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The PKK and Revolutionary Nonviolence:
Transforming Struggle for Kurdish Freedom in Turkey
1.4.2008
By Nicholas Patler, Independent Scholar, Staunton,
Virginia
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The
paper presented on my
behalf at the 2008 Conference on Kurdish Genocide in
Erbil, Kurdistan-Iraq
April 1, 2008
The PKK and Revolutionary Nonviolence: Transforming
Struggle for Kurdish Freedom in Turkey *
By Nicholas Patler, Independent Scholar, Staunton,
Virginia. At James Madison University
During a meeting with Turkish Prime Minister Tayyip
Erdogan in November 2007, U.S. President George W.
Bush publicly labeled the Kurdistan Workers Party,
or PKK, a terrorist organization and branded them as
an enemy of America and the free world. He then went
on to essentially issue a public death warrant for
the PKK by promising U.S. military assistance to
help Turkey find and eradicate the Kurdish guerilla
force in the mountains of Kurdistan-Iraq. In some
ways this was a blessing for Kurdish people still
hoping and struggling for freedom in Iran, Syria,
and especially Turkey. President Bush unwittingly
reminded the global community that there is a
significant and oppressed ethnic group in the Middle
East known as the Kurds. His announcement and
actions has also given the Kurdish problem in Turkey
a global visibility that had been suppressed for
years by the American government and relatively
ignored by the Western media. Since President Bush
branded the PKK as a terrorist organization and a
“common enemy,” writers and journalists from all
over the West have been scrambling to understand the
organization— albeit in a mostly superficial way1—in
newspaper editorials, magazine articles, and books,
and they are consequently heightening awareness in
regards to the larger problems the Kurdish people
have faced, historically and today. Before this, the
Kurds, particularly the Kurds in Turkey, were
intentionally pushed aside in America’s strategic
and obsessive alliance with Ankara, and Kurdish
oppression at the hands of the Turkish military and
government was for years hidden from the global
community behind the veil of American-Turkish power
politics. Much of the international community seemed
to care little for the plight of the Kurds. But now
the Kurdish struggle for independence, or
aspirations for political and civil rights in
Turkey, along with eighty years of Kurdish suffering
and repression, is beginning to receive more
recognition in the Middle East and international
community. While it is yet to be seen how this will
unfold, it is unlikely that the Kurds in Turkey and
elsewhere will be silenced for much longer.
In a negative sense, however, by labeling the PKK a
terrorist organization, President Bush has exploited
the fears of many people in the West, particularly
Americans who still see terrorism as a major threat
in the post 9-11 world. If a group or organization
can be dehumanized as dangerous, bloodthirsty
terrorists, the U.S. government is given a freehand
by its populace in dealing with them. And that is
what is happening as the most recent
American-Turkish military alliance works to
obliterate the PKK with the most sophisticated
weapons technology and lethal firepower on the
planet, including being so brazen as to violate the
sovereignty of Kurdistan-Iraq with reckless military
force to get at the PKK.
We know that children, women, and men have been
killed, villages destroyed, and people displaced by
Turkish invasions inside Kurdistan-Iraq since at
least 1986. And of course some of the most egregious
Turkish attacks occurred last December, which killed
and wounded civilians and destroyed parts of several
villages and life support systems. These were some
of the most egregious since they were clearly done
with U.S. assistance, including American-made
fighter-bombers and direct U.S. intelligence, the
latter helping to pinpoint PKK bases for Turkish
bombing raids from a central headquarters in Ankara
manned by American military personnel. In addition,
the U.S. enabled these mass bombings by opening up
Iraqi airspace for the Turkish military. These
recent attacks with U.S. support has led the fiery
journalist Gomer Chia to proclaim the bombings as
the “United States’ undeclared war against the
Kurds.”2
While this could very well backfire on the U.S. and
Turkey—writer Aliza Marcus had earlier predicted
that if the U.S. ever launched a military attack
against the PKK, Kurds in Turkey and Iraq “will see
this as an unjust war fought"3 on behalf of a
repressive regime, and they will turn against the
messenger” —it could also have terrible consequences
for the PKK, as they endure systematic bombings and
relentless attacks like nothing they have ever
experienced. And this will most certainly spill over
into more violence and repression of Kurdish people
and communities living inside Turkey and continue to
endanger the lives of those living in Kurdistan-Iraq
who are unfortunate enough to be caught in the
Turkish bombing raids. With the U.S. assisting and
shielding the Turkish government—indeed, the U.S.
has gone from enabling the Turkish oppression of the
Kurds by providing diplomacy and military exports
over the last several decades, not to mention
turning a blind eye to the Turkish campaign of
genocide against the Kurds,www.ekurd.net
to now assisting Turkey
with active U.S. military support— that the Turkish
government will be able to exert even more control
over the southeast region of Turkey, denying not
only Kurdish aspirations for freedom as they have
done for eighty years, but also stepping up its
efforts to actively repress the Kurdish people.
