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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.