She is five foot nothing in her trainers with hair pulled into a ponytail that reaches the small of her back and a multicoloured thread round one slim wrist. She is wearing green combat fatigues with a radio antenna sticking out from one pocket of her well-worn, olive-drab jacket. She has an AK47 over one shoulder and she is talking about killing men.
‘I first saw action in 1992 when I was 13,’ she says. ‘There was a long battle up in the mountains on the Badinan line. It went on for weeks, but eventually we won. I threw grenades and shot with my Kalashnikov. When the enemy were attacking we killed many of them. We shot them in the head, in the lungs, in their abdomen and legs. Mostly we shot them in the head. I killed a man from about 50 metres away. I shot him in the head. I don’t remember his face.’
We are sitting on the grass under a tree on a ridge in the Qandil mountains high on the triple border between Iraq, Iran and Turkey. It is the last week of April and the sky is a clear blue, though the clouds building to the south mean heavy rain soon. The clouds are moving fast and cast swift shadows on the steep wooded slopes of the rocky hills. In the valleys, a long way beneath us, small villages sit improbably under precipices.
A few metres from where we are sitting a dozen or so young women are playing volleyball on a patch of earth cleared among the trees. They are still wearing their uniforms, though they have leant their guns against tree trunks or fallen logs. Another 20 young women are sitting, smoking cigarettes of green local tobacco rolled with paper and making tea over small open fires. They are listening to shortwave radios, laughing and talking. There is a group of young men a few yards away, but they are keeping to themselves around their own fire. They, too, are in high spirits. Some of them are preparing to play football and are setting up goalposts using broken branches as posts and the lengths of the fabric they wind round their waists as cummberbunds as crossbars. But for the small stacks of weapons everywhere, the smell of unwashed bodies and the hard, pinched faces of the older women, the scene is almost bucolic.
‘I have been in many battles since then,’ Comrade Gulbar is saying, one hand on her gun and the other fiddling with the scrunchy in her hair. She is slightly irritated by my questions, though too polite to say anything, and is frowning. ‘I have not kept track of the men I have killed. There are many of them. I did not see them all die. Often in battles it is very dark and very confused. I have been wounded three times. In the arm and the leg.’
Comrade Gulbar is a military commander, in charge of a unit of 30 young men and women of the Partiya Karkeren Kurdistan (the Kurdish Workers Party or PKK). Her struggle, she tells me, is twofold. She is fighting for the Kurdish people and for the liberation of women. She says that the two issues are inextricably connected.
To those who have suffered most from their activities, the PKK is a brutal, criminal terrorist organisation given to indiscriminate attacks on civilians and motivated by a fanaticism paralleled only by Osama bin Laden’s Islamic militants. To many Kurds, either in the diaspora or in the heartland Kurdish areas of southeastern Turkey, western Iran, northern Iraq and eastern Syria, the PKK are freedom fighters, battling for a homeland, or at least better rights, for a people without a nation. Up to half the PKK are women and, throughout the group’s 30-year history, the ‘struggle for women’s freedom’ as Comrade Gulbar terms it, has been an integral part of its campaign.
The PKK’s ideology is, to coin a phrase, very last century. Were it not for its propensity for extreme violence, self-immolation, bombing towns and kidnapping journalists and tourists, there would be something quaint about its talk of dialectic materialism, the struggle against imperialism, false consciousness, the alienated capitalist self and so on. When you talk about ‘gender issues’ with PKK members (they don’t have cadres, I am told, but volunteers), you are suddenly returned to agitprop feminist debate, circa 1980.
Take the issue of marriage. PKK volunteers are not allowed to marry because truly free gender relations are impossible given the oppression inherent in the capitalist world system that is currently dominant. In that system, individuals and their emotions are reduced to commodities and so marriage, a bourgeois concept based on ownership, can only aid the continued dominance of patriarchal (and imperialist) power. As no truly power-free gender relations are possible (and here the revolutionary Marxism shades into French existentialism) until capitalism is replaced by a system which allows truly free relations between individuals, no marriage between PKK volunteers is permissible. Instead, all must strive for the revolution. As an added incentive, sex is banned, too, also until the revolution. It is ‘not included in the programme plans of the party’.
