Kurd Response Is Disruptive--and Disciplined

By JOHN-THOR DAHLBURG

Feb. 17, 1999 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITER

PARIS —

The trio of Kurdish men holding cell phones on the Rue Freycinet looked on as 16 of their compatriots occupied the Kenyan Embassy and 150 more in the street a block away bellowed slogans and words of encouragement.

“In a single day, we can mobilize 100,000 people,” Ali, 43, said as he fingered blue worry beads.

In a remarkable display of meticulous organization and shared anger and despair, Kurdish exiles and immigrants Tuesday overran Greek and Kenyan embassies and consulates and U.N. buildings in two dozen European cities to protest the arrest of Abdullah Ocalan, the leader of the guerrilla Kurdistan Workers Party, known as the PKK. The ethnic conflict between the separatist guerrillas and the Turkish government has claimed about 30,000 lives in 15 years.

The actions by Ocalan’s comrades and followers across Europe were uniquely spectacular and disruptive, experts said, because the PKK has been able to fuse Leninist-like discipline and hierarchy with clandestine tactics and the use of front organizations with high-tech gadgetry such as portable phones and satellite TV.

In many of Tuesday’s assaults, militants came equipped with jerrycans of gasoline or Molotov cocktails.

On Rue Freycinet, where 14 men and two women were dislodged by Paris police from the Kenyan mission after three hours, even a cheerleader was provided--a petite woman in a white-and-black head scarf who fed the crowd of Kurds gathered on the pavement around her the proper slogans to chant--”Vive Ocalan! Vive Kurdistan!” among them.

PKK Leaders Direct Response in Moscow

In Moscow, Kurdish emigres were alerted by 3 a.m. that Ocalan was no longer a free man.

“Starting from that time, we began to take planned steps,” PKK spokesman Makhir Balat told a news conference in Moscow. “This system was created and worked out under the direction of our leaders.”

In the Russian capital, that meant that 70 militants carrying red Kurdish flags managed to force their way onto the grounds of the Greek Embassy, where personnel said the invaders shouted slogans for about an hour and a half.

“[In the PKK], there’s a constant concern for command and control,” said Paul Wilkinson, chairman of the Center on Terrorism and Political Violence at St. Andrews University in Scotland. “And their care in organizing front organizations in all Kurdish population centers of Europe gives them a pool of people to call upon at the drop of the hat.”

When they heard of Ocalan’s disappearance and arrest, people flocked to the community centers that cater to the estimated 1 million Kurds who now live in Western Europe.

Ironically, Wilkinson said, the show of the organization’s prowess at mass mobilization in Europe coincides with a string of defeats in its armed struggle to carve out a Kurdish homeland in southeastern Turkey.

It is highly doubtful that Tuesday’s protests, however dramatic, will have any effect on the Turkish government’s resolve to try Ocalan as a terrorist, he said.

But the occupations from Moscow to London, some of which were combined with hostage-taking or threats of mass suicide, could portend even greater disorder if Turkey puts Ocalan, its most wanted man, on trial, as it has vowed to do.

“We will see violent trouble in Europe and Turkey between Kurds and Turks,” predicted Kendal Nezan, a physicist who chairs the Kurdish Institute of Paris and opposes the PKK and its revolutionary tactics.

In London, Kurdish political commentator Hazhir Teimourian said: “Europe and America are helping the Turkish state. . . . I believe Europe and America are going to have a terrorist problem, or a Kurdish problem, for the next 20 years.”

Founded in 1978, the Marxist-Leninist PKK has an estimated 7,000 guerrillas. Labeled a terrorist organization by the U.S. State Department, it conducted attacks on Turkish diplomatic and commercial facilities in dozens of European cities from 1993 to 1995, and it also has bombed Turkish tourist sites and hotels and kidnapped foreign tourists in an attempt to ruin Turkey’s economy.

The arrest of Ocalan in still-mysterious circumstances in the East African nation of Kenya after he was sheltered at the Greek Embassy in Nairobi was a major event for Europe’s Kurds. For many, the first word of the event came through Med-TV, a Kurdish-language satellite TV channel based in London that claims an audience stretching from Europe to the Kurdish regions of Turkey and Iraq.

