The Political Thought of Abdullah Öcalan: Kurdistan, Woman's Revolution and Democratic Confederalism

Introduction

On 20 March 1993, an illustrious group of Kurdish party leaders came together in Bar Elias, Lebanon for an unusual occasion. The Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) was declaring its first ever unilateral ceasefire.

The party had been founded in 1978 and saw no other way to wage the struggle for the rights of the Kurdish people than through an armed struggle, especially after the 1980 military coup in Turkey. Thus, the PKK took up arms in 1984, six years after it was founded and four years after the coup.

Eight and a half years later, the PKK’s Abdullah Öcalan surprised friend and foe alike with the announcement that they were ready for a political solution within the existing borders of Turkey. This was probably the first time that Öcalan demonstrated – in front of Turkish TV cameras – that he was able to thwart expectations and develop new ideas. Widely regarded as a national liberation movement, the PKK never wanted to be merely a dogmatic copy of some organisational model along the lines laid out by some classical socialist author. The PKK was a movement in search of solutions, and at the heart of this search was Abdullah Öcalan.

Many people – again, friend and foe – did not take Öcalan’s announcement seriously. They wanted to pigeonhole him as just another nationalist guerrilla leader and dismiss his offer as mere tactics. The ceasefire collapsed soon after the dubious death of Turgut Özal, the then President of Turkey, who had sent some positive signals for the resolution of the Kurdish question. But inside the Kurdish movement the search was on for new concepts.

Although the PKK was formed with a Marxist ideology and based on the Leninist party model, they had been very critical of the existing real-socialist models like the Soviet Union or Eastern Europe. This was especially the case in relation to the party model, bureaucracy, dictatorship of the proletariat and women’s freedom. By 1991, the Soviet Bloc had all but collapsed and the same fate awaited many movements that defined themselves as socialist.

Since that day in Bar Elias, there have been many revolutionary changes to the paradigm of the PKK, sprouting especially from the discussions in the people’s academy near Damascus. These discussions took place between Abdullah Öcalan and many revolutionaries and ordinary people alike, from 1993 to the day in autumn 1998 when he was forced out of Syria by the pressure applied not only by Turkey, but also by the USA. Based on his speeches and discussions in this school, philosophical and political analyses on different issues were published. Before Öcalan’s abduction and incarceration in 1999, several books based upon his speeches on sex and gender were also published, among them three volumes of Nasıl yaşamalı? (‘How to live?’), published from 1995 onwards. The title of a book of interviews with him, Erkeği öldürmek (‘To kill the male’), became a well-known saying among Kurds.

Öcalan coined several slogans, such as ‘A country can’t be free unless the women are free’, and later he restated this more strongly as ‘To me women’s freedom is more precious than the freedom of the homeland’, thereby redefining national liberation as first and foremost women’s freedom. In his prison writings, women’s freedom is taken up constantly as an essential part of his discussions of history, contemporary society and political activism. The practice he observed in real socialist countries and his own theoretical efforts and practice since the 1970s led Öcalan to the conclusion that the enslavement of women was the origin of all other forms of enslavement. This, he concludes, is not due to woman being biologically different to man, but because she was the founder and leader of the Neolithic matriarchal system.

On 2 February 1999 a Falcon Jet landed at Jomo Kenyatta International Airport in Nairobi, Kenya. On board was Abdullah Öcalan, coming from Greece and expecting a short stopover on his way to South Africa where the Mandela government had agreed to grant him refuge. It is yet to be understood why the then Greek government chose Nairobi for Öcalan, especially since it was only months after a terrorist attack on the American Embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam. The city was full of CIA and Mossad agents. Öcalan’s journey through three continents and between cities such as Damascus, Athens, Moscow and Rome that had lasted for weeks was about to come to an end.

On 14 February 1999 another Falcon jet arrived at Wilson Airport, Nairobi. The pilot indicated he had come to pick up a group of businessmen. However, this was the jet which would ‘render’ the PKK leader to Turkey the next day. With the collaboration of the Kenyan authorities Öcalan was kidnapped and handed over to the Turkish military in an act of international piracy involving the CIA, the MIT (Turkish secret service), and Mossad. It was also supported by the governments of Russia, Greece and other European countries.

Thus ended a story of intrigue, deceit and an odyssey – fit for the movie screens – of Abdullah Öcalan and the Kurdish people. At the same time this was – and this is frequently ignored – a starting point not only for the CIA programme of secret abductions and renditions two and a half years prior to 9/11, but also for a new string of interventions into the Middle East which have brought our world to the brink of World War III. Öcalan’s abduction and rendition remains a stain on the diplomatic history of all countries involved.

