A Short Biography of Abdullah \u00d6calan
Abdullah \u00d6calan was born on April 4, 1948, in the village of Amara, in the Xelfet\u00ee district of Riha (Urfa). He graduated from Ankara Anatolian Land Registry and Cadastre Vocational High School in 1968. In 1970, while working as a civil servant, he enrolled in the Faculty of Law at Istanbul University. During these years, he met with the Devrimci Do\u011fu K\u00fclt\u00fcr Oca\u011f\u0131 (Revolutionary Cultural Eastern Hearths; DDKO) and the youth leaders of the 1968 generation about the Kurdish question. He later quit the Faculty of Law and enrolled in the Faculty of Political Science at Ankara University. There he led a student strike protesting the March 1972 massacre of the Turkish revolutionary leader Mahir \u00c7ayan – whose ideas greatly influenced \u00d6calan and whom he commemorates to this day – and nine of his comrades in K\u0131z\u0131ldere. On April 7, 1972, Abdullah \u00d6calan was imprisoned for seven months for his role in the protests. Following his release from prison, having failed to introduce the Kurdish problem onto the agenda of Turkish revolutionaries,
he started working on establishing a separate group around the idea that \u201cKurdistan is a colony.\u201d The historically important first meeting of this group took place in 1973, in Ankara. Kemal Pir\u2019s
assertion that \u201cthe liberation of the Turkish people depends upon the liberation of the Kurdish people\u201d provided the group\u2019s theoretical framework, and, in 1975, Abdullah \u00d6calan and Mehmet
Hayri Durmu\u015f penned the group\u2019s first written document titled \u201cAnalyses of Imperialism and Colonialism.\u201d In 1977, \u00d6calan and his friends traveled to Kurdistan to engage a campaign to raise awareness of the newly forming group and its ideas. Speeches \u00d6calan gave during this Kurdistan campaign were transcribed. He visited Baz\u00eed (Elaz\u0131\u011f), Qers (Kars), Dugor (Digor), Dersim, \u00c7ewl\u00eeg (Bing\u00f6l), Xarp\u00eat (Harput), Amed (Diyarbak\u0131r), M\u00eardin (Mardin), Riha (Urfa), and D\u00eelok (Antep). Abdullah \u00d6calan\u2019s \u201cThe Way of the Kurdistan Revolution,\u201d also known as the \u201cManifesto,\u201d was written in the summer of 1978 and published in the first issue of the journal Serxweb\u00fbn (Independence). Abdullah \u00d6calan wrote the \u201cParty Program\u201d in memory of Haki Karer, who was from the Black Sea Region and had been murdered in D\u00eelok, and declared the foundation
of Part\u00eeya Karker\u00ean Kurd\u00eestan (Kurdistan Workers\u2019 Party; PKK) at a congress in the village of Fis, in Amed, on November 26\u201327, 1978. In the wake of the declaration, the Turkish state carried out
massacres in Mara\u015f and Melet\u00ee (Malatya) and attacks in Sems\u00fbr (Ad\u0131yaman) and Xarp\u00eat, and then declared martial law and detained numerous people. In 1979, foreseeing a military coup, which would indeed occur in 1980, Abdullah \u00d6calan and several of his friends passed through the border town Pirsus (Suru\u00e7) into the city of Koban\u00ee, in Syria. After leaving Turkey, from 1979 to 1998, \u00d6calan organized and led the political education of the PKK\u2019s rank and file, which he considered more important than military training. At the same time, he also led the movement as a whole, conducted foreign relations and was responsible for diplomatic meetings, while doing his best to stay in touch with Kurds and allies in Lebanon, Syria, and, increasingly, around the world. Going back and forth between Syria and Lebanon, where he cooperated with the Palestinian Liberation Organization and met with new and old cadres for the coming struggle, Abdullah \u00d6calan began making the preparations for a revolutionary people\u2019s war against junta set up after the September 12, 1980, coup d\u2019\u00e9tat. During the same period, he published the brochure United Front of Resistance against Fascism. In 1981, he wrote the books The Role of Force in Kurdistan, The Question of Personality in Kurdistan, Life in the Party and the Characteristics of the Revolutionary Militant, and The Problem of National Liberation and the Road Map to its Resolution, as well as his political report to the party\u2019s first conference. In the following two years, he also penned the works On Organization (1982) and On Gallows and the Culture of the Barracks (1983). The military coup resulted in thousands of people being imprisoned and severely tortured, as a wave of severe repression was unleashed against society. News of disappearances and executions were leaked despite intense censorship. As a result, \u00d6calan\u2019s writings in this period focused on how to build an armed organization against fascism, how to fight against the Kurdish landowners and aristocracy who collaborated with the state, and how to transform the Kurdish militants, with their oppressed and colonized personalities, into freedom fighters. He also made several attempts to build a coalition with the Turkish revolutionary organizations that had succeeded in crossing into other countries in the region. However, internal disputes in the Turkish left, among other things, prevented the emergence of such a coalition. Then, on August 15, 1984, the PKK carried out its first armed offensive against two military posts, one in Dih (Eruh) and the other in \u015eemz\u00eenan (\u015eemdinli).