With that in mind, this paper is presented in hopes
of inspiring the PKK to take advantage of the recent
momentum and turn of events to transform their
struggle into a strategic nonviolent campaign to
achieve Kurdish freedom and empowerment in Turkey.
Nonviolence has the potential to gain for the PKK
active support among the larger Kurdish community
and sympathy and help from the international
community. I understand that this contradicts the
PKK’s longstanding commitment to armed struggle, but
as this paper will hopefully demonstrate,
nonviolence is not only consistent with the courage,
fortitude, self-sacrifice, and honorable goals of
the PKK, but also it has the potential to take the
struggle to a new and more intense level like never
before. Before we continue, let me make it clear
here what I mean and do not mean by nonviolence. It
appears that the use of the word “nonviolence”
within the historical context of Kurdish efforts for
self-determination and ethnic-based rights has
usually meant working within the Turkish political
system to peacefully achieve Kurdish objectives
through elections, laws, and so on. This is a
political approach to the Kurdish problem, and it
has miserably failed. The Turkish government has
proven over and over that it is not willing to
accommodate Kurdish aspirations or even listen to
their grievances. Nonviolence, by contrast, often
works outside of the political system, unhindered by
rules and formalities—indeed, nonviolent soldiers
redefine and create the rules of engagement, and
they powerfully press in on an entrenched power
structure to creatively bring about change. This
approach has worked for billions of people worldwide
who, after years of trying to use futile violence,
amazingly achieved their objectives through
nonviolence, as we will see in this paper.
Without a doubt, since its inception in the
late-1970s, the PKK has achieved much success in
breathing new life into the Kurdish dream for
freedom, independence, and ethnic-based rights. They
have courageously opposed the tyrannical government
in Turkey and have brought attention to the plight
of Kurds living as repressed minorities in Syria,
Iran, and, until the establishment of independent
Kurdistan, Iraq. Without the PKK, it is almost
certain that the Kurdish problem would not be making
its way in front of the world today. While the PKK
has never been able to boast of a large membership,
they have gained the sympathy and respect of perhaps
millions of Kurdish people living under harsh
political and social conditions, exhausted from
years of being forced to endure dire poverty with
little opportunity to create a better life. This is
a tragic mockery since their Kurdish homeland,
divided between Turkey, Iraq, Iran, and Syria,
includes some of the richest oil and mineral
deposits in the world. The PKK has actively and
relentlessly opposed this ongoing exploitation of
the people and their resources, and, as one observer
explains, their uncompromising campaign to take
action, especially armed struggle against Turkey,
has given many downtrodden Kurds “a sense of honor.”4
In spite of these successes, the PKK’s commitment to
armed struggle over the last three decades has not
obtained Kurdish self-determination in Turkey or
made any significant inroads to achieving
ethnic-based rights. It has given the plight of the
Kurds visibility and has helped create a distinctive
Kurdish identity, but it has also resulted in one
failure after another as the Turkish government has
worked to crush the rebellion with its military
might, repressive tactics, and now direct U.S.
superpower assistance. The PKK also has been
hindered by the divisive on-again-off-again
infighting within the ranks of the organization
itself, and its lack of tolerance for other Kurdish
groups working for similar objectives has prevented
any serious efforts of Kurds in Turkey to unite.
These actions, unfortunately, have only served to
weaken Kurdish resistance while strengthening the
heavy-hand of the Turkish government, which has
certainly not been disappointed to see the Kurds
divided and fighting each other.5
With all considered, I believe that the viability of
armed struggle for achieving Kurdish
self-determination in Turkey has reached its limits.
