John Rees. Orbis. Volume 36, Issue 4. Fall 1992.
How Democracy Fares
Following the failure of the putsch in Moscow, many in the West have proclaimed the death of communism and some have even boasted of being responsible for its demise. But the passing months have demonstrated that communism is not dead—not in Russia, not in the other former Soviet republics, and not outside the former USSR. To take only the most obvious proof, orthodox and reform communist parties still rule in China, Vietnam, Laos, North Korea, and Cuba.
Perhaps even more telling, though, as an indicator of communism’s vitality, is the number of Marxist-Leninist insurgent groups that may yet take power around the world. In Cambodia, for instance, Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge may conceivably return to power, displacing both the Vietnamese-backed regime of Heng Samrin and any coalition government formed after next year’s U.N.-supervised elections. In the Philippines, the New People’s Army (the insurgent force of the Communist Party of the Philippines) has demonstrated a well-developed, adaptable command structure that has survived the capture of many of its leaders, while the party itself has built up a large number of front organizations to serve as recruiting devices.
Three particularly flourishing Marxist-Leninist movements in the Third World are the Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path) of Peru; the African National Congress (ANC) of South Africa; and the Partia Kartia Kurdistan of southeastern Turkey (PKK—Kurdish Workers’ Party). All three of these Marxist-Leninist movements appear to have a reasonable chance of achieving state power by the end of this decade.
Peru’s Vulnerability
An unorthodox Maoist movement in Peru, the Sendero Luminoso, is taking advantage of special local conditions to organize a terrorist insurgency that many observers believe may rule the country within seven years. Specifically, Sendero has capitalized on five conditions in Peru: the drug trade in cocaine; the brutality and incompetence of the military and police; a collapsed economy; widespread corruption in government; and deep division between the impoverished, disempowered mestizos and Quechua-speaking Indians of the interior highlands on the one hand and the European elite on the other.
Cocaine. Not surprisingly, given that about 60 percent of the world’s cocaine comes from Peru, the cocaine trade provides Sendero with a continuous source of funding. Colombian cartels pay off Sendero, the rival Castroite revolutionary movement (Tupac Amalfi) and corrupt government officials -depending upon which group is dominant in the part of the country where the cartel is operating.
In the Upper Huallaga Valley, where coca is about the only cash crop, Sendero units have won the loyalty of thousands of the coca farmers, by defending their plantings from Peruvian and U.S. efforts to destroy coca processing facilities. Indeed, in large expanses of the Upper Huallaga Valley, Sendero Luminoso controls virtually all aspects of the cocaine business: allocating land, dictating prices paid the farmers, then negotiating the sale price directly with the Colombian cartels. In this region, Sendero is believed to have full and direct control over 30,000 hectares (nearly 75,000 acres) of coca bush plantations. The insurgents also control many airports used by drug exporters and levy a “tax” on each outgoing flight of between $5,000 and $15,000. The resulting income has enabled Sendero to purchase weapons on the international market and from corrupt Peruvian military personnel.
Brutality. In no small degree, the Peruvian military and police unintentionally aid the Sendero insurgency by abusing human rights. Harsh and arbitrary repression is applied with a broad brush against campesinos, villagers, and residents of the urban shanty towns.
This has been the rule since the inception of the Sendero insurrection. In December 1982, the central government placed nine provinces in three departments of the central highlands under martial law because of Sendero operations. A few months later, General Luis Cisneros stated that his army was at war, and in war “there are no human rights.” Bluntly, the security forces have been extremely successful recruiters for the guerrillas.