Such sophomoric Leftism is understandable given the origins of the movement. The PKK was formed in 1974 by Abdullah Ocalan, a charismatic Kurdish political activist from Turkey. They were based in Syria through the 80s, but moved to their current bases in the mountains of northern Iraq in the chaos following the first Gulf War of 1991. With the local Kurdish parties weakened by the war on Saddam Hussein and by internecine rivalry, the PKK was able to hack out a substantial and effectively self-ruled feifdom. The early and mid-90s saw horrific violence in southeastern Turkey as the Turkish state attempted to force the PKK out of its enclave and to crush dissent among its own restive Kurdish minority. Both sides committed terrible atrocities, burning villages and killing civilians.
Around 40 000 people died and the Turkish government’s brutality was condemned by a series of international human rights organisations. The PKK took to suicide operations and explosions in Turkish cities and swiftly earned themselves a place on British and American lists of banned terrorist organisations.
A series of military operations during the 90s involving thousands of Turkish troops backed by Kurdish groups and auxiliaries failed to dislodge the group from its mountain stronghold. Once again, casualties on both sides were heavy. In all, Ankara says, more than 20 000 PKK fighters have been killed and several thousand Turkish soldiers and security militia men.
In 1999, there was something of a breakthrough. Abdullah Ocalan was captured in Kenya and, from his Turkish prison cell, issued a directive saying that the military strategy pursued by the PKK hitherto had been misguided. The PKK renounced violence, except in self-defence. Last year, it renamed itself Kadek, the Kurdish Freedom and Democracy Congress, and the hammer and sickle was dropped from its flag, though the red, yellow and green motif featuring a five-pointed star remains. Kadek now says it wants to pursue Kurdish and women’s rights through democratic means. Up in its enclave, it exacts customs duties and taxes on the local people, builds roads and the occasional clinic, runs a standing army of about 10,000 fighters, directs a sophisticated international network of activists and fundraisers (and extortionists) and overall acts like a mini-state.
‘We are not terrorists. We are a liberated people in a liberated land,’ said Comrade Gulbar. Many disagree. The PKK is still banned almost all over the world. Given that the Americans are committed to a ‘war on terror’ and are now in power in Baghdad this is an important point that seems to have escaped the notice of most PKK cadres.
I had first tried to see the PKK in 1991. The group was in the process of launching its guerrilla war against the Turkish security forces and meeting them had proved too difficult and too dangerous. Twelve years later, back in Kurdistan to cover the US-led war on Baghdad, things were easier. As Kadek, the group is keener on media exposure. We were told the days of kidnapping journalists are long gone. Contacts in the northeastern Iraqi city of Sulaimania carried our request up to the mountains and came back with an invitation.
We left Sulaimania as it got light and drove west. It was Easter Sunday. By mid-morning we had hired a local taxi, passed through the final government checkpoint and were on a dirt road heading up a narrow gorge. It opened on to a high wooded plateau, surrounded by huge peaks, with the colours of the trees and fields all muted by a swollen, lowering, overcast sky. On a spur at one side of the plateau was a small base built of wood, mud and breeze blocks with small turrets, a defensive wall, an aggressive mongrel, and several flags displaying the PKK star flapping in the wind. We were stopped there and waited.
War, as any soldier will tell you, involves a lot of waiting. Guerrillas do more waiting than most. They wait for dark, for supplies, for orders, for the enemy, for the right time to attack, for the political situation to change, for someone to convene a committee and make a decision. The PKK has been waiting for a long time and are very good at it. Western journalists are not so good at it. So after two days we were somewhat relieved when word came that a senior commander was ready to see us.
In fact, two senior commanders were ready to see us. We had hoped to meet Osman Ocalan, chairman Abdullah’s brother, but he was unavailable. Instead we were asked to join Murad Karailluh, aka Comrade Jamal, and Haleeja Actac, aka Comrade Chedam, for dinner.
Karailluh turned out to be a tubby, moustachioed and avuncular 46-year-old man who has spent 25 years fighting for the PKK. Actac was a slim and intense 31-year-old woman who, in just 10 years in the movement, has risen to be one of the group’s top military commanders. Both Karailluh and Actac are members of the PKK high command. I was mildly amused to see that, whereas the lowly grunts with whom we had spent the previous two days ate nothing more than greasy fried potatoes, rice and the occasional egg, we were served chicken, fresh bread and Coca-Cola.
Karailluh was jolly enough, however. He sat and belched loudly on to the back of his hand and spoke for long periods expecting everyone to listen. He was one of the original band of activists who had helped found the PKK with ‘Apo’, as Abdullah Ocalan is universally known, in the mid-70s. In 1980, he said, the Turkish government had destroyed his home and tortured and killed his father, a sheep farmer, to punish him for his militant activities. Actac grew up in Istanbul. She had become involved with the PKK in 1994 as a geography student at the university and was imprisoned for two years as a result. On her release she had travelled to Europe and then, after four years in Greece, made her way to the Qandil mountains.
