Kurdish Leader Spreads Maoism

[George Gundrey]

From: George Gundrey <ggundrey at igc.apc.org>

The following is from the Pacific News Service.  

Pacific News Service -- a 25 year old network of writers, scholars, 
freelance journalists and teenagers -- explores the diverse terrain of 
private cultures emerging worldwide and their impacts on the broader 
civil realm. Each day PNS transmits a 600-1000 word article to over 100 
news media outlets.  

For more articles, see our Web site at http://www.pacificnews.org/jinn/. 
For information about subscribing, contact PNS at 415-243-4364 or at
<pacificnews at pacificnews.org>. This article may be reposted or e-mailed,
but not re-printed without permission. 

COPYRIGHT PACIFIC NEWS SERVICE
450 Mission Street,  Room 204
San Francisco, CA 94105
415-243-4364


COMMENTARY-825 WORDS

MORE DESTABILIZING THAN SADDAM HUSSEIN -- TURKEY'S KURDISH LEADER SPREADS 
MAOIST INSURGENCY

EDITOR'S NOTE: A Saladin-type unifier is emerging in the Kurdish Mideast 
who could prove far more destabilizing than Iraqi dictator Saddam 
Hussein. Although unknown to Americans, Ocalan is the rising force in 
northern Iraq and his influence is even frightening Iran's mullahs. PNS 
editor Franz Schurmann, a professor emeritus of history and sociology at 
the University of California, Berkeley, has lived and studied in the 
Middle East and reads widely in the Arab press.

BY FRANZ SCHURMANN, PACIFIC NEWS SERVICE

His name is barely mentioned in official accounts of why the U.S. 
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 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. Ocalan (pronounced Oj-hah-lan) just may 
be the transnational figure the region has been looking for -- and 
fearing -- for decades.

Roughly 20 million Kurds inhabit the region stretching from eastern 
Turkey through northern Iraq into Iran, Syria and the Caucasus. Rarely 
throughout their three-thousand year history as a nation 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 as a people. Their national pride runs deep but so also does 
their sense of transnational mission. 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. Yet it is these two 
factional leaders on whom the Clinton administration has pinned its hopes 
for stabilizing Kurdistan and containing Saddam Hussein through the 
no-fly zone.

A year ago the U.S. sponsored a summit between the two big Kurdish 
leaders in Dublin which flopped. A second summit, scheduled for last 
month, never got off the ground because neither factional leader would 
attend. In fact, U.S. policy was doomed from the start because it assumed 
far too much power in the hands of these two factions while 
underestimating that of the PKK.

Today Ocalan holds together the biggest guerrilla insurgency in the world 
today. Every day the Turkish press carries reports of police or military 
posts attacked by PKK units. Two months ago a young PKK woman concealing 
a bomb in her dress walked into a solemn military observance and blew up 
30 soldiers along with herself. The Turkish political prisoners who 
recently staged mass hunger strikes were PKK members.

But Ocalan's influence reaches far beyond Turkey. Last month, the PKK 
demolished 24 of Barzani's military outposts in northern Iraq. Seeing his 
power seep away, Barzani turned to the only other leader able to help him 
-- Saddam Hussein. Saddam obliged by attacking Talabani's stronghold 
Arbil, prompting 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. Indeed, the Iranian opposition movement, 
Mujahideen-i-Khalq, "Martyrs of the People," sounds much like the PKK and 
has its base in northern Iraq.

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 not only oppressed 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 to its adherents living 
with the people, gender equality, a willingness to sacrifice one's life 
for the cause of the people.

In addition to a Maoist tilt to the poor, Ocalan also accepts the devout 
religious beliefs of the Kurds, in contrast to classic Marxist movements 
which have denounced religion as an opiate of the people. "Religion has 
always existed and it always will," he has said, describing it as a 
source of morality vital for movements like the PKK. He attributes the 
collapse of socialism to its failure to deal with the question of 
religion.

The PKK is not the only revolutionary force in the Middle East shaking 
establishments. An Islamic revival has been sweeping over Turkey 
resulting in the first Muslim prime minister since the formation of the 
modern secular Turkish republic. Muslims preach that their common faith 
crosses all boundaries of nationality, race and class. The Maoists agree 
on the first two but not the third. And Marxist ideas of class struggle 
have given them an organized militancy which the Islamic movements 
generally lack. The fact is Maoists, like other Marxist movements, know 
how to make war while Islamists don't.

If these two forces -- Islam and Maoist ideology -- should coalesce, the 
region is likely to see a new transnational empire arising which 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.

(09041996)	**** END ****	(c) COPYRIGHT PNS


/