Poverty. Roughly 80 percent of Peru’s populace lives in poverty. Between 1988 and 1990, the economy contracted 22 percent. Under the government of former President Alan Garcia Perez, payments on much of the country’s foreign debt were terminated and the country was largely cut off from foreign credit. In 1989, inflation ran at more than 3,000 percent. On taking office in mid-1990, President Alberto Fujimori undertook the strict austerity measures demanded by the International Monetary Fund and started paying interest on the foreign debt of more than $20 billion. The Fujimori government reduced inflation to about 55 percent last year and, despite near deadlock with congress, instituted reforms of trade, investment, and tariff laws. Last year, the economy grew by 2.8 percent, but it may take a decade to restore per capita income levels to the 1987 level.
These economic conditions play a critical role in generating support for the Sendero insurgency, and the organization knows it. For years, as Peru’s economy declined, religious charities, many supported and staffed by Americans and Europeans, were the main non-economic sources of sustenance for the poor. Now, however, foreign relief and religious workers, even the Catholic Church itself, are targets of Sendero assassins. An American priest in Lima said in a recent interview, “The terrorism makes it very difficult sometimes because people are threatened and if you stand too closely with the Church, then you know the other side has you marked.” During the past year, Sendero has visibly taken control of several of the squatter slums surrounding Lima.
Corruption. Exacerbated by money from narcotics trafficking, Peru’s governmental institutions became a by-word for corruption, with the most egregious abuses evident in the judicial system. The Fujimori administration, though pledged to reform, has made limited headway in reform since taking office in mid-1990. In criticism before the House Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on Western Hemisphere Affairs in March, Assistant Secretary of State Bernard Aronson listed six urgent reform priorities essential if the Peruvian government were to strengthen democracy. Ironically, less than a month later, the army and President Fujimori decided reform was not possible within the constitutional democracy. Dozens of presidential decrees have been issued on topics from making prison terms mandatory for tax evaders to firing many prison officials and all the magistrates of the Labor Court because it was common knowledge that their judgments were for sale. The four-day pitched battle by police and military units to regain control of the Miguel Castro Castro Penitentiary from Sendero prisoners also was explained as essential to ending endemic corruption in the prison system that had allowed the Sendero Luminoso to take control of several wings of the prison and show it off to Western journalists—including “CBS Evening News” camera crews—as a “liberated zone.”
Racial division. Sendero Luminoso’s founding cadre, all university-based intellectuals, spent years tailoring a message of “people’s war” to the Quechua-speaking Indian villagers of the Andean Central Highlands. Sendero emphasized racial and class divisions in which blancos (whites), who comprise 15 percent of the population, dominate government, the military and business; the cholos (those of mixed Indian-European heritage), who comprise about 40 percent, are in the middle ranks of status and income; and the indios are at the bottom. The elite long regarded the Indians as passive, but Quechua-speaking Indians contemptuously use the word wiracocha (white lord) to refer to those of. European descent or to cholos who appear mostly European. Peruvian leaders did not regard Sendero’s organizing among the Indians as a serious problem, and they ignored for two years the guerrilla attacks on Indian villages that began in 1980. By the time the government did recognize the threat, Sendero Luminoso commanded, through fear and allegiance, the obedience of many villagers.
The Shining Path
Sendero’s founder and leader, Abimael Guzman Reynoso, was a professor of philosophy at the University of Ayacucho. For more than a quarter century, Guzman has been slowly developing his insurgency. In the early 1960s, he joined a pro-Mao Zedong faction that split from Peru’s pro-Moscow communist movement. The Cultural Revolution and Red Guards inspired him, as did the “people’s war” waged by North Vietnam. Under the name “Comrade Gonzalo,” Guzman began developing a methodical strategy for a people’s war in Peru, using the ideas of Marx, Lenin, Stalin, and Mao, and adapting them to Peruvian conditions as outlined by the Peruvian radical Jose Carlos Mariategui. His group, then called the Partida Comunista Revolucionario Bandera Roja (PCP—Communist Party of Peru-Red Flag), became the PCP-Sendero Luminoso. Guzman broke with the Chinese Communist Party after the Gang of Four was deposed. That Sendero Luminoso has on occasion bombed both the Soviet and Chinese embassies in Lima on the same night suggests its present independence.
