The Kurdish PKK - a history of oppression and struggle

The PKK – coming down from the mountains (part of the series: Rebels)

by Paul White

Pubs. Zed Books

Pbck. £12.99

The Kurds are one of the largest national groups in the world without a country of their own – around 35-40 million people. Their language, culture and history, goes back centuries and is distinct from those of the middle-eastern states in which the Kurdish people are based, but their existence as a separate national group has been continually denied. They straddle Iran, Turkey, Syria and Iraq, but the greatest number of Kurds live in south-eastern Turkey and have been demeaningly described by successive Turkish administrations as ‘Mountain Turks’.

Paul White describes the rise of the progressive nationalist liberation movement, the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) within a historical context. He describes the transformation of small, often local movements of peasants and ‘social rebels’ into a modern Kurdish liberation organization, the PKK. It emerged as a modern revolutionary nationalist force with a burgeoning diplomatic presence.

The ongoing struggle between Kurdish nationalists and the Turkish administration has been bloody and cost thousands of lives, but both sides appeared to recognise that force alone would not solve their problems. As a peaceful gesture, most of the PKK’s forces were recently withdrawn from Turkey to the Qandil mountain region of Iraq.

Despite waging that long and bloody armed struggle, the PKK recently began contemplating an end to the armed struggle on Turkish soil and has been actively seeking a political solution. Originally the PKK advocated nothing less than full independence for a united greater Kurdish state, but now appears prepared to accept some form of autonomy and has linked this with the wider democratic struggle in Turkey as a whole. However the capture of its leader Abdullah Öcalan put that process on hold. He was kidnapped and handed over to Turkish forces as a result of a conspiracy between Greek security services, Mossad, the CIA and the Turkish government.

The consequences of the Iraq war had a significant impact on Kurdish aspirations. The conflict and US occupation left the Iraqi Kurdish region virtually autonomous and has allowed its people to develop its own forms of governance. This, in turn, has impacted on Kurdish aspirations and given the Kurds a new sense of identity and hope for a truly united nation.

The notorious underdevelopment of Turkey’s Kurdish region – it is the poorest region of the country and has enjoyed little to no investment. Its population has been under military occupation for decades and these factors have certainly not helped in bringing about a solution to the Kurdish question. While many Kurds remain sceptical and suspicious of Turkey’s long-term strategy, there is no doubt that the ideology of the PKK has had a deep impact on Turkey’s politics itself.

The Turkish state itself, was forced into a compromise on the Kurdish question, and only a year ago appeared ready to negotiate with Öcalan, granting belated but limited recognition of the Kurdish language and even allowed a pro-Kurdish party – the socialist and anti-capitalist, People’s Democratic Party (HDP) – to take part in the most recent national elections. This party was able to attract many liberal and left voters to overcome the minimum threshold for representation and win 13% of the vote. The party linked the issue of the Kurdish people in Turkey with that of democracy in the country as a whole. It was supported indirectly by the PKK. Its success prevented Erdogan’s Justice and Development Party (AKP) winning a majority for the first time since 2002. It also stymied Erdogan’s aim of shifting power from parliament to the president.

He was, though, was determined to counter that electoral result, so began a strategy of renewed military attacks on PKK bases in Qandil in the hope of uniting nationalist forces around his flag. He has granted the US use of the Erlginci military base in exchange for a blank cheque to attack the PKK.

            The United States signed a new military agreement with Turkey at the expense of the Kurds: In return for use of Incirlik Air Base on the Syrian border, it has betrayed the Syrian Kurds who have so far been its most effective ally against Islamic State. In return for the deal, the US gained military cooperation from Turkey, but it soon became clear that Ankara’s real target was the Kurds in Turkey, Syria and Iraq. Action against Isis was an afterthought, and was hit by only three Turkish airstrikes, compared to around 300 against PKK bases. By strongly playing the Turkish nationalist and anti-Kurdish card, he hopes to win back that majority in a second election on 1 November.

White’s book is very useful for anyone who wishes to understand more about Kurdish nationalist aspiration and the role of the PKK.

New play: A Wolf In Snakeskin Shoes

A Wolf In Snakeskin Shoes

By Marcus Gardley

Directed by Indhu Rubasingham

October – 14 Nov

Tricycle Theatre

This world premiere of award-winning playwright Californian Marcus Gardley’s new play is a fitting return for him to the Tricycle. This fresh take on Molière’s Tartuffe, set in the US deep south, in a world where fast-food tycoons flourish alongside mega-churches and charismatic preachers gives the Molière play a new lease of life.