I want to respectfully encourage the PKK to
understand that they are at a crossroads and that
what they do from here on can make the greatest
difference in their struggle to date. To sum up the
situation, Turkey has been given an enormous
material advantage in the form of direct U.S.
military and technological power, including
satellite intelligence, and they are utterly bent on
eradicating the PKK once and for all, a goal that
Washington admittedly shares. Moreover, with the
American media-propaganda machine in full
swing—perhaps the greatest weapon in the U.S.
arsenal—the American government is making sure that
the PKK is perceived as a terrorist organization and
that they are to blame for the instability and
violence in Turkey and now in Kurdistan-Iraq. Such
fear tactics,www.ekurd.net
as mentioned earlier,
not only gives the U.S. a freehand in assisting
Ankara in its efforts to crush the PKK, but also
threatens to further suppress the much needed public
debate regarding the underlying and important issue
of the Kurds legitimate quest for self-determination
in Turkey, and it continues to conceal Turkey’s
historic and contemporary repression of the Kurds.
The crossroads that the PKK faces, then, is to
continue using violence and risk being annihilated
by an ever more powerful enemy and its superpower
sponsor, thereby jeopardizing Kurdish dreams for
freedom in Turkey, or to transform their struggle
into a strategic nonviolent struggle and open up the
possibility to achieve Kurdish objectives in Turkey,
including self-determination. Armed struggle by the
PKK, as just mentioned, has already achieved two
important goals for the Kurds: it has given the
plight of the Kurds visibility and has helped create
a Kurdish identity. Now, at this juncture in
history, something more is needed—a far more radical
approach that can to take the Kurdish struggle in
Turkey to the next level. As one nonviolent scholar
has put it, “Violence is not radical enough, since
it generally only changes the rulers but not the
rules.”6 A massive strategic campaign of nonviolent
protest and civil disobedience, which utterly
changes the rules of conflict—such as bold protest
marches, disruptive sit-ins, and brave unarmed mass
confrontations with Turkish military forces in
Ankara and other major cities—may be able to bring
the PKK to that next level, enabling them to
transform their world. Nonviolence is certainly not
a method of confrontation and engagement for the
weak and timid. It is “the summit of bravery,”
believed Mahatma Gandhi—a method of action for the
most courageous in spirit who believe deeply in the
righteousness of their cause, ready to redefine
power on their own terms and give the oppressor no
choice but to surrender to their demands. “I can no
more preach Non-violence to a coward,” wrote Gandhi,
“than I can tempt a blind man to enjoy healthy
scenes.”7 Although some have portrayed nonviolence
as a tool of the bourgeoisie, nothing—nothing—could
be further from the truth. Of course, the
bourgeoisie or any repressive regime would like
nothing better than to see the oppressed and
colonized pacified, but nonviolence in action does
just the opposite. It has empowered the oppressed
with such a forceful weapon that the greatest armies
the world has ever seen have disbanded in the face
of its power and despotic regimes were made utterly
impotent as their lifeblood of political, economic,
and social exploitation ceased to exist.
Nonviolent Struggle in
History: “No power on earth can stand against it”
Examples of nonviolence in action can be found
almost everywhere. Mahatma Gandhi and millions of
Indians used the weapon of nonviolence to overthrow
an imperial British superpower, shattering
conceptions of power based on physical force and
weaponry. Albert Luthuli, a Zulu tribal chief, led
his nonviolent army of black South Africans into
battle against the extremely well-armed and
oppressive white government, laying the groundwork
for the end of the terribly unjust and deadly system
of apartheid, including the exploitation of African
land and resources by the ruling white elite. This
is not unlike what many Kurds today still endure in
their own land as their wealth and resources are
exploited for the benefit of other countries.8
In the Philippines, a nonviolent revolution led by
Corazon Aquino confronted the tyranny of dictator
Ferdinand Marcos, even turning back the advances of
tanks and fighter-bombers, until the power of the
people—courageously swarming around government
forces with the intense power of their hearts—
finally swept Marcos from power.9 In the United
States, Martin Luther King, Jr. and civil rights
activists, irrepressibly committed to nonviolence,
vigorously engaged a system of racial injustice that
had been entrenched for a hundred years until it
crumbled into the dust, breaking in the process the
chains of black political, economic, and social
enslavement. And Muslim peoples and countries have
historically engaged in nonviolent struggle as
well—including Egypt, Iraq, Iran, and Sudan.10
Interestingly, in the early days of the first
Intifada, Palestinians relied on many types of
strategic nonviolent actions, including strikes,
protest marches, demonstrations, boycotts, direct
confrontation, and many other forms of nonviolent
resistance and engagement.11 Who knows what they
would have achieved by now if they had continued to
use nonviolence on a mass scale— particularly with
the eyes of the world focused upon the
Palestinian-Israeli conflict. One thing, however, is
for certain: armed struggle has unquestionably
failed the Palestinians up until this point. Perhaps
one of the most striking examples of a people