Twelve years after Sendero’s armed struggle began, there is no area of Peru in which their death squads do not operate, and two-thirds of the country is under martial law. The cumulative death toll attributed to insurgent and counter-insurgent actions is 23,000, with another 4,000 people missing. The U.S. State Department’s official estimate of 3,000 to 5,000 full-time Sendero fighters and 6,000 to 10,000 part-timers may be low.
Sendero Luminoso presents itself as offering alternative governmental services—education, indoctrination, culture, medical care. But its principal focus is on a relentless sabotage of infrastructure –electrical power lines, bridges, school buildings, foreign-owned businesses—plus the assassination of mayors, municipal officials, teachers, police, military officers, and civilian political leaders at the local and national level. With these violent tactics, Guzman believes, the state’s foundations will be so eroded that the entire edifice will collapse.
And terror is indeed eroding Peru’s fragile democracy and institutions. Mayoral and city council posts go unfilled when no one will stand for office. Recently, Sendero cadre have been targeting foreign priests, nuns, and religious or charity workers, demonstrating Sendero control over the shantytowns and rural regions. In February, an assassination squad invaded a social function attended by the vice-mayor of Villa El Salvador, Lima’s largest shantytown, the popular leftist but anti-Sendero Maria Elena “Malena” Moyano. In front of her family and friends, Moyano was shot dead with automatic weapons. Then, before her screaming children, the Sendero assassins dragged Malena’s corpse into the street, put a powerful bomb on it and blew it to bits.
Because terror, not merely death, is Sendero’s tactic for demonstrating the regime’s inability to protect the populace, the process of killing is made horrible. Murder by disembowelment, forcing neighbors and relatives at gunpoint to hack a victim to death slowly and to commit ritual cannibalism, and kidnapping village children and making them Sendero executioners are commonplace. In January 1990, a Sendero band comprised mostly of children stopped a bus at gunpoint, forced two French tourists to get off, and shot them. Then, in the words of Assistant Secretary of State Aronson, the youngest child in the Sendero band “was made to beat one of the victims’ skull with a large rock until it was completely crushed.” The previous November also, two tourists were taken off a bus, tortured, and killed. In that case, the young woman victim was disemboweled. Four years ago, in an interview published by the Sendero newspaper, El Diario, Guzman said “Regarding violence, we begin with the principle established by Mao Zedong: Violence is a universal law, without exception … Without revolutionary violence, we cannot replace one class with another.” The revolution will be accomplished after Peruvians “cross over the river of blood.”
Last fall, Luis Arce Borja, the Brussels-based editor of El Diario Internacional and the man in charge of disseminating Sendero propaganda abroad (through a front organization called the Peruvian People’s Movements), wrote that during the revolution’s “strategic defense” stage (1980-1989), 35,000 people had been killed. In the current stage of “strategic equilibrium,” he predicted, with government and Sendero forces about equal, one million Peruvians will die.
In an interview with Lima’s Expreso last October, Adolfo Olaechea, the Sendero representative in London, said:
The revolution is at the stage of strategic balance. This means that the country already has been wiped out and it is time to begin the struggle against the high-level military units. We are no longer merely guerrillas; our organization is made up of regular forces. I think that the enemy will be defeated soon, and that before the end of this century, we will establish a popular republic that, I hope, will be ruled by President Gonzalo. We are preparing to meet this objective.
The Sendero insurgency is now advanced and the capital is being encircled. In this final stage of the revolution, Sendero hopes to use terrorist tactics to force many Peruvian leaders to flee, accelerating demoralization and governmental collapse. The political anarchy following Fujimori’s auto-coup can only aid the insurgents’ goal. And yet, if Washington turns its back on Peru because of the collapse of democracy in Lima, what will it do when Sendero Luminoso creates its “strategic equilibrium” of a million dead?