As we eat I ask her why she joined the PKK. She answers in rapid Turkish. ‘I became involved primarily for the feminist struggle, secondly because my friends were [involved], thirdly because when I saw that Kurdish people were persecuted in my own country I felt I had to do something.’
She explains that in almost all of the Middle East women are repressed. Their basic human rights are denied and they are treated as the property of their husbands. To fight the repression of women in the Middle East and in the world more generally, Actac says, is a significant part of the PKK’s mission. ‘Our revolutionary struggle means that here men and women are equal, standing shoulder to shoulder,’ she says. ‘Only in our party is this the case and so we are an example of how men and women should work and live together. Our role is to inspire and mobilise. When women see us they will understand that there is an alternative to the way they are forced to live their lives.’
Until a decade or so ago it was the Soviet Union that performed this role, Actac says, until the leadership’s ‘deviation into dogmatism’ caused the Communist regime to collapse. Actac is adamant. ‘The failure of the USSR is one of the main reasons for the continuing reactionary ignorance among the masses, both the dominant men and the unconscious women,’ she says. ‘We have to be the standard bearers of liberation now.’
I ask whether there is anything she misses from her former life. ‘It’s a hard life up here in the mountains,’ I say. ‘Back in Istanbul there are people out clubbing, dancing with boyfriends, drinking, having fun. Don’t you miss all of that?’
I also want to know if Actac and Khairallah are, as they appear to be from their body language, an item. This must be a problem for an organisation that bans sex between its members, but has 10,000 men and women living together in close confines up mountains with very little in the way of diversion. The attempt to eradicate any mention or practice of sex merely makes everyone obsess about it. I want to know if my suspicions about Actac and Khairallah are correct partly because it would be a flagrant, if magnificent, breach of party rules by the senior command and partly because it would be an amusing confirmation that they are both human, flawed and, despite the potential for dialectic pillow talk, occasionally have fun.
I am wondering about Marxist sex — thesis, antithesis, synthesis — when Actac answers my question. Her words rattle out like gravel hitting ceramic. ‘I had a boyfriend and I drank and smoked and danced, but I found all those things trivial,’ she says. ‘They are not things that are comparable to what I am now seeking. They are small things. I am engaged on important things.
I cannot be happy when I see a nation persecuted. I cannot stand by. I have to struggle.’
I ask Actac brightly if she has any questions for me. ‘Yes’ she says. ‘Why are you asking me social questions and asking my [male] comrade political questions?’ I move on to books. Other PKK cadres have cited Simone de Beauvoir as a favourite author. Who would be hers? ‘Lenin,’ she says.
Spending time with the PKK is disorientating. It is impossible to get a firm grasp on what is going on. One moment they resemble a joint girl guides/boy scouts summer camp led by someone with a worrying interest in rifle-shooting, the next they are back to talking, seriously, of martyrs, self-immolation, death and the struggle. The combination is disconcerting. Even moments of levity — a girls’ game which involves hurling a ball at each other and screaming with high-pitched giggles if hit, a surreptitious cigarette out of the commander’s sight, a fit of bashfulness when faced by a Western photographer — are tainted by an underlying darkness.
Who are these teenage cadres? Why do they make their way to the mountains in the knowledge that to go back to their homes will be, given the attention of the security services in their own countries, very hard? Few are in contact with their families. All profess a willingness to kill and die for the cause. All have made huge sacrifices, though they may not know it yet. All appear to be having tremendous fun.
With some, questions are deflected with the language of the manifestoes. Comrade Janda, from Qamishli in eastern Syria says she joined four years ago, at the age of 12, ‘because [her] nation is under persecution and torture’. ‘It is useless to have lessons when you are in an occupied country,’ she says, adding that her family, who have a long history of left-wing political involvement, suffered ‘indirect’ repression. ‘The regime were putting obstacles in front of the Kurdish people. My family did not prevent me coming. It is better to be here than anywhere else.’
Seventeen-year-old Comrade Rosa, a Russian Kurd, born in Moscow and, like comrade Janda, raised in a ‘revolutionary family’ tells me how she was ‘very influenced by the ideology of the manifesto of Abdullah Ocalan. Firstly, the liberation of humanity, secondly the liberation of women.’ She clenches a fist.
