Kurdish Warlord Is a Man Cut Off From His Army

One of the world’s most autocratic and durable warlords sat under police guard in a small Roman villa, politely greeting visitors in a jacket and tie and fidgeting with plastic worry beads. His gold watch was still set on Syrian time, an hour ahead of Rome.

Until October, Abdullah Ocalan moved freely about Syria, Lebanon and northern Iraq in army fatigues, toting an assault rifle and barking at recruits who worshiped him as a god. His training-camp harangues blended Marxist-Leninist rhetoric with brave talk of a “free Kurdistan.” The reply was always collective and robotic: “Long live the Leader!”

Under his command, Kurdish guerrillas killed uncooperative Kurdish civilians by the hundreds while fighting the Turkish army. He had dozens of his comrades executed and his own wife jailed for disloyalty.

Now, Turkey’s most wanted fugitive--who still leads one of the 30 movements blacklisted by the United States as terrorist groups--has been cut off from the army he created two decades ago. “We were unprepared for what happened,” he admitted. “Everything was so sudden.”

Ocalan’s forced journey from the Syrian capital, Damascus, to Moscow to Rome, where he surrendered to police Nov. 12 and asked for political asylum, is a watershed in the ethnic conflict between his Kurdistan Workers Party and the Turkish government. The fighting has claimed about 30,000 lives in 14 years, fed instability in the Middle East and hobbled the democratic and economic development of Turkey, a U.S. ally and member of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.

More than any other person, Ocalan, the university-educated son of Kurdish peasants, has defined that conflict. His odyssey, perhaps more than anything else, will shape its outcome.

For now, the warrior and his cause are in limbo.

Charges Include Ordering Killings

Turkey, whose threat last fall to invade Syria put Ocalan on the run, wants him sent home for trial on charges of leading a terrorist group, promoting separatism and ordering killings. But because he faces the death penalty at home, Italy is barred by its constitution from extraditing him there.

Eager to be rid of him, Italian officials are stalling on his asylum request and trying to find him a new home. But Ocalan insists on staying in Western Europe--to give his guerrillas more respect--and no country here wants him.

Pushed into the limelight, Ocalan has sought to focus attention on demands for guaranteeing the rights of Turkey’s 12 million Kurds, who make up one-fifth of the country’s population. With Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat as a model, he has offered to arrange a cease-fire, turn his movement into a democratic party and start peace talks under international supervision.

But Western Europe’s leaders, despite their initial applause for the idea, have balked at pressing it on Turkey, whose military-dominated regime shuns the path to negotiations pursued in the Mideast, Northern Ireland, Spain and other places seeking to end ethnic or sectarian violence.

In frustration, the Kurdish leader threatened in a New Year’s broadcast that his guerrillas will “make much bigger preparations for war” if his peace initiative is ignored much longer.

One-on-one, Ocalan does not sound much like the merciless warlord whom Turkish leaders brand “a baby killer” nor the macho orator his followers have seen in the camps and on Med-TV, his movement’s London-based satellite channel. A rumpled, engaging man with a bristly mustache and a nervous squint, he comes across as a limited politician who is troubled by his notoriety and trying hard to reinvent himself as a statesman.

“Some call me a prophet, as if I have created a new religion,” he said in an interview, claiming to reject such idolatry. “Some see me as a feudal lord. Others call me the No. 1 terrorist in the world. There are so many perceptions of me that I am trying to overcome.

“I’m searching for how to be or what to be,” he added. “But I have not yet found myself.”

For as long as he can remember, the man nicknamed Apo has found himself feuding with someone--his domineering mother, childhood peers, wealthy Kurds, his comrades in arms, his wife, the Turks.

Born in a cotton-growing Kurdish village by the Euphrates River in southeastern Turkey, on an uncertain birthday about 50 years ago, he went to a Turkish school and still speaks better Turkish than Kurdish. His mother pushed him to fight back when other boys beat on him.

