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Serxwebfin
London:
ass.
Istanbul:
London:
Vol. 49,
online at
The P n the 2 s
C ont inui ty through b reaks?
Ahmet Ham di Akkaya
and Joost Jongerden
ntroduction
The Kurdistan W orkers Party (PKK) has been, and is, one of the
most impo rtant
secular political movem ent in the M iddle East. The party s
radical political outlook
(with its view of K urdistan as an international colony and its
objective of u nifica-
tion, both of Kurdistan and the revolutionary forces in T urkey)
and strategy (the
determination that liberation can be acco mplished only by a
means of a people s
war, and its lack of hesitation in adopting v iolence as a
tactic, not only against the
state but also against powerful K urdish tribal leaders and
those con sidered to be
col labora tors) have been a t the hear t of co ntroversy (Van
Bruinessen 1988;
Kutsc hera 1994 ; McD owall 2007). Yet sine the capture of PKK
leader Abdullah
(i)calan, the focu s of discu ssion has shifted towards an
alleged radical break in the
PKK s political outlook and its capac ities to act. Did the
organization in the Imrali
period throw off i t s PK K heritage, and give up the ideal of a
uni ted Ku rdis tan
Oz can 2006 )? Or was the PK K un dergoing a similor fate as
Shilling Path in Peru,
an organization losing its way after the capture of its leader
(Hoffman and Cragin
2002)?
In this contribution, we argue that the PKK experienced severe
difficulties
in the period following the arrest of Ab dullah (kalm, but has
managed to reinvent
itself through a series of transformations. W e discuss s ome of
the changes that the
PKK has experienced in the 2000s, co nsidering its ideology,
polities and organiza-
t ion. And we argue tha t the PKK has nei ther abandoned the
idea of a uni ted
Kurdistan nor i ts efforts to accomp lish radical poli tical
change in Tu rkey, but is
trying to accomplish these in new w ays. Furthermore, the PKK
has no t been pu shed
into marginality, but rather has remained b oth a strong
pan-Kurdish p olitical actor
and an important acto r in Turkish polities.
In this chapter we try to understand changes in the PK K from
the party s ow n
perspective. Data has been c ollected through the study of Ab
dullah (5calan s defence
t ext s and the `prison notes , along with key PK K docum ents ,
such as congress
reports and form al decisions. This chapter is compo sed of
three parts. In the first,
we discuss the developments between the autumn of 1998 and
August 1999, during
which A bdullah eicalan was forced to leave Syria where he had
lived for almost
20 years and was finally captured in Kenya and brought to
Turkey. In the second
part , we take a closer look at the changes the PK K underw ent
after the arrest of
Ocalan. We consider the organizational structure of the PKK (the
transformation
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Ahmet Ham di Akkaya and Joost Jongerden
Sakar, M . (2008) `K iirtler exalan'a sahip eiksuf Ava ilable
online at (accessed 12 January 2009).
Trilsch, M and R iith, A. (2006) 'Ocalan v s Turkey'.
The Am erican Journal of International
Law,
100/1: 180-6.
Van B ruinessen, M. (1988) 'Between Guerilla War and Political
Murder: The W orkers Party
of K urdistan',
MERIP M iddle East Report,
No. 153: 40-6.
2000) `Turkey, Europe and the Kurds after the Capture of
