PKK Terrorism
"Today, following the arrest in Rome of Abdullah Öcalan, the Turkish Government said that it would press by every means available to it for him to be returned to Turkey to face trial.'
Öcalan has been responsible for thousands of deaths, kidnappings, mutilations, and attacks on innocent people during his quarter century long career as a professional terrorist.
Abdullah Ocalan was born in the province of Şanlıurfa in 1949. His mother tongue is Turkish and he has only a poor grasp of any Kurdish dialect and other languages. He had a conventional school education and his original ambition was to be an officer in the Turkish Armed Forces, but he failed the examination for the military academy. He did however get admission in 1971 to the Ankara University Political Sciences Faculty, where he joined the student underground revolutionary movements trying to overthrow Turkey's parliamentary system. He was dismissed from the university due to lack of attendance.
The cell of terrorists which he controlled rapidly broke with other groups. It was known for its extreme use of violence and the Apocu's (Followers of Apo) as the PKK was called in its early days had a special trademark: they hacked off the noses of their opponents in Ankara and other cities.
From the late 1970's, Öcalan worked closely with the Soviet Union and with Syria whose governments were attempting to create a political breakdown in Turkey. In 1980, Öcalan fled to Syria and used Syrian facilities, including training grounds in the Beka'a Valley, to train terrorist groups for cross-border terrorist attacks against targets in Turkey. He began to give an ethnic Kurdish dimension to his terrorist activities, though this usually had to be imposed on local populations by violent means, including kidnapping young men at gun point and then forcing them to undergo indoctrination and join his movement. In August 1984 Öcalan's terrorist groups began attacking Turkish police stations and similar targets in the southeast provinces north of the border with Syria and Iraq.
The main target of the PKK were the populations of all villages which resisted it. Using long-range rifles and rocket launchers, the PKK murdered thousands of innocent men, women, children, and babies. In response the Turkish authorities trained villagers to defend themselves in a militia system and also moved some populations out of areas where they would be at most risk. These two moves, intended to protect local populations, have been at the centre of a disinformation campaign by the PKK and its sympathizers.
Due to its ability to strike at Turkey from bases in Syria and (after the 1990 Gulf War) in northern Iraq, the PKK initially proved a severe threat to law and order and claimed many victims. Thanks to operations against its bases, Turkey has now succeeded in restoring law and order throughout the southeastern provinces where the PKK originally set its sights.
The PKK ("The Workers Party of Kurdistan") operates along the.familiar lines of Communist parties and carries out terrorist activities under the rigid direction of its Central Committee. Both its "political" and military wings are directly controlled by Öcalan. The PKK's enemies did not only include the Turkish authorities but also the two leading ethnic Kurdish groups in Iraq and Syria, the Kurdish Democratic Party of Masud Barzani and the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan of Djelal Talabani.
Throughout his career, collaboration with the former Soviet Union have been the two bases of Öcalan's method. Though the PKK has been considered an ethnic and cultural movement in southeastern Turkey by some Western circles, its real goals have not changed. Inside Turkey it continues to work terrorist activities. In the last two years, the PKK has regularly said that it wants to take over the whole of Turkey and to destroy all the existing politica1 parties there. It has also tried to launch a new terrorist campaign along Turkey's Black Sea Coast in areas which is based solely on ideological motives. Needless to say this terrorist activity has been completely unsuccessful.
In October this year, Turkey informed Syria that it would take action unless that government halted its support for Öcalan's. terrorist groups. It formally requested the extradition of Öcalan to Turkey. As a result, Öcalan moved to Moscow, but he was forced to move again after Turkey's strong protests.
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