Blood and Belief: The PKK and the Kurdish Fight for Independence

Abstract

Blood and Belief: The PKK and the Kurdish Fight for Independence Aliza Marcus New York and London: New York University Press, 2007 (xii + 351 pages, bibliography, index, illustrations, maps) $35 (cloth) Aliza Marcus's Blood and Belief: The PKK and the Kurdish Fight for Independence provides one of the most detailed historical accounts of the last three decades of the Kurdish struggle in Turkey and the leading Kurdish guerrilla organization, the Kurdistan Worker's Party (PKK), by pursuing the question of how a "small group of university drop outs and their friends" managed to launch the greatest military challenge to Republican Turkey (1). [...]during these years, the PKK underwent a series of important strategic and organizational changes. Despite these criticisms, Blood and Belief occupies a unique place in Kurdish studies; given the limited availability of sources and the practical difficulties of conducting research on an organization deemed illegal, Marcus manages to provide detailed and comprehensive data on the history of the PKK using personal accounts of former members.

Blood and Belief: The PKK and the Kurdish Fight for Independence Aliza Marcus New York and London: New York University Press, 2007 (xii + 351 pages, bibliography, index, illustrations, maps) $35 (cloth)

Aliza Marcus's Blood and Belief: The PKK and the Kurdish Fight for Independence provides one of the most detailed historical accounts of the last three decades of the Kurdish struggle in Turkey and the leading Kurdish guerrilla organization, the Kurdistan Worker's Party (PKK), by pursuing the question of how a "small group of university drop outs and their friends" managed to launch the greatest military challenge to Republican Turkey (1). The answer that former Reuters journalist Aliza Marcus provides is a story of all that was made possible- and impossible-under the guidance of the PKK's pragmatic and authoritarian guerrilla leader, Abdullah Ocalan.

Blood and Belief is organized chronologically and traces the rise and fall of the PKK's fortunes. Following a brief discussion of pre-PKK Kurdish politics and the general political situation in Turkey, Marcus describes how the PKK survived among rival Kurdish organizations in the 1970s and then, following the 1980 military coup that dissolved significant Kurdish and Turkish dissident organizations, how it became the first Kurdish group to launch guerrilla attacks upon the Turkish military. In explaining the rise of the organization, Marcus stresses the pragmatism of Abdullah Ocalan's political vision: Ocalan did not hesitate to seek partnerships with regional powers like Syria, even if they deployed political pressure on their own Kurdish populations. Marcus indicates that by initially accepting assistance from Palestinian revolutionary organizations operating in Lebanon and then, during the course of military rule in Turkey between 1980 and 1984, by attaining logistical support from Syria, the PKK had the chance to train its guerrillas abroad. Marcus attributes the PKK's staying power and, by the second half of the 1980s, its rapid growth in popularity within Kurdish society to Ocalan's ability to rescue his organization from the schisms that rival Kurdish organizations had suffered. Ocalan built an organizational culture that was intolerant of internal dissent, violently eliminated competing Kurdish organizations, and dismissed his own high-ranking guerrilla commanders who had the potential to challenge his leadership.

For more than a decade the PKK was the leading organization of a popular rebellion with thousands of armed militants and hundreds of thousands of civilian sympathizers. Yet Marcus argues that the same factors that strengthened the PKK's struggle against the Turkish state in the 1980s-its partnership with Syria and Ocalan's leadership cult-would ultimately precipitate its decline. By the middle of the 1990s, the PKK had fallen into international disrepute because of its violent actions against dissident members and rival Kurdish organizations. Furthermore, the PKK's dependence on support from Syria-a country that never wanted a Kurdish nationalist movement to be successful for fear that such a movement could mobilize its own Kurdish population into a fight for independence-ended up limiting the PKK's scope of operations. The final blow to the PKK came in the form of the Turkish state's deployment of new counter-insurgency techniques, including the forced migration of Kurdish villagers.

Marcus underscores the inability of Ocalan, the guerrilla leader who "had never fired a gun," to recognize the changing military and political requirements of the struggle during the second half of the 1990s, especially after the forced migration of thousands of Kurdish villagers who had provided critical logistical support to the guerrillas (240). Using personal stories of former key members of the PKK, Marcus notes that Ocalan continuously ignored information from his commanders about the new tactics of the Turkish military and the changing requirements of guerrilla warfare. Rather than realistically assessing the PKK's military capacities, Ocalan blamed his commanders for inadequately implementing his orders. Marcus argues that the specific organizational culture Ocalan had created and consolidated within the PKK combined with his obsession with his own leadership made it "hard for him to imagine it could be otherwise" (266).

