From the evaluations of Leader Abdullah Ocalan, April 4 - 2

In the first part of this file, the first stage of Ocalan’s life was discussed, and in this part the second and third stages will be discussed, as he describes them in his volume “Defending a People.”

The second stage of a leader's life

Regarding the second stage of his life, Leader Abdullah Ocalan says in the volume “Defense of the People,” “This time there is a break from bourgeois society and its state, and the experiment of forming an independent ideological group begins, aiming to establish its own contemporary social and political system...”

The leader divides this stage into two parts:

The first: It extends between the years 1972 - 1984, and it can also be called a campaign of awakening the deprived Kurdish people toward the times, or calling it the first rebellion, or the first shot directed at blind fate. On the other hand, view it as a cry of dignity and honor, and call it the first campaign to transform into the PKK.

The second: It includes the period from August 15, 1984 to February 15, 1999. This period, extending over fifteen years, is an amazing period, dominated by armed struggle as a second campaign towards the transformation into the PKK.

In the volume “The Kurdish Issue and the Solution to the Democratic Nation,” Leader Abdullah Ocalan speaks about the first part of his second personal and organizational stage in more detail, and says, “I began in early 1973 with preparations for establishing a group based on the thesis of ‘Kurdistan is a colony.’ A separate organization would have become an inevitable necessity.” Nevertheless, we were not taking a nationalist approach... I was practicing propaganda and verbal incitement within the group as if I was revealing a secret, without relying on any written document. This situation continued until the beginning of 1975...

In the winter of 1975, I embarked on official verbal propaganda, according to my awareness and understanding. I was carrying out both theoretical activity and propaganda. I had shown the courage and responsibility necessary to form a gelatinous group in the meeting we held on the banks of the Gobok Dam in Newroz in 1973. This came as a result of the protest that we organized to denounce the killing of Maher Jayan and his companions in the village of “Qazil Dara” on March 30, 1972, and also after the detention experience that I went through in the “Mamak Military Prison” for seven months (April - October 1972). For me, it became... The Kurdish truth is related to the results that will result from the practice of that group.

The first draft of the blog that we issued was in the year 1975, when I was in a house with Muhammad Khairi Dormoush, speaking while standing as if I were giving a speech, while he was writing down my statements with implicit approval. That sermon was an assessment that resembled a long manuscript about the reality of Kurdistan.... In fact, our group had the most organized and disciplined ideological awareness... We were closer to an ideological group with unshakable faith...

The years 1974 and 1975 passed with the experience of the “Ankara Higher Education Democratic Association (ADYŐD)” at the operational level, which I undertook to head as a sensitive mission. It was the first serious practical experience of my theoretical ideas, and the result was embodied in 1976 in a radical and strategic break with the Turkish left, along with a group of our distinguished comrades. Turkish origins (Hakki Qarar, Kemal Peer, Duran Kalkan)....

I entered the year 1977 while I was on a symbolic tour throughout Kurdistan for the purpose of propaganda. In the month of March, I had stated my theses publicly for the first time in a meeting that was like a conference attended by a large crowd. It was held inside a spacious hall in the “Architects’ Chamber” building in Ankara, and immediately after that I began touring Kurdistan..... I remember that it was as if I had completed a tour in a real war field, when I completed my tour in Kurdistan, where I stopped at the cities: Agri, Doğubeyazıt. Kars, Digur, Dersim, Bingöl, Elazig, Diyarbakir, Mardin, Orfa and Gaziantep in addition to the Ankara line....

In 1978, we moved to the writing stage with Sarkhbon newspaper, where my article that I wrote in the summer of 1978 was published in its first issue under the title “The Road to the Kurdistan Revolution,” known as “The Manifesto.”

I had only spent a few days in Ankara when we received news of the martyrdom of Hakki Qarar from Gaziantep. I can say that I collapsed after this news. It was certain that we suffered a heavy blow, but what was important was to respond to his memory with a correct answer... The pledge I made to myself in fulfillment of his memory was embodied in directing the group towards partisan transformation, so I personally wrote down the draft document of the party’s program in the fall. Same year.....

As for the other important cornerstone on the path from which there is no return, it was embodied in our holding a meeting in the village of Vis in Diyarbakir, based on the party’s program prepared in memory of Hakki Qarar. Twenty-two people attended it, and it was like a founding conference. It lasted for two days between 27 - November 28, 1978. In fact, naming the PKK and declaring ourselves was the end of a phase in this context. We had basically carried out what we should have done, whether according to global and Turkish circumstances, or within the group’s field practice. The revolutionary style is important here. The thing that had to be realized in the light of the objective circumstances at that time was to achieve a breakthrough in the name of the “working” class in the bowels of the trinity of the city, the class, and the nation-state....