The original was a daring satire on religious hypocrisy and the gullibility of the petit-bourgeoisie in 17^th century France. It is a play that would hardly work in a largely secular Britain today, but set in the USA it is very apposite. The country’s culture of evangelistic charlatans, fundamentalist Christianity and an atavistic belief in god and redemption is an ideal setting.

Given just days to live, multi-millionaire Archibald Organdy puts his faith in the flamboyant Archbishop Tardimus Toof, a prophet, preacher and part-time masseur from the deep south. Toof wheedles his way into the Organdy family and promises to absolve Archibald’s sins, heal his cancer as well as his son’s homosexuality, but Organdy’s live-in woman friend – a hard bitten, feisty and voluptuous former strip dancer – sees through the preacher’s pretence with his glutinous word artistry, shiny black suit and snakeskin shoes.

There is an overwhelmingly black cast who play with boundless energy, élan and verve. In Gardleys’ reworking of the play it becomes more of a farce, interspersed with great gospel singing and rap-like rhyming couplets, than a biting satire. The audience – largely black – clearly loved the cultural references of the humour.

The weakness, for me, came at the end when Tardimus Toof – now exposed as the bogus man of god that he is, but clutching the wealth he’s persuaded his gullible wealthy client to hand over – delivers a cynical paean to capitalist individualism, rejecting god and Christian charity, declaring that he now only believes in one god: himself.

Lucian Msamati plays Archbishop Tardimus Toof  with a convincing charisma and the right touch of a smooth second had car salesman. Sharon D. Clarke as his dignified, but hard-put-upon wife is the perfect foil. As is Adjoa Andoh to her ascetic tycoon lover; she is the epitome of what she memorably calls herself: ‘a thick, golden brown, brick-house goddess of voluptuous lusciousness’. The Tricycle Theatre’s Olivier-Award winning Artistic Director Indhu Rubasingham directs.

Motherland - a novel by Jo McMillan

Motherland – a novel

By Jo McMillan

Pubs John Murray

Hdbck £16.99

Imagine growing up on the losing side of history, the blurb about the book proclaims.  This is a personal memoir thinly disguised as a novel.

Jess, the protagonist, is a teenager living with her mum in Tamworth, a small town on the outskirts of Coventry and Birmingham during the seventies. Her mother is single, a teacher and also a committed and passionate communist as well as an avid peace campaigner, insulated and isolated from the real world. Jess follows in her mother’s footsteps, selling the Morning Star at weekends in the town square, joining the Young Communists League and accompanying her mother on several trips to the German Democratic Republic, where she helps organise further education courses for GDR teachers of English.

McMillan gives us the nitty-gritty of what growing up in that environment was like, but with a large dose of retrospective and jaundiced hindsight: was the Young Communist League really still using Stalin as a model twenty years after Khrushchev’s revelations?

Her descriptions of her mother, as a rather dotty, warm-hearted but naively utopian believer in the dawning revolution, is a sad caricature. Alexei Sayle’s similar descriptions of his communist family are at least leavened with genuine humour, but this story is a tedious traipse through a very muddy field. It is as if a teenager’s diary entries have been strung together as an over-long essay.

            Of course, a positive or more sympathetic story of communists and a communist upbringing would not be touched by a mainstream publisher and McMillan here, consciously or not, feeds the seemingly insatiable desire for denigrating and belittling descriptions and a portrait of the GDR that underlines the clichés of mainstream narratives. It is not that she distorts the facts so much as that what she selectively describes are the superficialities of life which, taken as a whole, convey a desolate and melancholic reality: all the East Germans are cold, inscrutable or devious. There is no character development or the profundity of perception, one would expect in a worthwhile novel, but merely casual observation and sketchy portraits. The description of her mother’s short love affair, cut short by the inhuman intervention of the GDR authorities, reveals a rare moment of novelistic imagination, but it has nothing to do with the factual reality of the rest of the book. It will, though, feed the propaganda image of a callous and inhuman system.

            The moral of this ‘novel’ is, to paraphrase Noel Coward, don’t let your daughter write your story, Mrs. Worthington!

