kalashnikov. "it's like a third arm. I don't even notice carrying it, " a young kurdish woman from istanbul told me. The pkk prides itself on being the world's only armed movement with female fighters in active combat.

Women's brigades lived in single-sex eaves, but fought in coed battalions. Most pkk members were turkish kurds, although the high number of syrians in leadership positions was striking-perhaps a result of the patronage damascus provided the rebels for over a decade. There were also a few turks, european-born kurds and germans.

The common language was turkish, since most young kurds of Turkey and europe speak little or no kurdish. In Turkey ethnic identities are not constructed along clearly defined racial or regional lines;

The nation's mixed society is a peculiar ottoman multicultural legacy. (perhaps this is why americans, unlike europeans, seem to have an affinity for Turkey.) Ocalan himself is an admirer of Turkey's army and a zealous supporter of its soccer teams. On the other hand, a quarter of the turkish parliament, including speaker hikmet cetin, is kurdish.

Life at the camp seemed a cross between the military and a rigid boarding school. There were training grounds, an infirmary and an open-air classroom for instruction in marxist-leninist theory.

Shortwave radios and a satellite telephone kept the residents up- to-date. Our very hospitable yet solemn hosts were 20 years old on average, but no one acted youthful. The pkk members loved to chat, but they scorned my questions about fear, death and family as reflecting "petit-bourgeois concerns." They preferred to talk in communist jargon: "the struggle," " working class resistance," "colonial exploitation" and "liberation." Perfect products of the group's indoctrination mechanism, the pkk members saw their comrades die by the dozen, lived under stalinist rule and remained unshaken in their conviction that they had chosen the path of "personal liberation." Members were discouraged even punished for- putting personal ties or romance before the struggle. "how meaningless to ask if i miss my parents," one dark-haired woman sneered at me. "i don't even think about it, and i am happy in the struggle. I don't have such feelings anymore." Later i learned that she had three siblings in the pkk, whose whereabouts she never knew.

The pkk rank and file learned this impersonal approach from their leader. Ocalan purged his close friends in the early years of the organization, and has run the pkk in a strictly authoritarian fashion. Many of his associates were made to confess "political deviations" oil collaboration with the turkish state" before they, were executed. Although an ideological foe of traditional kurdish feudalism, ocalan's despotic attitude is reminiscent of the kurdish tribal landlords the pkk set out to eradicate. Between the pkk's inception in 1979 and the mid-1980s, the organization primarily worked as a "hit man" in feuds between kurdish landlords.

That is, its targets were other kurds. The ruthlessness of its violence allowed the pkk to eliminate all other kurdish opposition movements and emerge as a local power.

The pkk didn't prove much kinder to its prisoners than to its own dissenters. The trip to the zap camp turned into a fiasco for mr.erbas, as the pkk commanders used the opportunity to parade their military power to the visiting media with soviet style speeches and ceremonies. After three days of telephone consultations with ocalan, they then decided to keep not only the soldiers, but also then, visiting families, finally releasing them a month and a half later.

Strengthened by ocalan's dramatic arrest, ankara is seeking ways to settle its kurdish issue in terms acceptable to the kurds, turks and the powerful turkish military. But as Turkey embarks upon a painful process of reconciliation, the current wave of bombings makes it harder to forgive and forget. And that may be precisely what the pkk has in mind.

(By Asli Aydintasbas, Wall Street Journal, 15 April 1999)

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