Starting in 1979, I sought to take the necessary measures in two directions. Preparations were made for a long-term mountain struggle on the one hand, and on the other hand I was looking forward to opening another reserve exit for the movement by going outside the country. If I succeeded in that, the sustainability of the movement would have become really standing...

When we arrived in the middle of 1979, I told Adham Akcan, who belongs to the city of Suruc, to prepare to cross the border. In Orfa, I went through a waiting period that lasted forty days, during which I lived a special situation very similar to the situation of Ibrahim Al-Khalil, as I had destroyed many of the idols of civilization and modernity. ...It was a truly exciting meeting when I was in the city of Nimrud, at a time when the Nimrods were on alert and filled with rage and anger. I was following in the footsteps of Abraham and his start. What was always going on in “Suruj” were similar conditions that were almost experienced in every start following the rebellion. ... After a few days, Adham informed me that conditions were ready for my departure... Like the case of our master Abraham, I found myself among the Palestinians after a march that lasted a month or two. I began my days there without knowing the language or having an interpreter. They were days in which there was nothing to cling to the person is the resistance, except for the importance of the hoped-for goal... Therefore, only those who have gone through experiences like this will understand the great importance of organization and relations aimed at a new society to the degree they deserve. What I experienced in the PKK was a truth whose nature and importance I rarely realized... The first time passed a year busy covering our logistical needs and reuniting our group... Before the coup of September 12, specifically in July 1980, we had sent the first group to return to the homeland under the leadership of Kamal Peer and Masum Korkmaz, and the flow of groups would have continued later and accordingly, in my opinion, it was necessary to the pivotal year of 1982 would be the year of completing a new campaign (especially due to torture and hunger strikes until death in Diyarbakir prison), and so we moved the center of the field campaign to the homeland, to the Loulan region, with the hope of starting it from there... and on August 15, 1984 The campaign began on August 15.

My goal in the period between 1970 and 1980 was to create a vanguard organization and party, and I succeeded in that, and my goal after 1980 was to create a fighting organization and a fighting people, whatever the period required for that...

In the volume “The Kurdish Issue and the Solution to the Democratic Nation,” Leader Abdullah Ocalan speaks about the second part of his second personal and organizational phase, which begins with the leap of August 15 and continues until February 15, 1999, in more detail. He says, “At the start of the unexpected August 15 campaign, the Gladio network was in Turkey.” The last remaining traces of the Turkish revolutionaries were cleaned up with the September 12 military coup in 1980. The August 15 campaign was not taken into account, and when it was achieved, it was initially thought that it was a simple leftist adventure, and that the classical army, police forces, and intelligence were capable of overcoming it immediately, but the inability to finish its matter in The first year led to the issue being transferred to NATO, which in 1985 approved intervention based on Article 5 of its founding law...

For the first time, in March 1987, I began to formulate analyzes regarding women... The women’s issue began to gradually acquire a serious character, and with each training session, I took another step to delve deeper into the analyzes on this matter, and the increase in the number of young women among our ranks made it imperative for us finding radical answers to the issue of women's freedom....

During the period extending from 1987 until my departure from Syria on October 9, 1998, I personally prepared the exhausting and successive campaigns without interruption, and launched them with amazing diligence... and we succeeded in enabling the process and in maximizing the strength in our struggle... and by the time we reached the end of the year 1998 It is no longer possible to liquidate our historic campaign in the People's Revolutionary War...

Regarding his exit from Syria on October 9, 1998, leader  says in the volume on the Kurdish issue and the solution to the democratic nation, “There were two paths in front of me while leaving Syria; the first was the mountain road, and the second was the European road. Choosing the mountain road meant escalating the war, while preferring the European road meant, it means looking for an opportunity for a diplomatic and political solution...”

Regarding October 9, Leader Abdullah Ocalan says in the “March on Rome” volume, “There is another strange thing that you should know, because it is of great importance to the Americans. October 9 is the day of the martyrdom of Che Guevara. The choice of this day was striking. Most likely they chose this to bring me together with that great revolutionary, so they saw it in their interest to get rid of me on a day like this...”

