The Kurdish Worker’s Party (Partiya Karkeren Kurdistan or PKK) was founded in 1974. It is made up primarily of Turkish Kurds and its goal is the establishment of an independent Kurdish state in predominantly Kurdish southeast Turkey. The organization evolved out of the leftist student groups active in Turkey in the 1960s. It was in this period that Abdullah Ocalan, a Kurdish student at Ankara University, joined the Revolutionary Youth Federation (Dev-Genc) - an umbrella organization for such groups that was formed in 1970. Ocalan soon came to see the “liberation” of the Kurds as his priority rather than a broader-based leftist revolution throughout Turkey as a whole, and began to build an organization geared toward such a task.
By 1974, the PKK had began to take shape, and for the next four years Ocalan continued to establish the organization while studying theories of revolutionary activity. On Nov. 27, 1978, the PKK was secretly but formally set-up in the Diyarbakir district. It aimed to establish a separate Kurdish state via a communist revolution. However, the organization lacked money, arms, and members, so, in order to finance itself, reportedly became involved in robberies and drug trafficking.
Forced underground in the late 1970s, the PKK mainly confined itself to attacks on tribal chiefs in Urfa province until 1980. That year the group relocated to the Beka’a Valley, where it trained with Palestinian groups, later fighting alongside them during Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon. This period also saw the PKK publicize its cause among the large Kurdish expatriate community. By 1982 the group had secured initial financial backing from the Kurdish population in Libya, political backing from Libya, and training camps in Lebanon and Syria, and was geared towards expanding its activities significantly.
For the next two years, Ocalan consolidated his powerbase within the PKK (often with brutal methods) as well as the organization’s structure. This led to splits, with some members establishing their own Kurdish groups or joining other existing ones. In 1984, the PKK established the Kurdistan National Liberation Front (Eniya Rizagariya Netewa Kurdistan or ERNK). This lacked regional support and was short-lived, causing Ocalan to set up a wider-based umbrella organization designed to appeal to non-Marxist and religious Kurdish opinion. This organization, the Kurdistan Popular Liberation Army (Arteshen Rizgariya Gelli Kurdistan or ARGK) was set up in 1984, and the ensuing period saw the PKK intensify its efforts to establish a Kurdish state.
The PKK campaign that followed centered on the “temporary village guards” - a paramilitary force set up by Turkey to combat the PKK - and other Turkish security forces. PKK attacks were also carried out on Turkish diplomatic and commercial premises across Europe in 1993 and again in 1995. The group also targeted the Turkish tourist industry, attacking resorts and hotels and kidnapping foreign visitors in the early to mid 1990s. Since the late 1990s, the PKK campaign has become less violent, although Turkey continues its efforts against the group, having enjoyed some notable successes in recent years, including the capture of Ocalan in 1999. Since Ocalan’s capture, the PKK has increasingly favored political rather than military means in the pursuit of its ends. In April 2002, the group changed its name to the Kurdish Freedom and Democracy Congress (KADEK). The name change did not affect the PKK’s addition to the European Union’s list of terrorist groups the following month.
More recently, Turkey has warned NATO that new PKK bases are being built in northern Iran. The relocation, allegedly with Iranian permission, was made necessary when Turkish raids drove the PKK out of their bases in northern Iraq last year. Turkey has hinted at a PKK-al Qaeda connection and claimed that the new camps are being used to store weapons and train guerillas. That Iran, with a sizeable Kurdish population of its own, would allow such high levels of PKK activity within its borders in the post-Sept. 11 strategic climate is debatable, although not inconceivable - the organization has enjoyed Iranian support in the past. Previously, such claims by Turkey have often preceded cross-border incursions against PKK strongholds. However, whether the Turks are as willing to launch such raids into Iran as they were Iraq remains to be seen. Indeed, given reported Turkish allegations that at least three such camps, disguised as medical facilities, are located in the Iranian city of Umriye, such action appears harder to envisage than if the Kurds were encamped in a more remote rural area. Given this, it could be that any such rhetoric by Turkey is an attempt to portray its ongoing war against the PKK as part of the wider U.S.-led war against terrorism. Such a portrayal could have dire consequences for the Kurdish separatist group.
Sources:
“Kurdistan Worker’s Party (PKK),” The International Policy Institute for International Terrorism.
“No Change? The Former Separatists Have Changed Their Tune. The Government Hasn’t,” The Economist, April 18, 2002.
“Unwinnable,” The Economist, May 15, 1997.
Constant Brand, “EU Widens Terrorist Group List,” The Washington Post, May 3, 2002.
Ely Karmon, “Radical Islamic Political Groups in Turkey,” Middle East Review of International Affairs, December 1997.
Martin Walker, “UPI Hears…,” The Washington Times, April 9, 2002.
United States Department of State, “Patterns of Global Terrorism, 2000,” April 2001.
Various articles from BBC Online.
