Abdullah Ocalan: The New Saladin?

[kurd-l at burn.ucsd.edu]

From: Arm The Spirit <ats at etext.org>

Kurdish Leader Is Key Player

Abdullah Ocalan heads guerrillas in Turkey, whose power is spreading

Analysis

By Franz Schurmann
Pacific News Service/San Francisco Examiner
September 5, 1996

His name is barely mentioned in officials accounts of why the United States
launched cruise missile attacks on Saddam Hussein's military bases. But
Abdullah Ocalan is creating waves that are destabilizing the Middle East
far more than the Iraqi dictator.

Ocalan is the leader of the Maoist-inspired [sic] Kurdistan Workers Party -
called the PKK - which has waged a decade-long guerrilla war in Turkey and
is now viewed by many observers as the rising power in Kurdish-dominated
northern Iraq.

Roughly 20 million Kurds inhabit the region stretching from eastern Turkey
through northern Iraq into Iran, Syria, and the Caucasus. Rarely throughout
their 3000-years history have they been able to form a state of their own.
Yet they have fiercely resisted every attempt to destroy or assimilate
them.

At the same time, Kurds have long believed that they are destined for
greatness. The greatest Kurd in history - Saladin - destroyed the crusader
states in the Holy Land, unified Arabs, Turks, and Kurds, and paved the way
for the Ottoman Empire's 500-year rule.

Could Ocalan become a modern-day Saladin? Expectations are rising rapidly
in the region even as popular disdain deepens for the two quarreling
Kurdish leaders - Masoud Barzani and Jalal Talabani - on whom the Clinton
administration has pinned its hopes for stabilizing Kurdistan.

A year ago, the United States sponsored a summit between Barzani and Talabani
in Dublin, but it flopped. A second summit, scheduled for last month,
never got off the ground. In fact, U.S. policy was doomed from the start
because it assumed that far too much power was in the hands of these two
factions, while underestimating that of the PKK.

Attacks by PKK

Today Ocalan holds together the biggest guerrilla insurgency in the world.
His influence reaches far beyond Turkey.

Last month the PKK demolished 24 of Barzani's military outpost in northern
Iraq. Seeing his power seep away, Barzani turned to the only other leader
able to help him: Saddam Hussein. Hussein obliged by attacking Talabani's
stronghold, Irbil, a move that led to this week's U.S. retaliatory missile
attacks.

Even the Iranian mullahs who preached an Islamic message similar to Mao's
early on in their revolution are now fearful that Ocalan's message could
spill over into Iran.

At the core of Ocalan's appeal is the fact that he alone among Kurdish
leaders understands that a social revolution is going on in Kurdish
society everywhere. 

Kurds feel oppressed not only by their alien rulers, but also
by one of the most rigid feudal social systems still in existence. The
message of Maoism has always been to empower the poor and fight their
oppressors. Like Mao, the PKK teaches it followers gender equality and
willingness to sacrifice one's life for the cause.

Communism with religion

Ocalan also accepts the devout religious beliefs of the Kurds, in contrast
to classic Marxist movements that have denounced religion as an opiate of
the people.

Muslims preach that their common faith crosses all boundaries of
nationality, race, and class. The Maoist's agree on the first two but not
the third. Marxist ideas of class struggle have given them an organized
militancy that the Islamic movements sweeping the Middle East generally
lack.

If these two forces - Islam and Maoist ideology - should coalesce, the
region is likely to see a new transnational empire arising that no amount
of high-tech weaponry from the West can thwart, and Ocalan will go down in
the history books as the Saladin of the late 20th century.



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