The Red and the Black
Last December, the South African Communist Party (SACP) held its Eighth Party Congress, an event attended by delegations from the Communist party of China, the Communist party of Cuba, and “fraternal parties” of several other countries. It amounted to a revival meeting for orthodox Marxist-Leninists. Joe Slovo, who was stepping down as general secretary to take up the honorary post of national chairman, gave a fiery two-hour defense of socialism and communism, asserting that the system that had been killed in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe was not true socialism. “We remain absolutely convinced that, despite some of the horrors of Stalinism, it is socialism and only socialism which can, in the end, assure every individual and humanity as a whole of freedom in its true meaning.” But Slovo’s effort to have the SACP support “democratic .socialism” in its charter was voted down by ultra-militants, who demanded no “appeasement” of imperialism.
Despite such militancy, the SACP can lay claim to being the most widely approved non-ruling Communist party now in existence. This anomaly is due to the reputation it has won as mentor and ally of’ the African National Congress (ANC) during a 40-year struggle against apartheid. The Soviet bloc and its allies long fostered this reputation by massive propaganda alleging communism were the only whites opposed to apartheid, despite the worldwide international economic sanctions that forced the white government in South Africa to abandon apartheid.
Perhaps the most egregious example of such an equation of the SACP with a “civil rights” movement was the 1988 film, A World Apart, a fictionalized life of Joe Slovo and his wife Ruth First. In addition to being SACP general secretary from 1987-1991, Slovo was a leader of the ANC’s terrorist wing, MK (Umkhonto we Sizwe—Spear of the Nation) from 1963-1987. But in the script of A World Apart, written by his daughter Shawn Slovo, the word “communism” is raised only by children taunting the Shawn Slovo character, and by an interrogator who drives her mother to try suicide in prison. Directed and beautifully photographed by the Oscar-winning cameraman Chris Menges (The Killing Fields and The Mission), the film shows a family modeled on the Slovos persecuted by the government for opposing discrimination; the father mysteriously fleeing the country one night; the mother arrested, interrogated, driven to attempt suicide, then released and reunited with her daughter, who quickly conquers childish selfishness and comes to understand the impassioned struggle of her parents. At the end, mother and daughter attend the funeral of a heroic black revolutionary, and there they raise their clenched fists together. A World Apart, won three awards at the 1988 Cannes film festival, including the Jury Grand Prix, and, rated “PG,” still makes the rounds of cable television’s film channels.
But beneath this bright “civil rights” image, the SACP is an orthodox Marxist-Leninist party that gives every evidence of controlling the policies of the African National Congress and directing as well the policy of the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU). For example, before “the SACP partially revealed its leadership in July, Aft/ca Confidential May 4, 19901 estimated that 27 of the 35 ANC National Executive Committee (NEC) members were SACP members.” The SACP also exercises a strong presence in executive posts throughout the ANC’s administrative structures, such as the president-general’s office and Political Military Council.
Of the 50 people elected to the ANC-s National Executive Committee in July 1991, approximately half were well-known SACP members and leaders. These included Chris Hani, then MK’s chief of staff; Thabo Mbeki, who was on the SACP political bureau until he began to devote himself full time to the ANC; Joe Slovo, SACP general secretary until December 1991, now working full time for the ANC; Ahmed Kathrada; Ronnie Kasrils, another MK leader; Harry Gwala, the hard-line SACP factional leader and ANC leader in Natal, whose SACP Natal Midlands branch on August 21 declared its support for the leaders of the Moscow putsch; Steve Tshwete, head of the ANC Organizing Department; Raymond Mhlaba; Mac Maharaj; Alfred Nzo, who moved from the SACP Central Committee to head the ANC secretary-general’s office; Raymond Suttner; Ebrahim Ismail Ebrohim; Aziz Pahad; Cheryl Carolus; Mohamed Valli Moosa; John Nkadimeng; Gertrude Shope; Sidney Mafumadi; Reginald September; Billy Nair; Jeremy Cronin and Kadar Asmal. The ANC’s new secretary-general, Cyril Ramaphosa, former head of the National Union of Miners and a leader of COSATU, at first refused to say whether or not he held SACP membership; later, he said vaguely it was in a state of suspension.