When he was about 12, the army seized power in a coup, and Ocalan remembers thinking then how great it would feel to pull off such a feat. He organized his playmates and gave them subordinate military ranks. Quiet and studious, he applied to the military academy but was turned down, he believes, because he is Kurdish.

Apo says his family took the name Ocalan, which means “avenger” in Turkish, after a relative died in a 1925 uprising--the first of many failed Kurdish challenges to modern Turkey’s republic.

Kurds are an ancient people whose language is related to Persian. About 22 million Kurds live in a mountainous region straddling Turkey, Syria, Iraq, Iran, Armenia and Azerbaijan. Western powers promised the Kurds an independent homeland in the 1920 treaty that carved up Turkey after the Ottoman Empire collapsed.

But Kemal Ataturk, who founded the Turkish republic three years later, fought to retain the land and assimilate Kurds and other minorities into a monolithic state, which remains Turkey’s official ideal. The government has crushed every Kurdish uprising since by hanging the leader, emptying rebel villages in the mountainous southeast and deporting Kurds to other parts of the country.

To this day, Kurds in Turkey have no right to teach or broadcast in their language. Even calling for such rights can land an activist in jail.

University Life Led to Independence Idea

The inspiration for the latest uprising came to Ocalan in the early 1970s in the Turkish capital, Ankara, when he was a political science student at Ankara University. He embraced Marxism, the dominant creed there, but was annoyed that Turkish leftists failed to embrace the Kurdish cause with equal enthusiasm.

Jailed for handing out left-wing leaflets, he was freed seven months later, having developed what he calls the “radical idea” of an independent Kurdish state.

“At first, there were no sympathizers, even among Kurds,” he recalled. “The Turks thought that Kurdistan was in the graveyard, that the Kurds had no history.”

He dropped out of school and formed a band of about 30 Kurdish fighters in the southeastern city of Diyarbakir. They robbed banks and jewelry shops to supplement donations and in 1978 concocted a Marxist, separatist platform that targeted Kurdish landlords as well as Turkish agents.

The government declared martial law in the southeast that year, and it remains in force. Ocalan and his band slipped across the border to Syria just before Turkey’s 1980 military coup, and he has not been back.

Since the guerrillas’ first cross-border raid in 1984, Ocalan has backtracked from his original ideals, toning down his Marxism to draw pious Muslims into the movement and, since 1994, calling for Kurdish autonomy and linguistic rights within--not beyond--Turkey’s borders. The army viewed all this as a tactical withdrawal by a weak enemy.

One principle on which Ocalan never wavered was his absolute authority in the movement.

Wary of rivals and infiltrators, he had at least 61 of his fighters executed, including 20 who were hunted down in Europe, according to Halit Celik, a rebel-turned-informer whose estimates are similar to those of other defectors.

Selim Curukkaya, another former guerrilla, says Ocalan surrounded himself with “servants and maids” and never tolerated dissent from even close associates, prompting the defections of a series of seconds-in-command.

The latest of these, Semdin Sakik, left in 1996 after Ocalan denounced him for ineptness in battle. Sakik replied that “the Leader” was a “mentally unbalanced tyrant” who lived it up in the Syrian and Lebanese capitals while sending teenage boys and girls to die in the mountains.

“Yes, he can be a tyrant,” a Kurdish journalist in Diyarbakir said. “But every liberation struggle needs such a leader to keep discipline and order. Otherwise, the movement could not have survived this long.”

Ocalan has, in fact, kept out of the war zone, but he makes certain that his name--and no other--is synonymous with the fight. Belief that the rebellion depends entirely on him is so strong among its supporters that 18 followers set themselves afire in anguish over his arrest. Eleven of them died.

“He helps us to think big,” said Huseyin Bayrak, the leader of a medical workers union in Diyarbakir, where Apo-worship runs deep. “Through Apo, we have recovered our history, our identity. In Apo, we see the revolution that we could not carry out.”