Although it does not cover theoretical discussions on nationalism and identity politics, Blood and Belief does not neglect the role of state policies in radicalizing Kurdish politics in Turkey. By emphasizing the extensive use of state violence against Kurdish civilians, including politicians, Marcus shows how the Turkish state continuously denied a legitimate space to Kurdish politics, confining it into illegality, and ultimately, further radicalizing it.

Blood and Belief makes an important historiographical contribution to the fields of Kurdish and Middle Eastern studies by providing the history of a popular guerrilla organization using firsthand information provided by the guerrillas themselves. The narrative is based on in-depth interviews with former members of the PKK, many of them conducted in Europe after Ocalan's capture in 1999. Although the literature includes studies that approach the issue from a conflict resolution perspective such as Henri Barkey and Graham E. Fuller's Turkey's Kurdish Question (1998), it lacks detailed sociological and historical works on the PKK and the Kurdish politics. Along with Ali Kemal Ozcan's Turkey's Kurds: A Theoretical Analysis of the PKK and Abdullah Ocalan (2006), Blood and Belief can be considered the leading sociological and historical study on the PKK. While Ozcan's work relies on Ocalan's own writings and statements along with questionnaire-based field research, Marcus's account relies heavily on the personal accounts of former PKK members, whose contacts she had made during her years as a journalist reporting on the Kurdish conflict in Turkey. By combining the interviews with former PKK members and the existing scholarly literature with careful and clearly written analysis of the data collected, Blood and Belief also succeeds in addressing a wide audience, ranging from the general interested public to scholars of the field.

The overall story that Marcus provides emerges as one of rise and decline, and which pursues a leader-centric path of history writing. Although the specific organizational culture of the PKK may require a leader-centric historiography, the weakness of this approach emerges when Marcus questions the PKK's continued popularity after Ocalan's capture in 1999. Whereas Marcus explains the decline of the PKK by emphasizing Ocalan's inability to adapt to the changing requirements of the struggle, she fails to provide a convincing answer to the question of why the PKK, which was built on the leadership of Abdullah Ocalan, has managed to survive and maintain its popular support for almost a decade after its leader was arrested. In her conclusion, following a very brief discussion of the post-1999 politics of the PKK, the author explains the continued popular support for the PKK by indicating the organization's success in prolonging its struggle against the state and becoming the sole symbol of the Kurdish struggle in Turkey. Marcus does not, however, discuss the dynamics of the PKK's struggle in the 2000s while its leader lies imprisoned in an island with extremely limited access to the outside world.

Marcus lists certain political events that took place between 2000 and 2007 without reflecting on how they were understood and interpreted within the organization. The very detailed style of history writing that primarily relies on in-depth interviews with former PKK members disappears in the post-1999 historical account of the PKK. In fact, during these years, the PKK underwent a series of important strategic and organizational changes. Following his capture, Ocalan adopted a moderate position and suggested civil-society-based politics for his organization in his written defenses. In light of Ocalan's suggestions, the PKK changed its main strategy, stopped its attacks upon the Turkish military and subsequently, in 2002, shut down and was reborn as another Kurdish organization, KADEK (Congress for Freedom and Democracy in Kurdistan) that would pursue a peaceful resolution of the Kurdish question. Although Marcus presents initial reactions to Ocalan's strategic changes within the PKK, she neglects the course of the events that followed. One indicator of this neglect is the absence of two organizations in the political timeline Marcus provides at the end of the book (307): Missing from the book are KADEK, which was annulled in 2003, and its successor KONGRA-GEL (Kurdistan's People's Congress), which today functions as a platform of various Ocalanist groups and organizations including the PKK, which was reestablished in 2005.

Despite these criticisms, Blood and Belief occupies a unique place in Kurdish studies; given the limited availability of sources and the practical difficulties of conducting research on an organization deemed illegal, Marcus manages to provide detailed and comprehensive data on the history of the PKK using personal accounts of former members. In the final analysis, Blood and Belief is a valuable read for anyone who is interested in the politics of guerrilla movements and in modern Kurdish and Middle Eastern history.