This is an very informative article about the Abdullah Ocalan, the PKK and its supposed libertarian/feminist turn
1. Roots of the PKK
2. People’s War
3. Creating the ’new man’
4. Serok Apo
5. A revolution of women
6. Democratic Civilization
7. Whatever happened to socialism?
8. Potent vagueness
The extent to which the PKK's feminism is dependent on Ocalan's ideas is shown repeatedly in interviews with Kurdish women.
For example Henife Husen, co-chair of the Movement for a Democratic Society (TEV-DEM), said: "With the supervision of President Apo [PKK Leader Abdullah Öcalan], Kurdistan's search for freedom came to Rojava, too. The women of Rojava accepted this from the beginning; they opened their homes, they gave up their children to this struggle."
And a women's militia commander said: “We don’t want the world to know us only as ‘the women fighting ISIS.’ And we also don’t want people to know us for our weapons. We want them to know us for our ideas. And our ideas are based on the philosophy of Abdullah Öcalan”.
For more on the PKK's internal regime in the 1980s this extract from Middle East Magazine, May 2000, is very interesting:
"The PKK, supposed to be monolithic, has a long history of dissidence and exclusions: the first fissures inside the central committee showed up with the second congress (1982) and were followed by the first assassinations (Cetin Gunger in 1984, Resul Altinak in 1985). But it was the third congress (1986), in a Bekaa camp, which really marked the beginning of an era of bloody repression comparable, in a way, to the era of the great purges and Stalinist trials of the Soviet Communist Party in 1937.
Arrested shortly before the congress, with Kesire Yildirim (Ocalan’s wife) and Duran Kalkan, Selahattin Celik spent three months in a cell where he had to write a report of self-criticism on his “mistakes” before appearing before a “court”. Relieved of his official position, he was sent to Europe. At one time he shared his cell with another member of the central committee, Halil Omer Can, who was severely tortured by his former comrades. Halil Omer Can nevertheless stayed with the PKK until the early 1990’s, when he became one of the three chiefs of the HPP (PKK secret service) in charge of... killing the dissident Mehmet Shener’s partisans regrouped in the “PKK-Refoundation”. In spite of his cooperation with Abdullah Ocalan, Terzi Djemal was finally arrested and executed in 1993.
“There were between 50 and 60 executions just after the 1986 congress”, claims Selahattin Celik. “In the end, there was no more room to bury them. Some of them were simple militants, Lebanese Kurds, accused of being “agents”, guilty of “not implementing orders”."
Anti_War
In last March 8 in the meeting in Amed in Turkey the letter of Ocalan is read loud to people. This was also debated parallel to what anti_war says in the above comment. But doesn't all this debate related to Ocalan and women's movement is very similar to discussion of veil and feminism? Does wearing a veil automatically makes a women enemy of her gender?
Alex De Jong provides a very useful account of the gradual transformation of Ocalan's and the PKK's ideology but in a direction which gives little confidence that a Kurdish based activist social movement might escape that ideology in any genuinely anti-capitalist direction - more trotskyist hope over understanding of material reality in the concluding paragraph.
This text is still worth a read but has been passed over in more recent discussion threads.
Yeah, only had a quick read of this (it's pretty long) but it seems really good.
I think I had an even shorter read and believe its longer than you suggest. Are there any other readers who found this disconcertingly long or short? Or medium?
[Angry leftist approaches]
Now wait a minute!
There are no links to obscure websites in this text that are explaining how democratically managed those deserted villages in Rojava, which are now probably PKK military bases!! It does not mention how the houses and lands of Arab peasants who "left" Efrin are "collectivized" and hence there are no classes but only a unified democratic nation either!!! There are no facts in this text! It must be a jewish-Marxist conspiracy to divert real militants away from sacrificing themselves to the cause of democratic-bookchinism and muddle their thoughts with some sort of abstract cosmopolitan idea like class struggle.
That made me so mad that I'm gonna write a petition now, and ask some more american bombs to tear all those sunni-arab bodies apart and villages demolished. Viva la eternal storm of steel!
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Seriously though I could only read the last half and it looks really good. Does anybody know who wrote this? Is it published somewhere else originally?
Well I just read it. It also looks good to me. I think it is possibly one of the best peaces that can be written by someone who does not know the languages he try to speak about.
Its historical discussion of emergence of pkk is good (though very basic and short I guess)
There are contradictory statements in People's war section.
vs.
Well does this mean they subordinated aghas (who accepted them) to the party (so working class)? Or other way around they become very nationalistic and privildged the aghas who supported them? I think this could be written more clear.
Handan Çağlayan is a good source to read about Kurdish women's movement. (but in a conventional democratic-citizenship paradigm, it is well research though)
But there are some sentences I just did not see references or anything:
And some have references but when I check them I did not think they really mean what the writer imply (though it might be open to debate) ex: "Samuel Huntington"
However it is a good trajectory of evolution of some of the ideas of Ocalan. Though I think it also lefts some interesting other stuff. Maybe it is now time for us to read Ocalan or pkk and not just people's narratives of pkk to get better insight.
Hmm, have we finally reached that moment? any suggestions?
plasmatelly
I'm sure the PKK have a pamphlet in the works, adequately called Fighting for the Nation: Libertarian Statism and the people's struggle.
Why not read that if they do? But apart from jokes the narrative and the focus of the above article is obvious, right? The turn in ideology of Ocalan is from materialist to idealist. A classic,very simple story. If we read more first hand accounts we can check it. Moreover article mentions twice the periods of dissolution correctly, but this reminds us to ask how they become so powerful again. The prediction was they will collapse or get smaller in books like Turkey's Kurds (quoted in the article) however they have an unprecedented civil popularity nowadays. Rojava would certainly boost it much more. So a solid analysis of this is needed.
Edited for readability
mikail firtinaci
"Alex de Jong is editor of Grenzeloos, the journal of the Dutch section of the Fourth International."
article was published here originally:
http://www.europe-solidaire.org/spip.php?article34511
The writer of this piece just made an interview on kurdish movement, see:
http://libcom.org/forums/middle-east/kurdish-autonomy-between-dream-reality-04062015
another (new) one by the same author The New-Old PKK