transforming their struggle from a violent guerilla-like
war to a collective nonviolent crusade—a
particularly powerful precedent for the PKK—can be
found in the Muslim Pathans’ nonviolent movement to
end British repression in what was then, during the
first half of the twentieth century, the North West
Frontier Province of India, which today makes up
Pakistan and part of Afghanistan. Notorious for
being some of the most violent people in the world,
the Pathans not only used guerilla tactics against
their British occupiers, but they also feuded with
each other over almost any perceived wrong or
humiliation, a divide-and-conquer strategy
encouraged by the British.12
But all that came to a grinding halt in the early
1930s as the Pathans were literally and by some
accounts miraculously transformed into a cohesive
and powerful nonviolent army. Under the charismatic
hands-on leadership of Abdul Gaffar Khan, the Pathan
tribes were united as one people. Their humble
leader, affectionately called Badshah Khan or
Emperor of Emperors by his people, convinced the
Pathans to lay down their rifles, abandon their
guerilla tactics and law of revenge, and confront
the British through the weapon of nonviolent civil
disobedience. He raised an army of over 100,000
nonviolent soldiers called the Servants of God, who
received nonviolent training and discipline in
military-style camps located all over the Frontier
Province. Once priding themselves on their skillful
ability to manipulate a dagger in combat, the
courageous fighters now faced off with the British
using nothing but the weapon of nonviolence and the
deep conviction of the righteousness of their
struggle. After more than two centuries of military
control and years of violent confrontation between
the British soldiers and the Pathan tribesmen, a
nonviolent revolution by the Pathans in the north
and the Indians in the interior had done the
unthinkable by overthrowing an imperial
superpower.13
Prior to victory over British tyranny, Badshah Khan
had told his people that “no power on earth could
stand against” the power of nonviolence.14 And as
the proceeding events would demonstrate, he was
right. Indeed, the British military force, quickly
losing its power over the heroic nonviolent Pathans,
resorted to dropping 500 tons of bombs on them—one
of the first overlooked mass aerial bombing
campaigns in history that targeted unarmed
civilians15—in hopes of breaking their resolve. They
miserably failed, as the Pathans remained united and
committed to their nonviolent struggle. After
centuries of occupation, the defeated British left
the North West Frontier Province for good. Mirroring
the Pathans of 70 years ago, the PKK is caught in a
violent struggle with a force that is militarily far
superior—although, it must be pointed out, Turkey’s
large army has been unable to totally suppress the
PKK’s guerilla war. And while they have achieved
some success, they now face overwhelming military
and technological force by Turkey and its U.S.
sponsor, not to mention the potential cooperation,
unstable as it may be at times, of other countries
in the region such as Iran. It is imperative that
the PKK’s strategy changes. They are in a unique
position at this juncture in history to not only
regain the momentum of their struggle, but to
achieve empowerment in Turkey by switching from
armed to nonviolent struggle. The PKK is the ablest
group to actively unite and lead the Kurds in Turkey
today, having demonstrated for well over three
decades a remarkable ability to organize, recruit,
survive, and pursue its goals amidst almost
insurmountable odds. Badshah Khan and his followers
traveled to villages, often by foot, to spread
the gospel of nonviolence and recruit members for
the nonviolent army. This grassroots approach was
crucial to uniting the divided Pathans in the
occupied North West Frontier Province, creating a
sense of Pathan identity, thus enabling them to
build a cohesive organization capable of confronting
the British.16
Similarly, since its inception, the PKK has often
relied on a grassroots movement to gain support and
recruit members in the southeast part of Turkey,
often slipping past the watchful eyes of the Turkish
military and village guards. Rather than spending
time and money to set up offices or printing up
newspapers and magazines in which the “poor could
not afford and the illiterate could not
understand”—conventional efforts of other Kurdish
groups—the PKK took their cause directly to the
people, traveling to villages and towns, meeting
one-on-one with Kurds.17 With such invaluable
experience, the PKK is the most capable organization
today to take nonviolence to the people in the same
way that they have taken them armed struggle. Only
this time, like Badshah Khan and the Pathans, they
may be able to build a large and committed active
support base that will present a formidable
opposition to Turkish oppression and violence. For
many, an obvious question arises at this point: will
not the unarmed
nonviolent crusaders be simply crushed under the
heavy weight of the well-armed, massive Turkish
military forces? While on the surface it may seem
that a nonviolent strategy would be fatal for the
Kurds, nonviolent campaigns in real life seldom work
out that way. The momentum of a struggle nearly
always shifts to the group employing nonviolent
tactics. This has been proven all over the world,
time and time again. Indeed, nonviolent movements in
the twentieth century, worldwide, involved billions
of people and creatively employed almost two hundred
different types of nonviolent actions, most of which
succeeded in accomplishing their objectives.