Ocalan kept his grip on the movement in part because his Syrian hosts helped him control its war chest, former guerrillas say. The money flowing to Damascus, according to police in several European countries, came not only from willing Kurdish expatriates but also from extortion, drug trafficking and fees paid by Kurds in exchange for their being guided to European nations as illegal immigrants.

Turkey helps Ocalan too. Because it refuses to allow anyone less brutal to emerge as a legal advocate for Kurdish rights, many Kurds who shun violence say he’s their only hope. The army’s own brutality--its destruction of nearly 3,000 Kurdish villages and expulsion of 2 million villagers--has fed an insurgency estimated to number 7,000 fighters.

Human Rights Watch holds Ocalan’s rebels responsible for at least 768 of the war’s estimated 4,400 noncombat deaths, including those of civil servants and teachers who did not obey rebel orders to shut down their schools. The rebels also have kidnapped two dozen foreign tourists in Turkey and attacked Turkish businesses across Europe, prompting Germany and France to outlaw their party.

Defense of Slayings Subject to Dispute

Ocalan acknowledges that there have been “physical eliminations” within the ranks. He makes the disputable claim that his party never had a policy of killing noncombatants but merely failed to control “certain individuals” who did.

“There are people in our movement who have caused us more trouble than our enemies,” he said.

But he insists that a trial of his alleged crimes would obscure the historical causes of the conflict.

The guerrilla leader speaks more candidly of his private war--his marriage to Kisire Yildrim. Their 10-year, childless union ended in 1987 when Yildrim, a charter member of the party’s central committee, was locked up at a rebel camp in Lebanon for resisting her husband’s orders. Friends helped her escape to Sweden.

Ocalan said he had become suspicious two years earlier when his father-in-law, a Kurdish agent of the Turkish intelligence police, told the media that he allowed the marriage only because he hoped to draw the warlord away from his cause.

“When I realized that the state was trying to control me through this woman, I fought back,” Ocalan said, visibly agitated by the memory. “The marriage turned into an unbearable political conflict.”

The state has tried almost everything to bring Ocalan down. Turkish officials say their government is spending nearly $20 million a day fighting his insurgency. One official says secret agents tried twice to assassinate Ocalan in Syria. Emboldened by a budding military alliance with Israel, Turkey moved its army to Syria’s border in early October and demanded his surrender.

Syria quietly ordered him out. He left Oct. 9 with a fake Syrian passport bearing the name Abdullah Sarokurd. The fictitious last name means “leader of the Kurds.”

Ocalan’s journey has revealed volumes about foreign alliances and quiet diplomacy on both sides of the Kurdish conflict.

A neo-fascist Russian lawmaker invited Ocalan to Moscow and set him up in a secret police compound. Israeli intelligence traced him there by intercepting his cellular phone calls and alerted the Turks. Turkey and the United States pressed Russia to get rid of him, with Turkey promising Moscow high-tech military equipment.

The Russians offered Ocalan safe passage to Greece, Libya, Armenia or Cyprus. Instead, he phoned a Communist ally in the Italian Parliament, who flew to Moscow, escorted him to Rome and counseled him to surrender to airport police. Italy’s government, caught off guard, held him on a warrant for ordering terrorist acts in Germany--until the Germans dropped that case out of fear it would provoke violence at home.

Since then, Ocalan has been caught between conflicting pressures of war and peace.

His separation from the Mideast guerrilla camps has made him more accessible to moderate Kurdish exiles who are politically active across Europe and oppose his violent path. Many have met with him in Rome to encourage his conversion to peaceful politics.

‘The Leader’ Will Fight Again, Exiles Predict

But with Europe’s welcome mat wearing thin and Turkey’s army vowing to crush the guerrillas, some Kurdish exiles predict that Ocalan may soon rejoin his fighters, who have moved their camps from Syria to Iran and Armenia.

“Ocalan is still the sole source of authority in his party, but we cannot talk to a terrorist and a criminal,” said O. Faruk Logoglu, Turkey’s deputy foreign minister. “We must bring him to justice. Until we do, he’ll continue to hurt us no matter where he is.”