Captured Abdullah Ocalan: The most unwanted wanted man
It was an odyssey that began last Fall. Kurdish PKK leader Abdullah Ocalan was expelled from Syria in October when Turkey began making threatening intimidations toward Damascus, unhappy with the presence of the terrorist leader in the house of its southern neighbor. Ushered off to Moscow where the Communist Duma requested his asylum, the Russian government, with its hand stretched out for Western aid, thought it was hardly the moment to acquiesce to such a request.
Personally escorted from Moscow to Rome by several members of the Italian Refound Communist party, the Italian government endured a harrowing two months of national debate over whether Ocalan should held under arrest or granted the political asylum that he had requested. They would have preferred to ship him off to Germany which had requested his extradition. However, German Chancellor Schroeder proved to be pusillanimous when he negated in fear of retaliation from the large Kurdish presence in his country. The Italians never considered acceding to the Turkish extradition request since the crimes for which Ocalan is accused would require capital punishment.
On January 16th Ocalan left Italy and had been criss-crossing the continent airport-hopping ever since. Forlorn over his failure to find a European country willing to welcome him, two weeks ago word had it that Ocalan had had enough and was ready to turn himself over to the German police. The word came from Bonn’s secret service by way of the German weekly, Der Spiegal. Who knows where they got their information from!
The very same day the Kurdish question was transplanted to the Iberian Peninsula. At that time I was preparing a piece, the gist of which was the following:
After the Italians, it’s the turn of the Spanish to have their Kurdish affair. The regional Basque parliament has decided to host a reunion of the soi-disant Kurdish Parliament in exile. The Turks claim that this 65-member assembly is the political branch of Ocalan’s PKK terrorist group.
The Italian chapter of the Kurdish intrigue began last November when PKK leader Abdullah Ocalan arrived on a plane from Moscow. At that time Ankara began a full-fledged boycott of Italian products when Rome refused to honor their request for Ocalan’s extradition. Spanish businessmen are rightfully concerned that a diplomatic dispute could hurt their exports as well.
Prime Minister Jose Maria Aznar urged the Basque nationalists to reverse their decision to play host to the group. Not counting on his own power of persuasion, he also ordered three of his ministers, the Minister of Public Administration, the Interior Minister, and the Foreign Minister, to impede the Kurdish representatives from entering Spanish territory. However, that may be more difficult than it seems. Although the Kurds hold no proper documents, all 65 have political refugee status and are, therefore, able to circulate freely within the European Union.
While Spanish entrepreneurs continue to fear for the Ocalan effect from Ankara on their one and half billion dollar a year exports, the Basque and Catalan nationalists reiterate their solidarity toward a people "persecuted by Turkey."
I didn’t finish the piece, thinking it was probably too obscure to be considered newsworthy. I guess it’s a good thing I didn’t or I would have risked being called a Cassandra! Two days later Ocalan was captured in Kenya where he had sought asylum at the Greek Embassy in Nairobi. While the Turks are reveling over the capture of their public enemy number one believed to be responsible for the death of over 37,000 people, the Kurds in exile are wreaking havoc in embassies and consulates all over Europe.
The Kurds are a nation without a country. When the Ottoman Empire collapsed in 1920, the Kurds were promised the creation of the independent state of Kurdistan as part of the Treaty of Sevres, which was, however, never ratified. Instead, those who are not in exile, about 26 million, are divided between southeast Turkey, northeast Iraq, northwest Iran, and small sections of Syria and Armenia.
Twenty years before sharing the Nobel Peace prize together with his former enemies, Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Perez, Yassar Arafat was flaunting a pistol before the United Nations, calling for the creation of a Palestinian state, and promising violence if his call went unheeded. Several years of PLO assassinations, hijackings, and bombings earned the PLO and Arafat international prominence.
Desperate ends require desperate means. There seems to be no end to the lessons to be learned from the errors of the arbitrary carving up of nations on a map from the comfort of conference rooms and summit meetings. The international community has been unwilling to heed to the needs of the victims of their cartographical errors when those needs are mentioned in meekness. Though I would hardly advance exoneration for acts of terrorism, it should come as no surprise when the underdogs decide to unite in their common separate causes or when the oppressed adopt outrageous and illegitimate means in order to put their grievances on international agendas.
February 1999
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