This holding of high posts simultaneously in the SACP and ANC continues to work both ways. Thus, among those elected in December 1991 to the SACP Central Committee were: Slovo, Hard, Kasrils, Gwala, Mhlaba, Suttner, Nkadimeng, Nair, Cronin and Mafumadi. Many other South African Communist Party Central Committee members, as well as rank and file members, are active in the ANC; and have previously served on the ANC’s National Executive Committee; examples include Govan Mbeki, Essop Pahad, Garth Strachan, and Brian Bunting.
In December 1991, Walter Sisulu (the ANC’s deputy president) told the SACP congress that success in the Convention for a Democratic South Africa (CODESA) negotiations “requires tight unity at the center. It requires a powerful engine that propels the liberation movement as a whole. That engine is our alliance between the ANC, SACP and COSATU.”” Similarly, COSATU’s general secretary Jay Naidoo told the SACP delegates, “The left is under attack and we need to unite in defense of the struggle for fundamental transformation.” But perhaps the clearest statement of unity came a few months earlier from Chris Hani, who had been MK’s chief of staff for fifteen years and was soon to replace Slovo as SACP general secretary. “You see,” he told a BBC interviewer in August 1991, “we share the same objectives in terms of the national democratic revolution, in terms of building a post-apartheid South Africa. We are bound by those common objectives.”
Linking Apartheid and Capitalism
Given the SACP’s attempt to exploit the drive for black equality for its own purposes, one should not be surprised to find it identifying apartheid with capitalism. In a February 1992 interview, General Secretary Hani said, “We must admit that in this country capitalism bears the main responsibility for the poverty of our people. Capitalism and apartheid have been and are still like Siamese twins; and you can never say it is not capitalism, it is apartheid. Both worked together to reap maximum profits. So for us in the party, this will be our main terrain of struggle, now and in the future.”
Slovo has also iterated the identification of apartheid with capitalism, saying, “In South Africa, the historical link between capitalism and poverty is nowhere more apparent and more disgraceful.” He continued, “At the height of apartheid from 1950 to 1970, the economic system made it possible for foreign capital in South Africa to attract a 21 percent rate of return—three times higher than that of the advanced industrial countries. Who was it if not the mining houses who campaigned remorselessly for pass laws, ghettos, military-style compounds, the perpetuation of the reserve system.”
More generally, Marxist rhetoric pervades the comments of those allied with the SACP and ANC, as when Walter Sisulu espoused an old socialist viewpoint, saying that “the entire alliance” understood “that the freedom of our people will mean little if they have the vote, but have no houses nor land.”
Potential for Violence
In addition to the shared views and conjoined size of SACP and ANC, one must add their violent histories as a cause for worry. In the early 1960s and then during the late 1980s, the ANC and SACP conducted terrorism and sabotage against civilian targets. The more recent terrorist campaign was suspended, because the public reaction among black and white in South Africa was one of anger and revulsion. The bombings of fast food restaurants and bus stations used mainly by black commuters, plus car bombs and assassinations of moderate blacks, also elicited an adverse reaction from the SACP’s international support networks. Nonetheless, the ANC and SACP have never foresworn a return to armed struggle should the CODESA negotiating process falter.
