The PKK is disbanding

[frandroid]

The PKK has held its Congress and has announced that it is disbanding.

Leyla Zana welcomes PKK Congress outcomes, urges responsibility for a democratic future

I'm in shock. Clearly the entire Kurdish freedom movement won't just disappear, and has always skilled at adopting multiple identities depending on the circumstances. "The PKK" itself morphed from the whole to being a one component of the Kurdish Communities Union (KCK), which itself was the inheritor of the mantle of the Kurdish armed struggle movement. (i.e. the KCK is the "real" PKK, while "the PKK" is the Turkish faction hiding in Iraq, itself divided between the political wing, and its subsidiary the HPG, which itself is the "armed" group.

Here's a simple chart of the armed movement:


Here's a more complex map/chart of the movement, with links to other political parties who officially claim to have no link to the PKK (lol) but do have a fair degree of independence. Their members/politicans do routinely get arrested and/or deposed under false accusations of terrorism by Turkey (and in Iran, where they often get straight up executed, though it is a much smaller movement there)

Link to Wikipedia if it doesn't allow hotlinking to images

There's also a complex number of supporting political organizations in Europe, mostly in Germany and somewhat in Belgium, France and possibly Sweden. Amberin Zaman mentions business interests as well, and the PKK has been accused of being into drug smuggling before. So I'm pretty sure most of this isn't going away, even if Erdogan's demand was that "all related organizations" disband. And the PYD/YPG/YPJ/SDF aren't going away any time soon in Syria, which Turkey does consider to be an even more serious threat on its border. But the PKK had effectively lost the armed struggle against the Turkish state, which kept using it as a scarecrow, so maybe this shift will allow for political movement in the right direction? It's definitely been going in the WRONG direction in Turkey since 2015, in terms of Kurdish political and civil rights.

Anyway I have a meta-post about the PKK, Hamas and armed resistance brewing in my head, which I should start drafting soon....

(Parenthesis: Apparently Öcalan was allowed to zoom in at the Congress, and that clearly would have been a presence very difficult to contradict in the movement, in light of the absolute personality cult around him in the movement.)

Comments

[sabotabby]

I'm looking forward to read it. And thanks, as always, for explaining these things.

[frandroid]

You're welcome. I've added some unorthodox thoughts in a reply below.

[springheel_jack]

I'm surprised. And puzzled.

[frandroid]

There are a few theories:

1) Öcalan became kind of "liberalized" in prison and has really been convinced that armed struggle leads to nothing. If you ever get to read Blood and Belief, you get to discover that he himself was responsible for the deaths of dozens if not hundreds of PKK militants who were not trusted (for the most minor and puerile reasons, such as being too "urban" for this group of rural Kurds) or were threatening to his leadership, due to terrible decision-making. Of course the war between the state and the PKK has led to the deaths of more than 30,000 people, the destruction of thousands of Kurdish villages at the hands. Tons of other villages were depopulated due to these campaigns of state terror. Diyarbakir and a couple cities in Iraqi Kurdistan used to have the largest Kurdish populations--now Istanbul is ironically the world's largest "Kurdish" city. Also now the civilian Kurdish movement is developed in a way which can truly take and has taken the mantle of the armed movement. They are the inheritors of the PKK's work but the PKK is now a political hindrance.

2) This theory is nuts, and I won't go into the reasons why I think there are some logical roots for it here, but I still feel like sharing it. It goes this like: Öcalan was an intelligence plant in the 1970s Turkish revolutionary left who got too successful in his covert leadership role and went rogue. Now after having been detained for so long, his only way out is to convince the PKK to lay down arms. It's not the first time he has tried to do so... (I think Aliza Marcus also discusses this in the aforementioned book.)

3) I think I mentioned this in the post, but the PKK, in its narrowest sense, is fucked at this point. An armed struggle group which can't conduct serious operations on the territory of the state it opposes and wants to occupy and defend has been defeated.* It's only because they are hiding in the Qandil mountains that they are not being destroyed, but with the increasing collaboration of the KDP, their eventual demise in inevitable. Turkey has over 15,000 troops in Iraqi Kurdistan, dozens of bases, phenomenal drones, and has slowly been choking the supply and communication lines of the PKK. Öcalan could be seeing himself as giving them a lifeline. This might be the closest to the truth, with a dose of 1), inasmuch as I understand the PKK, which is much less than many Kurdish comrades/scholars of course.

I'm writing this here and not on BlueSky because I think I would get destroyed by some people over there for some of what I write... :P

(*: contrast with Hamas which can continue to defend itself in Gaza, even if it can't really defend Palestinians, though as this point the difference is somewhat academic?)

[sabotabby]

God, that's bleak.

[conuly]

That's shocking.