3 - Kurdish nationalism in twentieth-century Turkey and Syria

Summary

The Kurdish nationalists in Turkey learned how to survive periods of severe repression under various military governments (1960, 1971, 1980, 1993 and 1997) and thrive during periods of relative political relaxation, allowing them space to organize and expand their membership and activities. A major development for the movement, however, occurred in 1978 with the official formation of the PKK, which impacted on the movement in Turkey as well as across the region. The impact outside Turkey has been especially significant in Syria and Iraq, where the PKK (renamed the KCK in 2000) gained substantial political support in Kurdish-majority areas 1980–99. In Syria this started to happen when its entire leadership was based there. However, since 2012, its political influence has grown substantially through its Syrian Kurdish affiliate the Democratic Union Party (Partiya Yekiti ya Demokrat; PYD), taking advantage of a fragile central government.

What makes the PKK/KCK stand out in the Kurdish movement in general is its refreshingly progressive approach to addressing the oppression, marginalization and disenfranchisement of the Kurdish people and its ability to adapt to new political developments regionally as well as globally. Introducing an intersectional approach to discrimination and inequality in 2000, the PKK/KCK has focused on inequality in all shapes and forms: class, gender, ethnic, cultural and religious. In addition, the approach encompasses social ecology. As a concept, social ecology was created and developed by Murray Bookchin, an American libertarian socialist. It refers to the potential of human beings to play a creative role in natural evolution by uprooting the hierarchical and ecologically destructive society we currently live under and replacing it with a socially enlightened and ecological society. Bookchin's model of democratic municipalism has been an inspiration to Abdullah Öcalan, PKK's founder/leader, who had studied it in prison, on the basis of which he developed democratic confederalism, the PKK/KCK's political agenda and model of government since 2005. This system of government has been implemented by AANES since 2012 as an alternative to nation-statism (Chapter 5). This was a major political shift, making the differences between the PKK's political worldview and those of other Kurdish political parties even starker.