The leader continues his talk in the volume “The Kurdish Issue and the Democratic Nation’s Solution” about his departure from Syria and his wanderings in Europe and its countries’ refusal to grant him political asylum, saying, “Syrian officials caught their breath after the plane landed me in Athens on the ninth of October... We changed our direction to Moscow.” On a private Greek plane... I stayed for about thirty-three days in what was said to be secret... My preference for Moscow came from my belief that “no matter what,” they had lived through a socialist experience that lasted seven decades, so they would accept me with ease... and despite the collapse of their regime, ... I did not expect them to be affected by this degree of moral scarcity. We were face to face with the ruins of bureaucratic capitalism much worse than liberal capitalism, so we were disappointed by the attitude of our friends in Moscow....

By pure coincidence, our third path was built on taking advantage of our relations in Rome. We began the Rome adventure, which was to last sixty-six days, in a hospital in Rome as part of a show scenario prepared by Italian intelligence.... My second trip to Russia was a mistake... and after a kind of deception. They took me on a cargo plane to land me in Dushanbe, the capital of Tajikistan. We waited for a week in a room that we never left, then we returned to Moscow again, and once again we turned towards Athens again after two days full of adventures and extreme cold and snow inside Moscow... according to the allegations. I was going to go to South Africa. This was preceded by a trip to Minsk, as I was going to enter Dutch territory through Minsk before going to Nairobi. So, on a private plane again, I waited for more than two hours in the embrace of the bitter cold in Minsk, but the awaited plane did not come... And in the hell of Nairobi, I was presented with three paths: the first; Death decorated with a scene of clashes under the pretext of not obeying orders for a long time. Second: My compliance with the orders of the CIA without controversy and my surrender to them, and third: I was handed over to the Turkish Special Warfare Units, which had been prepared a long time ago.... The four-month period from October 9, 1998 until February 15, 1999 was amazing, and no global power except America could have arranged this sweep that extended for four entire months at that stage. The role of the Turkish Special Warfare Forces at that time was limited to transporting me to Imrali on board the plane under supervision...

The third stage of a leader's life

Regarding the third stage of his life, which he says, “If it is correct to call it life in name and content,” Leader Abdullah Ocalan points out in the volume “Defending a People” that it “begins on February 15, 1999 and continues until the end point. Its distinctive characteristic is the beginning of the break from life-centered about the state in general, and about contemporary capitalist life in particular.

He continues his speech by saying, "In the Imrali Maritime region, I did not give priority to myself, even for just one moment, and I struggled to continue my biological existence with difficulty within a narrow space, with breathing problems. I did not feel pain for myself, but I did not accept being stabbed in the back for the sake of the people, and despite the fact that all the powers of the world did not leave us even a tiny glimmer of hope. They created good ideas and positions for the sake of friends and people, for the sake of humanity, and they succeeded in doing the impossible. At the very least, one had to work to be worthy of these efforts...”

In the volume “The Kurdish Issue and the Solution of the Democratic Nation,” the leader says about this stage: “The context of the captivity in Imrali urged me to comprehend the reality with a deeper and more comprehensive view, meaning that the proportion of truth within the context of Imrali was more advanced than it was in the previous stages, as it achieved important achievements: Starting from the abstract level to the concrete, from dogmatism to realism, from indifference to sensitivity and precision, from national statism to democracy, from economicism to capitalist modernity (capitalism, industrialism and national statism), from capitalist modernity to democratic modernism, from ideal history to historical Scientific-philosophical, Islamic Sufism also dealt with the character of truth in a broad scope, and classified its levels. The beginning of speech and action regarding the fate of nations and societies has a close relationship with the stages of truth, and is determined according to the proportions of truth based on practical results.”

During the various periods that Leader Abdullah Ocalan’s lawyers met with him in Imrali, the leader sent messages to the people regarding their commemoration of his birthday. In one of the messages he sent during the lawyers’ meeting with him on April 7, 2010, the leader said, “My birthday was commemorated. What is more correct is that the issue is not my birthday.” Also, the people see it as their birth as well. The issue is not whether I was born in that city, in that village or on that land or not. The people see it as their birth, see it as their renaissance, and salute it because it is their birth. I salute those who went there, those who commemorated the birth and those who made efforts in this field. But they must not empty it of its content.”

Article sources:

March of Rome

Defending a people

The Kurdish issue and the solution of the democratic nation

Message of Leader Abdullah Ocalan on the occasion of April 4, 2010.

T/ Satt.

ANHA