Certainly, the theoretical and practical foundations for resuming armed struggle have been carefully protected. Chris Hani was for years Joe Slovo’s deputy in the leadership of the MK. In 1987, when Slovo became SACP general secretary, Hani succeeded him as MK commander. He retains wide-spread popularity among the MK cadres, and he opposed the suspension of armed struggle during negotiations. After fighting broke out between supporters of the ANC and the Inkatha Freedom Party, Hani spearheaded MK organization of para-military “self-defense units” to defend ANC-controlled areas. Thus, the likelihood is strong that the ANC and SACP would resume violence if negotiations do not produce results quickly. After being elected SACP general secretary, Hani stated:
As long as there’s space for peaceful negotiations, the SACP will explore that space fully and totally, but we are not going to stop short of the bottom line. And the bottom line is that this [white] government, which is illegitimate and unrepresentative, has no right to rule us even for a day.’
Turkey’s Kurds
Over the past two years, Turkey has come under increasing pressure from terrorist organizations espousing three ideologies: Marxism, ultra-nation-alism, and fundamentalist Islam. Many such groups appear to have at least one state sponsor, generally Syria, Iran, or Iraq. But by far the largest insurgent threat to Turkish stability is posed by the Kurdish Workers’ Party (PKK), formed in 1978 by Abdullah “APO” Ocalan.
The principal question regarding the PKK is whether it is a nationalist group using Marxist-Leninist rhetoric, or a Marxist-Leninist group using nationalist rhetoric. Seized documents concerning the organization of the PKK’s armed wing contained thirty points stating the ideology of the PKK is Marxism-Leninism. But the final answer to the question will not be known unless the PKK comes to exercise some sort of power—and the West’s experience with “agrarian reformers” and so forth suggests that would not be wise.
Turkish sources trace the major ideological influences on the PKK to radical Palestinian groups, such as George Habash’s Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, and to the development of Iraqi communism during the 1970s. These were then adapted for a primarily Kurdish ethnic entity, the PKK, which professes that its goal is to set up an independent, all-Kurdish state cawed from Turkish territory and operating along Marxist-Leninist lines.
Last November, while entertaining reporters at the PKK’s main training base, the Mahsum Korkmaz academy in the Syrian-controlled Bekka Valley of Lebanon, Ocalan described the PKK’s relationship to the PAK (Partiya Azadiya Kurdistan—Kurdistan Freedom Party), organized in October 1991 in southern Turkey, as one of “ideological and political” dominance. He explained that the PAK unfortunately “is not in a position to put Marxism and Leninism into practice.” Thus, he made it clear that the PKK exercises ideological and political control over the PAK, which is merely a front party. At the same time, Ocalan acknowledged that “the consequences of Marxism and Leninism currently are being debated throughout the world.” And Ocalan’s deputy, Numan, commander of the Mahsum Korkmaz camp, chimed in saying, “We accept Marxism as a science, and science is subject to constant improvement and changes.”
Ocalan presented the PKK as democratic in orientation and seeking to help democratize Turkey; but PKK manuals and materials captured by Turkish military forces indicate no ideological shift in the indoctrination of fighters in the PKK’s armed branch, the People’s Liberation Army of Kurdistan? The PKK monthly, Berxwedan, which circulates in the large Kurdish expatriate community in Germany, devotes most of its coverage not to ideology but to battlefield stories, denunciations of all things Turkish, and flattering accounts of “Chairman Apo” and his contacts with, for example, Libya’s Colonel Qaddafi.
Examples of the PKK’s democratic nature cited by Ocalan in interviews last fall in fact refer to infiltration of Turkish political parties. In March 1989, the PKK was supporting 18 mayoral candidates in Mardin, 10 in Slirt, 3 in Hakkari, and 20 in Tunceli. Two small, illegal revolutionary groups were cooperating with the PKK’s electoral effort. An additional five “independent” candidates were being supported by the PKK and four other illegal Marxist organizations. Ocalan pointed to the October election of several deputies openly supportive of the PKK as members of the People’s Labor Party (Halkin Emek Partisi HEP), which formed an electoral coalition with Inonu’s Social Democratic Populist Party (Sosyal Demokrasi Halkei Partisi–SHP), a part of the governing coalition. Esma Ocalan, mother of the PKK leader, was a guest of honor at the December HEP party congress. Former HEP leader Fehmi Isiklar and at least half a dozen other former senior HEP leaders who followed him into the SHP attended the HEP gathering. The HEP toned down its former anti-imperialist anti-American rhetoric and invited observers from the U.S., German, and other Western embassies to attend.