Thereafter, the PKK began to grow exponentially. As the organization continued to grow steadily from 1987 to 1990, gaining popularity among Kurds and extending its regional influence, new problems emerged. A series of documents with the title \u201cAnalyses\u201d assembled \u00d6calan\u2019s intense discussion of the existing problems. These documents were later published as brochures,
including The Revolutionary Approach to Religion and The Question of Woman and the Family, and as books titled The Liquidation of Liquidationism, The Fascism of September 12 and the PKK\u2019s
Resistance; Betrayal and Collaboration in Kurdistan, and Selected Writings, vols. 1\u20134.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The PKK\u2019s armed struggle against the Turkish state continued even after the military coup was nominally ended. In terms of the repression that Kurds faced in the region, the banning of their language and their organizations and the denial of their existence, the transition to democracy in 1984 was a nonevent. Indeed, not only the PKK but the entire left in Turkey defined the post\u2013military coup period as the institutionalization of fascism and neoliberalism in Turkey. From 1990 to 1992, the armed struggle \u00d6calan led, which he called \u201ca war for the protection of existence,\u201d gained massive popular support. During this period, \u00d6calan became convinced that the political solutions to the Kurdish question that the PKK proposed and the strategies it had adopted needed to be revised. This phase saw \u00d6calan\u2019s Resurrection Is Complete, Now It\u2019s Time for Liberation and the 1993 book-length interview with Yal\u00e7\u0131n K\u00fc\u00e7\u00fck titled The Story of the Resurrection. In these books, \u00d6calan started to conceptualize a radical form of democracy that could liberate Kurds, women, and other oppressed groups. In the early 1990s, \u00d6calan gave several interviews to Turkish journalists and leftists regarding his search for a democratic solution and efforts to achieve peace, which were published as the following books: Meetings with Abdullah \u00d6calan (Do\u011fu Perin\u00e7ek, 1990); Apo and the PKK (Mehmet Ali Birand, 1992); Interview in a Kurdish Garden (Yal\u00e7\u0131n K\u00fc\u00e7\u00fck, 1993); The Kurdish Question with \u00d6calan and Burkay (Oral \u00c7al\u0131\u015flar, 1993); I am Looking for a Collocutor: Ceasefire Talks (1994); Killing the Man (Mahir Say\u0131n, 1997). During those years, his analysis of communality also left its mark on the Kurdish community, and he published Problems of Revolution and Socialism, Insisting on Socialism Is Insisting on Being Human, The Language and Action of Revolution, History Is Hidden in Our Day and We are Hidden at History\u2019s Beginning, How to Live, vols. 1 and 2, and Kurdish Love. As can be deduced from the titles of the books, at this point, \u00d6calan was primarily concentrating on two aspects of the struggle: first, how to center on women\u2019s freedom and transform the PKK into an organization that can provide freedom to its militants and to the people; second, how to deal with the shortcomings of the Soviet real socialist model without giving up the ideals of a socialist revolution. He also started developing his ideas about history, which he would later return to in much greater detail in his prison writings. \u00d6calan states that the second half of 1990s was when he obtained his own freedom, in the sense of
freeing himself from dogmatic thinking. During this period, he tried to open up a venue for dialogue between the PKK and the Turkish state. The book Dialogues, Ceasefire Statements, and Press Releases, 1993, 1995, and 1998 is a compilation of \u00d6calan\u2019s analyses in the context of the attempts made at dialogue with the governments of President Turgut \u00d6zal (1993) and Prime Ministers Necmettin Erbakan (1995) and B\u00fclent Ecevit (1998). All of these efforts were sabotaged by events that the Kurdish Movement and \u00d6calan have a strong suspicion were the work of NATO\/Gladio units. Major examples of such events are the massacre of thirty-three unarmed Turkish soldiers by a PKK guerrilla group, the suspicious death of \u00d6zal, and the attacks, bombings, and assassination attempts targeting Abdullah \u00d6calan. The attacks against \u00d6calan and his ideas by forces that aimed to prevent peace and democracy in Kurdistan culminated in \u00d6calan\u2019s exile from the Middle East and his eventual abduction. The US\u2019s multidimensional diplomatic and military pressure on the Syrian state, including Turkey\u2019s open threat of war against Damascus,meant Abdullah \u00d6calan had to leave Syria on October 9, 1998.