The Bloody Trail of Imperialism

The Bloody Trail of Imperialism – the origins of the First World War

by Eddie Glackin

Pbck €8.00

Pubs. Communist Party of Ireland

This slim volume packs a big punch. Although its subtitle could lead to misconceptions that the book deals only with the immediate causes of the First World War, whereas Mr. Glackin begins his historical analysis a hundred years prior to 1914. And he is no doubt right to do so, because he takes us back to the true causes of the ‘Great War’. He demonstrates concisely how it resulted from the ongoing battle between competing imperialist nations for the spoils of Africa, Asia and Latin America which had been rumbling on since the early 1800s after the defeat of Napoleon and the restoration of feudal power in Europe. This is a classic history primer for young people, but also extremely informative for an older generation that has perhaps forgotten or never knew how bloodthirsty, rapacious and vicious the competition for colonies was, as well as to what depths of human depravity, and untold greed this scramble for land and resources reached. The emerging capitalist nations were desperate for new markets and sources of raw materials – the African, Latin American and Asian continents offered easy pickings. With their superior weaponry and industrial power, the big colonialist nations of  Britain, Germany, France, Italy, Belgium and, somewhat later, the USA, pillaged and massacred their way to achieve their goals. Glacklin expertly and with utmost clarity charts this process with many examples to underline his points: the virtual genocide of the Herero people in what is today Namibia by the Germans, the first concentration camps set up by the British in South Africa, the murders and horrendous mass mutilation of the Congolese as a means of intimidation by Belgium, as well as many other examples. Of course, these rampaging colonial nations were bitterly and heroically resisted by the indigenous populations, but they didn’t stand a chance. The First World War represented the culmination of this battle for colonies and resources with one of the most senseless examples of mass murder on European soil. It left an emergent USA as the strongest global power, consolidated British dominance in India and Africa, leaving France and Spain with a few sops, and Germany routed and robbed of all its colonies.

This book is well worth the €8.00 and should be on the bookshelf of  anyone who has a keen interest in history and wishes to have it explained as a process seen from an intelligent Marxist perspective.

Honourable Friends? – parliament and the fight for change

by Caroline Lucas

Pubs. Portobello

Pbck £14.99

Under Caroline Lucas’s leadership the Green Party was transformed from a tiny, single-issue organisation into a mature party with clout. Under her guidance it has developed radical policies on the economy, on burning social issues and the environment, and mounted a fundamental critique of  the capitalist system itself. She has managed to do this without resorting to extremist or wild utopian rhetoric. Her challenge to the establishment and its implicit iconoclasm comes across as sane, rational and humane. Nor does she, as so many politicians do when they write biographies, use it as an ego trip. She emphasises co-operation, collaboration and working with others.

This book, as she herself emphasises, has been put  together in between meetings, parliamentary committee sittings, on scribbled notes during late night train journeys from London back to Brighton, culled from emails and notes taken by her assistant Cath Miller. It is no long-deliberated and honed political philosophical tract, but is a ‘record of progress so far, the challenges and setbacks as well as some successes. It is an “of the moment”, from the trenches snapshot of the first five years of coalition government.’ This is not necessarily a disadvantage, it reflects her genuine passion and commitment, her honesty and vision.

She picks up the central issues facing the country and humanity as a whole and demonstrates how our present political structures and the enormous power wielded big companies and financial interests undermine parliament’s ability to deliver the policies that people and society need.

Generations of Labour MPs, instead of challenging the public school or gentlemen’s club arcane rituals of parliament have submitted in awe and felt honoured to be admitted and not dared suggest change. Margaret Becket told Caroline when she first arrived in the House of Commons, ‘don’t worry, you’ll get used to it’. But she hasn’t and she refuses to.  She is determined to challenge and to help sweep away the dust of centuries, taking inspiration from the  Suffragettes. She rightly argues that parliament should be there to serve the people and its procedures should facilitate that and be brought into the modern world, ceasing to be a comic opera. 

To have silk slings in the cloakrooms for hanging up one’s sword, a snuff box at the entrance to the chamber, to have to physically walk through the Aye or No lobbies to register one’s vote, to be reliant on the party leader’s patronage to obtain a decent office are just some of the silly anachronisms of  the system.

Lucas ridicules and demolishes central platforms of the coalition one after the other with a devastating simplicity and rationality, she exposes the blatant lying of leading minsters and makes strong arguments for public ownership.

Against the unwritten rules of parliamentary procedure she used her maiden speech, which by tradition is anodyne,  to attack the polluting firm Trafigura which had already sued the BBC and forced journalists to remain silent about its activities.

‘I have come to see up close, how unless parliament changes, progress in every other area of our national life faces delay or obstruction,’ she writes. Lucas might be only a one woman show, but she packs a political punch far beyond her own or her party’s weight. A wonderfully refreshing and empowering read.