The PKK: Coming Down from the Mountains

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

The PKK


Coming Down from the Mountains
By Paul White Zed Books LtdCopyright © 2015 Paul White
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-78360-038-0


Contents
Glossary of organizations, cities and towns,
Glossary of key figures,
Chronology of significant events,
Introduction,
1 'The time of revolution has started',
2 PKK origins and ideological formation,
3 Early years of struggle,
4 From ceasefire to all-out war,
5 The move towards peace,
6 Democratic confederalism and the PKK's feminist transformation,
7 Coming down from the mountains,
References,
Index,

CHAPTER 1
'The time of revolution has started'

'Events, however great or sudden', as John William Draper once reflected, 'are consequences of preparations long ago made' (Draper, 1875, vol. 2: 152). The emergence and evolution of the Partiya Karkerên Kurdistan provides sound verification of this astute observation. It was the product of nationalist and protonationalist uprisings and events hundreds of years earlier, which had divided Kurdistan into enclaves subservient to domination by a number of foreign states, as Figure 1 illustrates.
The Kurdish and Turkish left in Turkey almost universally regard Turkish Kurdistan as feudal. PKK Serok (Leader) Abdullah Öcalan is no exception, still maintaining:
the Kurds have not only struggled against repression by the dominant powers and for the recognition of their existence but also for the liberation of their society from the grip of feudalism. (Öcalan, 2011: 19)

As several scholars have observed, the actual picture in Turkish Kurdistan is more complex. In fact, all ancient Anatolian society stagnated under a dominant 'Asiatic' mode of production. Interaction with Europe increasingly evoked feudal forms there from the seventeenth century onwards. But Mustafa Kemal's Turkish nationalist takeover in 1923 ushered in an openly modernizing regime – albeit Turkey remained a weak, underdeveloped economy, subordinate to the economies of those great powers that had successfully industrialized centuries earlier. Nevertheless, Turkey was integrated into the world economy during the 1920s and experienced real growth, including industrialization from the 1950s onwards.
Yet Turkish Kurdistan stumbled backwards in comparison, relatively speaking. Peasants have remained mostly landless. Kurdish economic development problems were not resolved by the economic modernization of the 1980s onwards, and political 'democratization' was not achieved for the Kurds. The Kurds were effectively excluded from citizenship.
As Majeed R. Jafar (1976) masterfully explains, the Kurdish region in modern Turkey is not merely underdeveloped, like Turkey as a whole, but is an exceptionally underdeveloped sector within the latter – or, as he puts it, Turkish Kurdistan suffers from 'under-underdevelopment'. Zülküf Aydin (1986) shows that the region's peasants remained mostly landless sharecroppers. He verifies the general verdict of severe economic underdevelopment for the region. Aydin, along with Ronnie Margulies, Ergin Yildizoglu (1987) and Kemal H. Karpat (1973), explain how the mechanization of agriculture, beginning in the 1950s, forced vast numbers to migrate either to western Turkey or even abroad. The landless rural Kurds who remained were caught in a horrendous poverty trap, as not even a modest degree of stunted industrial development in Turkish Kurdistan soaked up the jobless and underemployed.
The continuing war in Turkish Kurdistan has massively impacted upon all who live there. Kurdish sociologists estimate that about 3,500 Kurdish villages have been destroyed, rendering some 4 million people homeless. Severe unemployment prevails even in Amed (Diyarbakir), the largest city. In Turkey as a whole the mean annual income is US$7,000, whereas in the four poorest neighbourhoods in Amed it is a mere US$500 (Tatort Kurdistan, 2013: 70; Cagaptay and Jeffrey, 2014: 10).
Ismail Besikçi's Dogu Anadolu'nun Düzeni: S