Last winter, Ocalan proclaimed his support of the HEP as a legal party whose strengthening “before a political solution is found would not be disadvantageous.” Ocalan also said he wanted “PKK sympathizers to join the Social Democratic Populist Party,” to influence the policy of Foreign Minister Inonu and Prime Minister Demirel towards an autonomous Kurdish “federation.”
The PKK Insurgency
Given the mountainous terrain of Kurdistan and the existence of safe havens in Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, and Iran, Ocalan has chosen a path to power for the PKK that borrows heavily from the precepts of a classical people’s war. The main text is Ocalan’s Popular War and Guerrilla in Kurdistan, in existence since the late 1980s. From 1984 through 1988, the PKK’s operations focused on “soft” targets such as the mayors of Kurdish towns, Kurdish village headmen, and members of the rural militia. These activities were successful in provoking a harsh response from the Turkish government, which viewed disturbances in the Kurdish regions as a military matter, not a political one. In turn, this harsh treatment of native Turkish Kurds and of refugees from Iraq helped fuel the ranks of the PKK. By 1989, PKK documents showed the guerrillas had expanded to 2,000 combatants.
The PKK’s main sources of arms and logistical support have been Syria, Iran and Iraq.
However, the PKK seems to have begun practicing the Marxist-Leninist ritual of criticism/self-criticism with Ocalan acknowledging the PKK had persuaded many Kurds they had more to fear from the PKK than from Turkish troops. In addition, the PKK commander seems to recognize that the wholesale slaughter imposed on Kurds who support the Turkish government has cost his organization valuable international prestige.
State support. Like certain other “popular” Marxist wars of liberation, the PKK’s war depends heavily on support from established states. Historically, this support did not come from the former Soviet Union but from the USSR’s clients. Thus, during the PKK’s campaign to disrupt Turkey’s general election, Turkish State Minister Esin Kocak stated that “Iraq, Syria and Iran are giving logistic support to the separatist PKK,” which became a source of intense friction with these governments.
According to Turkish intelligence and security sources, Syrian support for the PKK was sponsored personally by Jamil al-Assad, brother of President Hafiz al-Assad and leader of the Revolutionary Murtaza Party (RMP), formerly the Imam Murtaza Society, based in Latakia. From time to time, Syria has claimed to have ordered the PKK and other Turkish terrorist organizations out of its territory; but it is no secret that most closures of facilities were temporary or that new ones were opened both in Syria and in the Syrian-occupied Bekka valley of Lebanon. In April, Syria ostentatiously dosed the PKK and Dev-Sol camp and there were reports that Ocalan would be forced to move from Damascus, but most guerrillas had left the camp in March to join the offensive.
The PKK’s main sources of arms and logistical support have undoubtedly been Syria and Iran, with Iraq joining also, seeking a weapon against U.S.- allied Turkey in the PKK. Press reports, citing intelligence sources, state that after Ocalan and Saddam Husayn met in al-Mawsil early in 1991, Baghdad supplied weapons to the PKK for use against Turkey. There is insufficient evidence to determine whether that cooperation has continued. Ocalan’s prestige might suffer if he were seen as anally of Saddam Husayn’s repressive regime. At the same time, Iran seems to have switched its support to Turkish fundamentalists of the Hezbollah organization that has killed PKK fighters.