Unfortunately, these remarkable struggles generally
do not find their way into history books, which are
instead too often engrossed in war and power
politics.18
The PKK and the Kurds in Turkey are also in the
unique position today of having more visibility than
ever before, particularly since Turkey and the U.S.
has embarked on a reckless and noisy campaign to
eradicate the PKK. With the world becoming ever more
conscious that there is an ethnic group known as the
Kurds—albeit a troublesome one as President Bush and
much of the Western mass media maintains in
demonizing the PKK—the Kurds in Turkey have an
opportunity to shift more of the world’s attention
to their cause. By adopting nonviolence, not only
can the PKK and the Kurds defeat the violent and
dehumanized stereotype that is being promoted by
Turkey and the U.S., but also they can gain more
international sympathy and support to help them in
their struggle for freedom. It is very unlikely that
Turkey will be able to move as freely as they have
in the past to violently suppress Kurdish efforts
with sympathetic journalists and human rights
groups, among others, broadcasting to the world the
PKK led nonviolent engagements. The Turkish
government will also not be able to so easily
conceal or contain masses of trained Kurdish
crusaders and sympathizers spilling into the streets
for nonviolent change. While there will certainly be
unfortunate violence against the nonviolent
demonstrators, images of unarmed Kurds being
attacked will only increase international sympathy
for their cause. A powerful example can be found in
the American civil rights movement of the 1960s.
Televised images of unarmed civil rights activists
being beaten by police helped focus national and
international attention and sympathy on their
regional nonviolent struggle, creating a tidal wave
of momentum that helped carry the struggle to
victory.
Re-conceptualizing Violence
and Love: Transforming Old Conceptions of Power
Of course, in order for the PKK to make the
transition from armed to nonviolent struggle, they
would have to more or less achieve an individual and
collective change at a deep, inward level. But such
a possibility should not be seen as utopian naiveté,
even for those with a history and commitment to
violent guerilla tactics. The Pathans were committed
to armed struggle for two centuries, but overnight
internalized the precepts of nonviolence. For
oppressed peoples of the world who have participated
in nonviolent struggle, this transition was
accomplished by identifying with the humanity of the
oppressor. They began to care about their enemy—or
at least pitied them—when they realized that their
enemy was caught in a system of domination and
violence as well. The Turks, both in historic and
contemporary times, have experienced a distinct
culture that has inculcated them with a blinding
nationalism, a militaristic mindset, and extreme
lack of tolerance—indeed fear—for many peoples
within their reach both inside and outside of the
country. Moreover, repression and violence against
anything that is perceived to threaten Turkish
identity is normal behavior, reinforced in Turkish
culture by the government, schools, and propaganda.
In Turkey, observes Halal Demir, “we can see direct
physical, structural, as well as cultural violence
nearly everywhere we look and nearly at any
moment.”19 Had a Kurd been born a Turk, they would
be caught in the same self-perpetuated system of
domination and violence, and chances are that they
would think and feel as a Turk does. Indeed, they
may very well be shooting at the PKK and repressing
other Kurds or at least wholeheartedly supporting
such actions, fearful that their way of life is
being challenged and their safety in jeopardy.