After leaving Syria, \u00d6calan looked for a new place where he could continue the political struggle. The details of the international diplomacy he conducted for a democratic solution to the Kurdish question and peace in Turkey during this period are published as a book titled Towards Peace: The
Rome Talks. During this period, the CIA and Mossad pursued him relentlessly, and, as a result of the intense pressure applied by NATO and Turkey, different governments forced him to leave.
After an odyssey through several European countries, \u00d6calan set off for South Africa, but he was never to arrive. On February 15, 1999, in a plot that involved several secret services, including the
CIA, Mossad, and Turkish and Greek intelligence agencies, he was abducted while leaving the Greek embassy in Kenya, Nairobi, and handed over to Turkey. The abduction caused protests and
uprisings by Kurds in all four parts of Kurdistan and worldwide.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Abdullah \u00d6calan\u2019s prison conditions are grim, and he is confronted with an arbitrary regime of total isolation. \u0130mral\u0131 Island, where he is imprisoned, is a restricted military zone located in the Sea of Marmara. \u00d6calan spent the first ten years of his sentence as the only prisoner on the island, guarded by more than one thousand soldiers. In 2009, a new prison was built for him, and there are now three other prisoners on the island. All cells in this new prison are designed for solitary confinement. Each of the prisoners has his own tiny courtyard for fresh air, but due to the extreme height of the walls these yards look like well shafts. \u00d6calan still cannot receive letters and is the only prisoner in Turkey without access to a telephone. In the last ten years, the authorities have only permitted five meetings with his lawyers and five family visits, and these were only made possible by the protracted hunger strikes of several thousand Kurdish political prisoners spread across Turkey. Despite these conditions, \u00d6calan has produced a major corpus of writings while in prison. Starting with his defense speech in the show trial on \u0130mral\u0131 Island, The Declaration on the Democratic Solution of the Kurdish Question (1999), these writings outline the new strategy that the PKK and other actors in the Kurdish freedom movement should adopt to transform Kurdistan, Turkey, and the broader region without changing existing political borders. Prison Writings: The
Roots of Civilization is an extensive historical and philosophical study that lays the groundwork for all of the following books, while its second volume, The PKK and the Kurdish Question in
the 21st Century (both 2001), extensively evaluated and critiqued the PKK\u2019s shortcomings and failures, in order to improve its social impact and increase its political capacity. His submission to
the Greek courts, Defense of the Free Human (2003), shed more light on his abduction and the role of various powers and further developed the ideas he had previously addressed. \u00d6calan\u2019 subsequent writings further delved into and developed his thesis about history and began to map out his alternative paradigm, first in Beyond State, Power, and Violence (2004). This book played a
major role in forming what he calls a \u201cnew kind of revolutionary party.\u201d Bringing together ideas from prominent Western and non-Western scholars, he argued for an understanding of history as an antagonism between state formation and society formation. Since revolution is for the empowerment of society, it also should be against the state, organizing in a way that renders the state redundant. While capitalism, patriarchy, and the nation-state build capitalist modernity, he argues that the people\u2019s resistance against these systems should build upon the history of democratic modernity, of which the world\u2019s revolutionary struggles are the their. Finally, in his writings, \u00d6calan also revisited and further developed his ideas on women\u2019s freedom and revolution – which he called his \u201cunfinished project.\u201d Putting women\u2019s freedom and revolution at the center of all democratic revolutions, he emphasized that women\u2019s autonomous organization and ideological production will transform society into a state of equality, peace, and freedom. All these ideas are mapped out in the five volume Manifesto of the Democratic Civilization (2008\u20132011). The ideas that \u00d6calan formulated in prison have greatly influenced and inspired three revolutionary projects. North and East Syria, more commonly known as the Rojava revolution, with the participation of all peoples of the region, is a revolution where the role of women and the youth continues to determine the direction, and which serves as beacon of hope for the region. The Halklar\u0131n Demokratik Partisi (Peoples\u2019 Democratic Party; HDP), which was founded in 2012 and brings the Kurdish movement together with other freedom movements in Turkey, including socialist, women\u2019s, ecological -movments and Alevis, Armenians, and other opposition movements led by the peoples themselves, and which has received the support of 12 percent of the electorate in Turkey, is also shaped by \u00d6calan\u2019s ideas. Another example, the Kurdish Yazidi people\u2019s autonomous council, formed in the aftermath of attacks, is oriented toward self-defense and self-government, so that Yazidis can continue to flourish on their land. For its part, the Kurdish women\u2019s movement, equipped with \u00d6calan\u2019s analysis, not only set a precedent in self-organization and self-defense under the current conditions but also showed how to translate this into political mechanisms that allow women to exert their weight for a lasting transformation in the Middle East. All of these political actors aim to build democratic autonomous regions in the Middle East where radical democracy is exercised and to unite in a confederal structure on the basis of an ecological, feminist, and decolonial constitution. While in prison, \u00d6calan further developed and augmented the strategy that the Kurdish movement adopted during the second half of 1990s to achieve peace with the Turkish state. In 2009, he announced that he intended to write a document outlining a \u201croad map\u201d to peace and encouraged people to share their thoughts on the subject with him. This triggered an extensive debate in Turkey and abroad, which energized different sections of society. He completed the \u201croad map\u201d on August 15, 2009, the twenty-fifth anniversary of the launching of the armed struggle. This road map served as a basis for a process of dialogue with the state. From 2009 to mid-2011, a delegation appointed by the Turkish government engaged in secret negotiations with Abdullah \u00d6calan on \u0130mral\u0131 Island and with leading PKK members in Oslo (the so-called \u201cOslo process\u201d). The parties involved agreed on several protocols. These protocols contained a step-by-step plan to end the armed conflict and make the necessary institutional transformation to resolve the Kurdish question. However, the Turkish government decided not to implement this plan, instead extending the waves of arrests of Kurdish politicians and activists and starting massive military operations in June 2011. In another series of talks, Turkish state authorities conducted a direct dialogue with \u00d6calan on \u0130mral\u0131 Island (the \u201c\u0130mral\u0131 process\u201d). In late 2012, the state acknowledged that these talks had taken place. The assassination of three Kurdish female politicians, including PKK founding member Sakine Cans\u0131z, by the Turkish secret service, the M\u0130T, in Paris on January 9, 2013, threatened to quickly bring the talks to a standstill, but \u00d6calan stuck with them. At the Newroz festivities in March 2013, \u00d6calan called for the withdrawal of the armed groups from Turkey and expressed his hope for democratization in Turkey. The call was heeded, and hopes for peace resurfaced. That year, Time magazine named \u00d6calan as one of the one hundred most influential people in the world, and he was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. In the following months, however, it became clear that the Turkish state\u2019s sole objective was to disarm the PKK, and that it had no interest in a political solution. The last pinnacle in the so-called \u201cpeace process\u201d was the Dolmabah\u00e7e Declaration in February 2015, when an agreed protocol on peace was read in the presence of the vice prime minister, who was acting on the directive of then prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdo\u011fan, and HDP lawmakers, who represented \u00d6calan. However, soon afterward, then prime minister and later president of Turkey Recep Tayyip Erdo\u011fan shifted strategy, scrapped the entire dialogue process, and renewed military escalation. As of today, \u00d6calan and the whole of \u0130mral\u0131 Island remain in
total isolation, with no possibility of communication whatsoever. Meanwhile, both support for his ideas and the chorus of voices calling for his freedom is growing every day.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This biography is extracted from a brochure written by the International Initiative for the freedom of Abdullah Ocalan. The full brochure can be read here: https:\/\/ocalanbooks.com\/downloads\/ENG-brochure-freedom-shall-prevail.pdf<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" A Short Biography of Abdullah \u00d6calan Abdullah \u00d6calan was born on April 4, 1948, in the village of Amara, in the Xelfet\u00ee district of Riha (Urfa). He graduated from Ankara Anatolian Land Registry and Cadastre Vocational High School in 1968. In 1970, while working as a civil servant, he enrolled in the Faculty of Law […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":345,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[21],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-188","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n