The PKK has also received some support from Greek and Greek Cypriot circles, apparently on the grounds that the enemy of my enemy is my friend. On December 5, 1991, Ocalan told a group of Turkish reporters in the Bekka Valley that the PKK wanted to set up a radio station in Greece, but that the Greek government said it did not have the money. Said Ocalan, “The Greeks say that we have a common cause. I do not wish to offend our Greek friends, but this is cheap politics …” Meanwhile, Turkish president Turgut Ozal has made concessions to Greece to persuade the Greek government not to support the PKK.” In 1989, a former PKK cadre said PKK members received guerrilla training in a refugee camp on Lavrion, a Greek island, and in camps in the ethnically Greek sector of Cyprus.
Lastly, the PKK has received indirect state support from the flood of weapons that entered the Kurdish region from all sides, including the Western powers, when they were arming and encouraging Kurds in their revolt against Saddam Husayn. It would be naive to think that various local Kurdish groups do not sell and trade guns to one another. This has led to some public recriminations against the Western powers from officials of Turkey’s National Intelligence Service.
Prospects. Ten Turkish provinces are currently under a state of emergency. The PKK is particularly active in the mountains south of Gaziantep, Urfa, Mardin, Midyat, Cizre, and Hakkari. By November 1991, an estimated 3,500 people including guerrillas, soldiers, and civilians had died in the eight-year struggle.
During the past year, the PKK battled to create a “liberated zone” by targeting the main elements of Turkish government in the ethnic Kurdish regions—civilian village officials; the 30,000 village home guards armed, if inadequately, by Ankara to defend Kurdish villages against PKK raids; and army posts. A leaflet distributed among the Kurdish villages in advance of the March 1992 spring offensive told the populace to obey the “instructions of the party, the front and the army.” It demanded: “Ann yourselves. Every village must be turned into a center of rebellion, every house into a firing position, and every family into a rebellious guerrilla group.” Kurds were ordered to form support groups for the insurrection, to establish underground food caches for the insurgents and the populace, to build air raid shelters, and establish courier networks. The leaflet said, “Children can be used as messengers. They can gather information on the movement of the enemy.”
The PKK draws its strength from the old and continuing grievances of an ethnic minority that feels, with cause, that its existence, language, and culture are threatened. The governments of Iran, Iraq, Syria, and even Turkey itself (as well as the Western powers) periodically manipulate Kurdish factions. At this stage, the PKK has been unable to seize and permanently hold territory, but it has been gaining adherents and has embarrassed Turkey internationally by raising charges of human rights abuse committed by military activities in the Kurdish regions. Internally, the persistence of the insurgency humiliates and might demoralize the army, that most respected of Turkish institutions.
In light of the traditions of the region, it seems probable that the PKK will continue to be used as a covert destabilizing weapon employed by Turkey’s neighbors. Syrian or Iranian statements disavowing aid to Kurdish militants have proved unreliable and deceitful in the past. In June, Turkish military sources said that Ocalan had added Iraq as a new protector. An Iraqi military base some 20 miles south of Mosul bas been turned over to the PKK. The Turkish military believes that much of the PKK’s equipment was transported from the Bekka to the new base in Iraq. Should the political climate in Turkey deteriorate, as it did in the late 1970s, the PKK and other militants could then expand into urban terrorism. What Ocalan seeks, apparently, is a political settlement that would create a PKK-dominated autonomous Kurdish region and put him ahead of the other Kurdish leaders. If conditions become severe enough, Ankara might strike a bargain.
Conclusion
It would be inaccurate to maintain that the utopian vision developed by Marx and Engels bas burnt itself out. Likewise, the totalitarian party structure developed by Lenin, Stalin, and Mao to install socialism are not yet relegated permanently to the ash heap of history. Ideas and philosophic movements rarely die out so quickly.
The Achilles’ heel of Marxism-Leninism was always its economic theory and its view of human motivation. Countries where governments have tried to implement Marxism thus tend to collapse. But the lure of Marxism-Leninism has been its provision of a rationale and structure for armed insurrection. While the grievances of national minorities and ethnic groups remain, therefore, so too will the pull of Leninism. As a result, this is no time for self-delusion within the democratic countries.