WHO IS ABDULLAH OCALAN? WHAT IS THE PKK?
The terrorist organization known as the Kurdistan Workers’ Party or the „PKK” is an extremely brutal Marxist-Leninist set-up founded by Abdullah Ocalan in 1978.
From the late 1970s, Ocalan worked closely with both the then Soviet Union and with Syria, whose governments were attempting to generate a political breakdown in Turkey.
In 1980, Ocalan actually moved to Syria and used Syrian facilities as well as training grounds in the Bekaa Valley to drill terrorist groups for cross-border attacks against targets in Turkey.
In August of 1984, Ocalan’s terrorist groups began attacking Turkish police stations and similar targets in Turkey’s southeast provinces. Since then, the PKK has been waging a vicious terrorist campaign against Turkey in order to carve out a so-called independent Kurdish state from the Turkish Republic’s sovereign territory.
To achieve this objective of separatism, Ocalan, as a professional terrorist, masterminded thousands of PKK terrorist activities against Turkey, including murders, kidnappings and mutilations. These activities have resulted, to date, in the death of thousands of innocent individuals, most of whom are civilians, including women, babies, children, the elderly, civil servants, and school teachers. The PKK’s main target has been the entire populations of all the villages which resisted it in southeast Turkey. Indeed, the PKK indiscriminately murders the very people it claims to represent: the Kurds.
Moreover, the PKK’s enemies include not only the Turkish authorities but also, ironically, the two leading ethnic Kurdish groups in Iraq, namely, Masud Barzani’s Kurdish Democratic Party and Jalal Talabani’s Patriotic Union of Kurdistan.
Clearly, Ocalan disguises PKK activities as a romantic campaign for Kurdish independence when, in actuality, the hallmark of his terrorist activity has been a strong commitment to Marxism-Leninism. He has infused an ethnic Kurdish dimension into his terrorist activities. The United States has long recognized the PKK as an international terrorist organization, citing it as such in its State Department’s Patterns of Global Terrorism reports. The PKK has also been categorized as a foreign terrorist organization by the US according to the 1996 Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act. Interpol, as well, issued an International Red Bulletin alert calling for Ocalan’s arrest and immediate repatriation to Turkey for his terrorist activities.
In October 1998, Turkey informed Syria that it would take action unless that government halted its support for Ocalan’s PKK and formally requested Ocalan’s extradition to Ankara. As a result, Ocalan fled to Russia. When he traveled to Italy from Moscow on November 13, 1998, he was arrested upon arrival in Rome with a false passport. The White House Press Secretary stated that the Clinton Administration „welcomes the detention, which is an important step forward in the global fight against terrorism.”
Turkey has requested that Italian authorities extradite Ocalan to Ankara to stand trial for leading a terrorist organization, ordering killings of thousands of people and threatening Turkey’s territorial integrity. A decision by Italian authorities on granting such an extradition is expected.