With this realization comes power and liberation for
the disciples of nonviolence even before they obtain
physical victory.20 He/she understands that the
oppressed and oppressor are both caught in the same
vicious system, and it is that system which needs to
be eradicated, not human beings who happen to be on
whatever side historical circumstances may have
placed them. It was with this understanding that
Gandhi repeatedly reminded the world that
nonviolence “seeks to eradicate antagonisms, but not
the antagonists themselves.”21 This heightened
awareness has released such a creative power in the
hearts of nonviolent revolutionaries that
exploitation has dissolved in the face of its
unshakable resolve without so much as a hand being
raised against the oppressor. I realize that this
contradicts an important key aspect of the Marxian
revolutionary idea, which seeks to liquidate the
bourgeoisie and its supporters, and achieve
communism or the ideal society through violence—a
key aspect of the proletarian revolution more or
less shared by the PKK. Let me make it clear here
that this is not an attempt to discredit Karl Marx
or Marxism. Marx was perhaps one of the fiercest
defenders of the poor and disenfranchised the world
has ever seen. He was deeply concerned, indeed
depressed at times as he looked upon the suffering
of humanity in the nineteenth century, the majority
of whom lived in poverty and were exploited for
nothing more than their labor or manipulated for
their acquiescence to unjust power. It enraged him
that a small minority of men had all of the wealth
and power, food and luxury—far more than they would
ever need—while the majority of people were
miserable, hungry, and powerless. As a result,
believed Marx, modern man had lost the
ability—indeed his birthright—to fully participate
in the human experience due to such “naked,
shameless, direct, brutal exploitation” by the small
ruling class, as he so vividly put it.22
Marx correctly understood that in most cases,
particularly in the most extreme situations of
entrenched oppression and exploitation, it would
take nothing less than a radical revolution to
change things—or to empower man and restore his full
humanity. However, where Marx went wrong was in
making it an absolute condition of his that this
radical revolution be a violent one. His weakness
was in his wrath towards the oppressor as much as
the vicious cycle of exploitation itself. The
bourgeoisie must be wiped from the face of the
earth! In believing so, Marx unwittingly adopted the
tools and thereby the philosophy of the
oppressor—violence. He had a burning passion for
freeing man and creating utopia, but by mandating
revolutionary violence to achieve his dream, he laid
the groundwork for more oppression—more
suffering—and more exploitation. Why? Because
violence, as just mentioned, is the tool of the
oppressor or bourgeoisie. And it is much more than
that. It is their philosophy—their view of how the
world works—as much as any political or ideological
doctrine that they claim to represent, which is
really secondary. Violence enables and perpetuates
injustice and the unaccountable use of power. Where
organized violence and unbridled power intersect,
fear, suspicion, and the crushing domination of
others are its lifeblood. When the oppressed in turn
decides to use violence to end this abuse of power
and achieve justice—indeed, when they make it the
cornerstone of their ideological platform, as does
revolutionary Marxism—they adopt and internalize the
worst aspects of the system of domination in which
they are trying to end. The just cause they
represent becomes corroded with fear, anger, and
hatred. And only more injustice can ultimately be
the result since the means, as Gandhi stressed, are
really the ends in their earliest stages, “like
seeds, of which the ends were a natural flowering”23
as paraphrased by one Gandhi biographer.
Armed Guerilla war may be effective—it may lead to
liberation—but at a tremendous cost not only in
lives, but also in the transference of violence to
the new order. Thus, when power is achieved and the
enemies are wiped out, violence continues as more
enemies are created and done away with in a
repetitive, vicious cycle. The new order ends up
becoming more oppressive than the one before, such
as occurred in Stalinist Russia and Pol Pot’s
Cambodia. “If we resist violence with violence, we
simply mirror its evil,” explains one nonviolent
scholar. “We become what we resist.”24 In short, the
oppressed
becomes the oppressor. And people have violently
liberated themselves from one power only to become
enslaved to another since the greatest oppressor,
fearful violence, is left in tact to work its harm.
Ironically, it is not unusual for heavily armed,
repressive regimes to prefer that those rebelling
their power adopt violence themselves—if the choice
is one between violence and nonviolence. This
reveals just how important violence is for
oppressive power. They are such experts at using
violence, and have such conventional force at their
disposal, that they can respond to rebellious
violence with greater and better-organized violence,
such as the intense, unrelenting Turkish bombing
raids of the PKK in the mountains of Kurdistan-Iraq.
Violence is their territory. However, nonviolence
not only catches them by surprise, but also
generally throws off their momentum. And as a
nonviolent struggle presses in on them with its
irresistible force, never giving up or giving in,
the ruling power—with all the weapons, technology,
and propaganda at its disposal—gradually wears down,
until it finally crumbles under a force greater than
anything in its arsenal. It should be no surprise,
then, that oppressive powers have encouraged or
desired that nonviolent soldiers go back to using
violence. They cannot explain the power of
nonviolence. They just know that it exists and that
they cannot successfully engage it with age-old
conventional methods of war. But they know not what
else to do, so they try to provoke nonviolent
soldiers to re-establish armed struggle. “ ‘The
British feared a nonviolent Pathan more that a
violent one,’ ” wrote Badshah Khan. “ ‘All the
horrors the British perpetrated on the Pathans has
only one purpose: to provoke them to violence.’ ”25
Eknath Easwaran, who had met and observed both Khan
and Gandhi, explained the initial British reaction
to the nonviolent Pathans in this way: “Much of the
government’s extreme behavior during the months that
followed can be understood only as attempts to goad
the Pathans into breaking their nonviolent vow. If
they broke down and retaliated, the British would be
back on familiar ground.”26 Similar regimes have
expressed the same goal or desire for a return to
armed conflict in the face of nonviolence, including
in Israel, Ghana, Philippines, and India. Violence
is the weapon of oppression, nonviolence the weapon
of freedom.
