For Turkish Rebel Kurds, Disillusionment Replaces Passion for Battle

When Ferhat first set eyes on Edibe at a training camp in the mountains separating Turkey and Iraq, it was, he said, “as if a bullet had pierced my heart and love gushed forth like a waterfall.”

The woman at his side smiled shyly and said, “I knew immediately that he was the one.”

But romance was forbidden among the Marxist guerrillas of the Kurdistan Workers Party as decadent bourgeois self-indulgence. So for more than two years the couple exchanged coded love letters through a trusted go-between. Based on opposite sides of the border, they saw each other rarely and only in the company of fellow fighters.

“As our love grew, so too did our despair, because neither of us wanted to be called traitors,” Ferhat recalls.

That was before their leader, Abdullah Ocalan, fell into the hands of Turkish forces in 1999 and declared that the Kurdish drive for independence from Turkey had been a mistake. “We felt used and betrayed,” Ferhat said. “We no longer knew what we were fighting for and so we decided to escape.”

Ferhat, 27, and Edibe, 23, say other fighters feel the same way. Disillusioned with the guerrilla movement and its leadership, worn down by years of war against the vastly superior Turkish army, a growing number of comrades are seeking a way out, according to the couple and other deserters.

The Kurdistan Workers Party has been waging an armed separatist campaign in Turkey’s largely Kurdish southeastern provinces since 1984. Its call for an independent nation for more than 20 million Kurds scattered primarily across four nations struck a chord among thousands in Turkey long alienated by the government’s refusal to recognize their ethnic identity.

More than 30,000 people, mostly armed rebels, have died in the conflict, which at its peak in the early 1990s pitted about 8,000 guerrillas against the second-largest military in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.

An estimated 5,000 guerrillas are in retreat here in northern Iraq, looking like a defeated force.

“Their morale is very low; before, they used to fight with passion,” said Sami Abdurrahman, a leading figure in one of the two Iraqi Kurdish movements that administer northern Iraq. “They have no spirit, no goal. Turkey has won the war.”

Ferhat and Edibe made their escape last June. After months of planning, the couple met at a mountain pass near the Iraq-Iran border and began a two-week trek to Salahuddin, where they joined Abdurrahman’s movement. They have since married.

“For 11 days we survived on melted snow and wild herbs,” Edibe said. Their guerrilla training helped them evade former comrades sent to capture them. “We proved to be tougher than them in the end,” Ferhat said, grinning.

Escape did not mean freedom, however, because Turkey offers no amnesty for guerrilla combatants who return home.

Interviewed in a dilapidated hotel room in this Iraqi village about 40 miles south of the Turkish border, the couple asked that their last names not be published for fear of guerrilla or government reprisals against their families in Turkey.

Abdurrahman said about 200 guerrillas have deserted the Kurdistan Workers Party and joined his militia in recent months, and just as many are reported to have taken up arms with a rival Iraqi Kurdish movement in Western-protected northern Iraq. Overflights by U.S. and British warplanes based in Turkey have kept the area outside the control of President Saddam Hussein’s government in Baghdad since the Persian Gulf War ended a decade ago.

In return for that protection, both Iraqi Kurdish movements are helping the Turkish army in its frequent assaults on the remnants of Ocalan’s rebel army, which is ensconced in the craggy mountains along Iraq’s borders with Turkey and Iran. Ferhat works as a military consultant for Abdurrahman’s group.

From solitary confinement in an island prison near Istanbul, Ocalan has vowed with renewed belligerence to retaliate for the Turkish raids. “We don’t want war, but if they come to us with the aim of extermination, we will use our legitimate right to self-defense,” he said in a recent statement issued by his lawyers.

Nihat Ali Ozcan, a terrorism expert at the Eurasia Strategic Research Center in Ankara, the Turkish capital, believes that Ocalan remains in firm control of the guerrilla movement and that the rebels still pose a threat to Turkey. “They may be weaker but they retain the their capacity to hurt us badly,” he said.

But rebel deserters say that Ocalan is losing his grip over the movement and that a power struggle is shaping up between his supporters and those who want to resume guerrilla raids into Turkey.

Ocalan was convicted of treason in 1999 and sentenced to hang, but the government stayed his execution pending a review by the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg, France. In return, Ocalan ordered his men to call off their offensive and withdraw to northern Iraq.

Military leaders in Turkey have dismissed Ocalan’s overtures as a tactical ploy and vowed to pursue the rebels until they surrender or die.

The army also opposes the “cultural autonomy” that Ocalan now advocates as alternative to independence for Turkey’s 12 million Kurds, even though some officials are willing to accept such a concession as a necessary step for their nation’s admission to the European Union.

When Deputy Prime Minister Mesut Yilmaz made such a case recently, calling for relaxed government bans on broadcasting and teaching in the Kurdish language, the army criticized such concessions as possibly leading to an independent Kurdish state.

“Ocalan saved his own neck, but nothing has changed for the Kurds,” Edibe said. This is a view she could not freely express among her former comrades, even though it was shared by many, she said. “Anyone who speaks up against the leadership faces execution.”

Edibe, now five months pregnant, said she and Ferhat would like to return to her native village in southeastern Turkey. “I no longer want war, I just want to be a mom,” she said. But that would mean likely arrest and a life sentence in prison.

Ahmet Turk, a leader of Turkey’s largest legal Kurdish party, laments the government’s refusal to grant full amnesty to guerrillas in the wake of their unilateral cease-fire.

“These people should be encouraged to return, to re-integrate into society. This would be one of the most important steps for a lasting peace,” he said at the party’s headquarters in Ankara.

The government in 1998 issued a “repentance law” that allows reduced sentences for Kurdish rebels who can prove that they did not take part in combat and are willing to inform on their comrades. Few have taken up the offer.