“We had a live program throughout the night, after it became clear strange things were going on,” said Sebelam Gunesar, an employee in Med-TV’s studios in Denderleeuw, a suburb of the Belgian capital, Brussels. “And we’re going to stay on the air all day today.”

Mizgen Sen, a PKK spokeswoman in Brussels, said the party tipped off Med-TV with a fax at 11 p.m. Monday that said Ocalan had vanished and that all Kurds should go on “alert.”

By midnight, Sen said, the party had hooked up Med-TV with a member of Ocalan’s entourage in Nairobi who confirmed on the air that Ocalan had been arrested.

“Even the statement that we didn’t know where he was caused a panic among the Kurdish people,” Sen said.

“You wouldn’t believe me if I told you that we didn’t organize what then happened,” the PKK spokeswoman said.

In Germany, ‘Nothing Is Spontaneous’

Police in Germany, home to 400,000 Kurds, the largest concentration in Western Europe, said the embassy gate-crashings and protests were carefully planned and coordinated. With Ocalan arrested, the 20 or so Kurds said to constitute the PKK leadership for the “European Front” reportedly took charge.

“Nothing is spontaneous. Everything is decided in concert,” said Ruediger Hesse, spokesman for the police information service in the German state of Lower Saxony.

Although PKK officials may be located in London, Paris or the German city of Hanover, “everything takes place by portable phone,” Hesse said.

V.I. Lenin, the Russian revolutionary, spoke often of the decisive effect a handful of militants could have, provided they were devoted and well trained. The PKK has evidently learned that lesson. “Only a small number of people, the most militant members of the PKK, are involved in each occupation,” said Nezan, the physicist who opposes the PKK.

The militants were also aided Tuesday by the fact that Greek diplomatic missions abroad, with the exception of those in traditionally antagonistic locations such as Turkey, are thinly protected, with only two or three guards on duty.

Minimal Security at Greek Missions

The Greeks, in fact, may even have shrugged off warnings of possible PKK-directed protests. Ocalan’s Greek lawyer, Failos Kranidiotis, said he had told the head of Greece’s intelligence service Sunday that if Ocalan was arrested, the reaction would be fearsome. The intelligence officer reportedly laughed.

“He said, ‘We know, you’ve said this before, but it’s just blackmail for us to give him [Ocalan] asylum,’ ” Kranidiotis said.

So the Greek Embassy in Vienna was unguarded when about 30 Kurds stormed it around 5 a.m. and took the ambassador, his wife and three other Greek citizens hostage.

At the United Nations, spokesman Fred Eckhard said Tuesday that before dawn in Geneva, about 25 Kurds entered the U.N. offices at the Palais des Nations using a fake delivery vehicle to get through the gate.

In Manhattan, security was increased outside U.N. headquarters. Two large police vans were parked prominently on First Avenue within view of the U.N., and extra police stood guard along the perimeter of the building.

Aided by Med-TV’s broadcasts, Kurdish telephone networks and numerous PKK front organizations such as its political wing, the Kurdistan National Liberation Front, Ocalan’s organization was able to take quick, Europe-wide action Tuesday.

“The telephone rang a lot last night,” one Kurdish militant in Berlin admitted to a French reporter.

But Farouk Serhat, a Paris-based spokesman for the Kurdistan National Liberation Front, insisted that Tuesday’s events were spontaneous and that he couldn’t predict what Ocalan’s followers might do next.

“These are people who have lost everything, their homes, their families,” Serhat said. “I can only say that we have been overtaken by the actions of the Kurds to defend Mr. Ocalan. We cannot control them in Europe.”

Times staff writers Marjorie Miller in London, Maura Reynolds in Moscow, Paul Watson in Vienna, Carol J. Williams in Berlin and John J. Goldman at the United Nations, and special correspondent Maria Petrakis in Athens, contributed to this report.

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A Continent Under Siege

Kurds protested in these cities on Tuesday:

1. London

2. Paris

3. Marseilles

4. Brussels

5. Copenhagen

6. The Hague

7. Strasbourg

8. Stockholm

9. Cologne