Finally, nonviolence ultimately finds its magic and
power in love—a love that is best defined, as Martin
Luther King said, by an “understanding and creative,
redemptive goodwill for all men.”27 It’s time that
we rescue the concept of love from the aggressive
and violent power structures that reduce it to a
useless folly within a context of narrow power
politics. In such a worldview, love is seen as a
flaw—particularly universal love—and for many it
implies a vulnerability that threatens to leave one
exposed to domination or aggression. That is the
greatest lie or misunderstanding the world has even
known. Submerging love under the dominance of
violence, in a philosophical sense, strengthens the
oppressor and weakens the oppressed. It makes
violence and physical force the power and love as
the weakness. The exact opposite is true. Creative
love is the greatest power, the most profound
revolutionary force the world has ever known.
Violent force is by far the lesser power. Its noisy
destruction—its bombs and guns and whatever else it
strains to muster—masks its precarious and fragile
nature. It cannot permanently organize itself
without eventually crashing into the dustbin of
history, such as the violent end met by Adolf Hitler
and the Nazis or any other regime that depended on
fear and destruction to acquire and maintain power.
Love is seen, nay, what is more, love has been
proven as the most durable and universal force that
informs our very existence—a truism not only proven
time and again by the success of nonviolent
movements worldwide, but also by modern science
which, in its experimental research, gives
scientific validity to Gandhi’s claim more than a
half-century ago that “Love is the strongest force
the world possesses and yet it is the humblest
imaginable.”28 The controversial Russian-born
sociologist Pitirim Sorokin, who stirred up the
Western academic world by discussing love within a
context of power, wrote that, “without the operation
of love energy…universal enmity and disorder would
have reigned supreme.”29
Indeed, King Asoka Maurya, who ruled the largest
empire India has ever known in the second century
BCE, understood this universal mystery when he
restructured his country on “the foundations of love
and morality” rather than force and coercion. Asoka,
in short, re-conceptualized power based on the
desire to uplift others—a riskier thing to do in his
own times, particularly in an age that vividly
remembered the whirlwind of destruction wrought by
Alexander of Macedon, than for us to do today. “The
need of the age,” says Asoka biographer, B. G.
Gokhale in stressing the Indian leader’s desire to
transcend power based on force, “was to transform
the empire into a human institution answering human
needs.…”30 And Asoka succeeded!
I end this paper by again encouraging the PKK to
consider transforming their revolutionary struggle
for freedom in Turkey to a nonviolent one. As
difficult as this is to consider, the Turks and the
Kurds are neighbors and both are there to stay.
Perhaps the time is ripe to begin working for peace,
freedom, and a future in which younger generations
in Kurdistan-Turkey—your children and
grandchildren—will not have to suffer from so much
despair, hopelessness, and violence. A better
destiny can be in your hands. I share Gandhi’s hopes
for the oppressed—in this case the PKK and Kurds in
Turkey—when he declared, “I am convinced that, if
someone with courage and vision can arise among them
to lead them in nonviolent action, the winter of
their despair can in the twinkling of an eye be
turned into the summer of hope.”31
Writing almost fifty years ago, the Cuban
revolutionary, Che Guevara, described the Latin
American guerrilla-fighter in way that could just as
easily apply to the PKK soldier today when he said,
“The guerilla is a crusader for the people’s
freedom…a social reformer. He takes up arms in
response to widespread popular protest against an
oppressor, impetuously hurling himself with all his
might against anything that symbolizes the
established order.”32
Imagine for a moment substituting “arms” with
radical nonviolence, “impetuously hurling” the
collective power of the Kurdish heart “against
anything that symbolizes the established order.” Do
not allow yourselves to be destroyed by clinging to
a lesser power. Consider transforming your struggle,
and go from being noticed to being great.
* Paper presented on the
author’s behalf at the 2008 Conference on Kurdish
Genocide, Erbil, Kurdistan-Iraq, convened by Prime
Minister Nechirvan Barzani, January 28, 2008.