Earlier, in October 1998, Öcalan had come to Europe to seek support for a peaceful solution of the long lasting and bloody Turkish–Kurdish conflict. His hand held out for peace was refused. No country was willing to take the Kurdish leader, or to take the initiative in mediating negotiations between the conflicting parties. However, the die had already been cast and the Kurds were seen to be standing in the way of the geostrategic and economic interests of the leading powers in the Middle East. Deliberately, in order to gain political profit, these powers accepted the escalation of the war in Turkey. Abdullah Öcalan’s abduction was supposed to be only the beginning.

For almost eleven years, from 1999 to 2009, Abdullah Öcalan was the sole prisoner on the prison island Imrali in the Turkish Marmara Sea. Imrali prison is the unexposed Guantanamo of Europe. It is declared a military zone and guarded by 1,000 soldiers. Over the 18 years of Öcalan’s imprisonment Imrali has had an arbitrary and continuous aggravated isolation regime in place. Bringing in a few other prisoners in 2009 has not altered this – on the contrary: the number of persons subjected to an aggravated isolation regime has increased. This regime was only relaxed slightly while a political process was in place; when there is no such process the regime becomes one of total isolation with no news from prisoners, no lawyer-client consultations, family visits, letters or telephone calls for any prisoner in Imrali (Öcalan has always been denied the right to phone).

Since July 2011 Öcalan has not seen his lawyers, since October 2014 his custodian and family have been barred from the island, and since April 2015 the political delegation of HDP parliamentarians could not confer with him after Turkish President Erdoğan halted talks with Öcalan and the PKK. The same restrictions applied also to the island’s five other inmates. Since April 2014 we have had no independent information whatsoever from Imrali.

Although the anti-torture committee of the Council of Europe (CPT) has repeatedly sent a delegation to Imrali and demanded an end to his solitary confinement and the European Court of Human Rights delivered judgements regarding isolation, unfair trial and other issues, Turkey has not followed the recommendations or implemented the judgements. The Council of Europe’s Committee of Ministers, its Parliamentary Assembly and even the Court itself have turned a blind eye to Turkey’s human rights violations when it comes to Öcalan, and thus have become Turkey’s accomplices.

The current total isolation of the whole Imrali Island Prison – which is now spilling over to other prisons – is not only unprecedented in the history of Turkey and a grave violation of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR). It is also an indication of the conflict’s current and future escalation.

Öcalan inhabits a cell of 13 square meters. The construction of the cell and the airing grounds are such that he can see nothing but walls and sky – and even that only through a metal mesh. His books were written under extraordinary conditions. At times, he was isolated completely from the outside world, alone at the island prison for months. At others he was denied a pen and paper, or was not allowed to have more than one book in his possession at any one time. All 13 books that he penned in prison between 1999 and 2010 were handwritten. He never saw the manuscripts again, nor was he able to see them printed as books. He was also not able to discuss his thoughts with others as he put them down on paper. Despite such continuous harsh solitary confinement, the responsibility he felt for the resolution of the Kurdish issue led Öcalan to come up with profound solutions to many deep and complex issues and conflicts that face the Kurds – and ultimately everybody.

Öcalan has examined the issue of women’s freedom, the phenomena of power and state and how interrelated they all are. This has led him over and over again to return to an analysis of history. In doing so he stumbled over nation, state and nation-state and how detrimental these are for any movement; turning even the most revolutionary individuals into mere practitioners of capitalism. For Abdullah Öcalan it is not sufficient to produce critique and self-critique. He feels compelled to lay out what might constitute an alternative to the way of life that is being imposed on society. Therefore, he makes an effort to systematise the lives and struggles of all those oppressed and exploited throughout history, as well as to propose an alternative model and way of life outside of capitalist modernity and thus classical civilisation.

These texts become ever more important in the light of developments in the region as well as in Kurdistan. At a time when war on women has been heightened around the world, his analysis exposes how the state truly represents the apex of such masculinity. The state is the institutionalisation of the hegemonic and dominant male. In addition, and as a natural result of this, the revival of sectarian and nationalist conflict in many areas of the world and the consequences of an aggressive capitalism confronting the world, Öcalan’s proposals and an evident effort to implement them in Rojava (Syrian Kurdistan) and Bakur (Turkish Kurdistan) might be just the right remedy for the war-stricken region. He calls upon all people to build and defend free life and