Others don’t bother with the ideology. Comrade Shaheen (20) left his home in northeastern Iraq in 1998. His father is a tailor and had taken him out of school to help him earn money for his family. Shaheen says he joined the PKK because he ‘was influenced by the kind of life of my comrades here, living in the mountains, hiking and marching and training for a specific aim.’
Then there is the 18-year-old, also born into a family with a history of political activism though this time in Germany, who joined the PKK to be close to his Kurdish roots. There’s the 29-year-old Swiss man, entirely devoid of Kurdish blood, who says he is an ‘internationalist and a humanist’. And there is the Kurdish girl from Holland, who speaks English, Dutch and Kurdish with equal facility, who left her college in Amsterdam to join. ‘You can go anywhere and life will be the same, but here you have 5,000 women fighting for freedom, democracy and human rights,’ she says. ‘We will stay here until the final victory.’
So, after spending several days talking to several dozen recruits, what have I understood? Very little, to be honest. The recruits are young, many are from families with a history of involvement in left-wing politics, most are Kurdish, some feel strongly nationalistic, some are politically inspired, some are drawn by the prospect of adventure, and some by both. Given the minimal life opportunities available in your average provincial town in the Kurdish dominated regions of the Middle East, particularly for women, one can see the attraction of life as a guerrilla. Or maybe I am just too jaded and simply cannot credit their unabashed, unalloyed idealism, their genuine commitment to a cause.
After all, currently life isn’t so bad in the hills. No one has had to fight for nearly three years. There are no knocks on the door from the government’s heavies in the middle of the night. The daily routine involves a dawn reveille, physical exercise for an hour, military lessons for the rest of the morning and then political lessons in the afternoon, all interspersed with lots of volleyball and soccer and hiking. The prohibition on sex between cadres must be very difficult to enforce, as a number of cadres hint to me. There are books to read and films to see. On a shelf in one bunker I found the following: Anna Karenina, The Brothers Karamazov, six of Ocalan’s works all with titles like We Will Win Freedom, Ten Days with Commander Marcos and the Zapatistas by a Turkish journalist, An Introduction to the History of Thought and Gibbon’s The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. There are also communal video screenings of carefully selected ‘revolutionary works’. The most popular is Braveheart.
On the plateau where we spent two days waiting, is a small, white-washed concrete building with a spire. It looks like a mosque or a shrine and, for those who have made the leap of faith, performs a similar function. It is the PKK’s ‘martyrs memorial’. In its well-kept garden are rows of graves, each with a name, age and date of death inscribed on it. Inside the memorial are large posters of Abdullah Ocalan, a huge PKK flag and, in carefully constructed wooden display cases, rows of photographs of young faces. The pictures cover one wall and half of another. The rest of that wall is covered by the flags and the posters. There are no pictures on the other two walls. But they are not empty. There are a series of wooden display frames waiting to be filled with the faces of the dead. And outside, there is room for many more graves.
The day I stood at the memorial, Jay Garner, the retired general appointed by Washington to govern Iraq, arrived in Baghdad. The implications of this do not appear to have sunk in up in the Qandil mountains. Comrade Jamal was very sanguine about the prospects for Kadek. Capitalism was entering its final stage, he told me. All other forms of government were being swept aside. The autocracy in Iraq had gone. The monarchy in Saudi Arabia was next. Then would come the oligarchy of Turkey. The maps of the Middle East were being withdrawn and the old borders of the colonial era dissolving. This was a tremendous opportunity for the party, he said. Victory was drawing close.
There is another reading of the current situation of the PKK. The PKK is a terrorist organisation. It exists on a piece of land which is now directly governed by America. America is in the middle of a war on terror. Turkey and the other local Kurdish groups are, despite occasional differences, strategic allies. In short, it is only a matter of time before the US, with willing auxiliaries, moves to destroy the PKK, Kadek, its mountain enclave and comrades Gulbar, Rosa, Chedam and everyone else.
Outside the martyrs memorial is a detachment of new recruits, two thirds male, one third female, but commanded by a woman. They have just arrived in Kadek territory and are taken directly to the martyr’s memorial. They walk around the graves and the pictures with solemn faces and then stand in ranks as a salute is fired. Then they sit on benches in the memorial gardens, boys on one bench, girls on another, and drink orange squash, smoke, play with flowers and talk and laugh. Then they form ranks and march away into the hills. – Guardian Unlimited Â