1 One of the exceptions to this is Aliza Marcus’s
original and informative, Blood and Belief: The PKK
and the Kurdish Fight for Independence (New York:
New York University Press, 2007).
2 Gomer Chia, “United States’ Undeclared War Against
the Kurds,” Kurdish Media, December 25, 2007.
3 Marcus, 304.
4 Marcus, 305.
5 Marcus, 10–11, 41, 73, 305; David McDowell, A
Modern History of the Kurds (New York: I. B.Tauris,
1996), 421.
6 Walter Wink, Jesus and Nonviolence: A Third Way
(Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2003), 72.
7 Louis Fischer, ed., The Essential Gandhi: An
Anthology of His Writings on His Life, Work and
Ideas (New York: Vintage Books, 1983), 198.
8 Albert Luthuli, Let My People Go (New York:
McGraw-Hill, 1962).
9 Wink, 98–100.
10 Ralph Crow, Phillip Grant, and Saad I. Ibrahim,
Arab Nonviolent Political Struggle in the Middle
East (Boulder: Lynn Reinner Publishers, 1990).
11 Ibid.
12 Nicholas Patler, “From Pathan to Palestine,”
Peace Review: A Journal of Social Justice, 15, 4
(December) 2004: 491. I wrote this piece to consider
a nonviolent option to Palestinian empowerment and
self-determination.
13 Palter, 491–92; Mukulika Banerjee, The Pathan
Unarmed: Opposition & Memory in the North West
Frontier (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2001),
51–53, 56, 67, 75–81, 85–87, 125–32.
14 Eknath Easwaran, Nonviolent Soldier of Islam (Tomales:
Nilgiri Press, 1999), 117.
15 David Omissi, Air Power and Colonial Control: The
Royal Air Force, 1919–1939 (Manchester: Manchester
University Press, 1990), 167.
16 Patler, 492; Banerjee, 60–63.
17 Marcus, 29.
18 Wink, 2–3; Gene Sharp, The Politics of Nonviolent
Action (Boston: Extending Horizons Books, 1973),
117–434.
19 Halal Demir, “Nonviolence in Turkey,” War
Resisters International (http://www.wri-irg.org/wiki/index.php/Turkey:_Nonviolence_in_Turkey).
20 This is true in a physical-institutional as well
as a moral and ethical sense. Nonviolent movements,
including the Pathans, established parallel
governments and institutions, including courts,
police, social services, and so on, while the
nonviolent campaigns were being carried out, thus
depriving the oppressive regime of its day-to-day
power over the lives of the indigenous peoples.
21 Easwaran, 80.
22 Karl Marx, “Manifesto of the Communist Party,” in
Robert C. Tucker, ed., The Marx-Engels Reader (New
York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1978), 475, and The
Marxian Revolutionary Idea (New York: W. W. Norton &
Co., 1970).
23 Bhikhu Parekh, Gandhi (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1997), 54.
24 Wink, 78.
25 Cited in Easwaran, 125.
26 Easwaran, 125.
27 Martin Luther King, Jr., Strength to Love (New
York: Walker and Company, 1984), 77.
28 Fischer, ed., 206.
29 Pitirim Sorokin, The Ways and Power of Love:
Types, Factors, and Techniques on Moral
Transformation (Philadelphia: Templeton Foundation
Press, 2002), 6.
30 B. G. Gokhale, Asoka Maurya (New York: Twayne
Publishers, 1966), 83–86.
31 Fischer, ed., 329.
32 Che Guevara, On Guerrilla Warfare (New York:
Praeger Publishers, 1966), 7, 30.
Gandhi Center Working Papers Series ISSN 1941-2541
Gandhi Center Working Papers Series ISSN 1941-255X
Copies of Gandhi Center Working Papers are available
for download from
http://www.jmu.edu/gandhicenter/workingpapers.shtml
or by mailing a request to:
Mahatma Gandhi Center for Global Nonviolence
James Madison University
MSC 2604, Cardinal House
500 Cardinal Drive
Harrisonburg, Virginia 22807, USA
Suggested citation:
Patler, Nicholas. 2008. “The PKK and Revolutionary
Nonviolence: Transforming Struggle for Kurdish
Freedom in Turkey.” Gandhi
Center Working Papers Series, Number 5. Mahatma
Gandhi Center for Global Nonviolence, James Madison
University, Harrisonburg.
Republished by eKurd.net with
permission from the author.
Copyright:
The contents of this paper are solely the property
of the authors, and cannot be reproduced without the
permission of the authors.
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