Review of "Aliza Marcus: Blood and Belief. The PKK and the Kurdish Fight for Independence"

Aliza Marcus, a long-time Reuters correspondent to Turkey, has published a well written and comprehensive book on the history of the PKK's struggle. Citing numerous sources and lots of interview partners, she paints a colorful picture of the 1970 years leading up to the eventual founding of the party in 1978, the struggle in prison and in exile in the early 1980s as well as the destructive war of the 1990s.

The first part on "Ocalan, Kurds, and the PKK's start" is a breathtaking record of the troubled 1970s with their revolutionary atmosphere, the brutal military coup of 1980, the resistance in prison and finally the preparation for guerrilla warfare. With much empathy Marcus manages to make the struggle of the PKK and even its violent methods understandable by revealing the rational calculations behind it. Ocalan is presented as a far-sighted and brilliant strategic thinker and charismatic leader, his reasons to propagate and ultimately launch an armed struggle are well explained and understandable. 

The second part called "The PKK consolidates power" focuses on the internal power struggle until the killing of Mehmet Sener in 1991 and the emergence of the PKK as a hugely popular people's movement towards the early 1990s. Part three, "PKK militants fight for control", provides interesting insights in how the war in the mountains of Kurdistan was actually led and the relationship between the PKK and the legal political parties and newspapers in Turkey. Ocalan is portrayed as ruthlessly silencing his critics with various methods. Part four named "Ocalan's capture and after" is eager to illustrate the military problems in the late 1990s and the changes after the abduction of Ocalan in 1999, describing the PKK as a failed organization that has ultimately lost its focus with dropping the demand for an independent state.
 
Marcus has done a lot of research and cites numerous sources, including various publications of the PKK. Journalistic in style, she relies much on her interview partners, most of whom she presents with real names as well as their names-of-war. The only exception among the males is the former leading figure of Dev-Yol and now academic writing on the Armenian question whom she presents as "Mesut Akyol", although his real name is no secret at all. However she omits that he also worked for the German intelligence service against the PKK later as he himself stated before a German court.  

While the book owes much of it appeal to these well-written interviews, here also lies its biggest flaw. The former PKK militants, some of them high-ranking commanders during the war, all seem very eager to present themselves as completely innocent and blame all tactical and strategical faults of the movement as well as the atrocities they committed solely on one person: Abdullah Ocalan. Some omissions are therefore symptomatic. For instance Marcus reports an "incident in 1989, [where] about a dozen students from A university in the western city of Eskisehir were executed by the PKK soon after they joined the rebels in the mountains in southeast Turkey." (p. 135). What Marcus fails to mention is that the one responsible for this atrocity is the same Semdin Sakik (Zeki) that she praises as one of the most brilliant and able PKK commanders (p. 259 ff). There is also no mentioning of his catastrophic failures in Dersim, costing the lives of hundreds of fighters. Sait Cürükkaya (Dr. Süleyman) who poses as an intelligent and sympathetic husband and family father in the book is actually infamous for getting a militant pregnant then sending her off on a suicide bombing mission. Important figures like Terzi Cemal and Hogir which would have shed light on important failures of the early years of the guerrilla warfare are also completely missing. Omissions like these are symptomatic because they all serve the same cause: to blame solely Ocalan for everything that went wrong or bad. 

Furthermore, Marcus also seems to agree to the main political criticism of the former militants: the PKK should not have dropped the demand for an independent state but should have continued to pursue this goal militarily. Turning a blind eye to all other aspects of the PKK's struggle, she therefore presents the 5th Congress of the PKK in 1995 as one where wrong military decisions have been made. Given that most authors would describe the dropping of the demand for an independent Kurdish state and the attempt to win political ground as the main feature of that congress, she seems strangely obsessed with the agenda of the former military commanders she interviewed. Far from investigating whether the adoption of more moderate political demands could ultimately help in ending the war and fostering a peaceful political solution, Marcus gives the strong impression that it would be better to pursue the same strategy in 2008 as in 1978.
 
Consequently she completely ignores the arguments of Ocalan given in his defense speech before the court that would later sentence him to death. This and later submissions to other courts including the European Court for Human Rights have been published as books and sold more than 100.000 copies in Turkey alone. Enough to be mentioned, one should think, but Marcus seems to disagree. The 1999 main defense speech does not even show up in the bibliography, neither do the English translations of both books, "Declaration on a Democratic Solution to the Kurdish Question" and the elaborated "Prison Writings: The Roots of Civilization" which appeared in 2007. On the last page of the book she even explicitly states that Ocalan's writings have no special importance in her view:

"Ocalan has turned into a symbol of Kurdish desires. What he says or what he does is not that important, because he is a symbol. So is the PKK." (p. 305)

 
This is the more surprising as his writings have not only had paramount influence on all programs of the PKK and affiliated organizations since 2000, even the "Kurdish political Party that is backed by the PKK" (p. 305), the DTP, has incorporated a lot of his anti-separatist thought into their own party program. Other authors like Ozcan and Gunther have realized this correctly. 
As Rubin in his review correctly mentions, the record of the years 1999-2007 is remarkably short and falls far short of explaining what the PKK is and where it stands today. The 13 pages are more a record of the depressed PKK drop-outs who do not believe in the cause anymore rather than an analysis that could help understand what is going on between the PKK and the Turkish state right now. 

Therefore the book leaves the reader with mixed emotions. While the brilliant chapters on the roots and the first years of the PKK can be recommended as probably the best text on the topic available in English, the rest of the book is more controversial and especially the last chapter falls far short of expectations. While providing lots of valuable information, the identification with the personal motives and political thinking of her interview partners, who are mostly marginal figures in today's Kurdish politics, makes Marcus somewhat blind to the real dynamics of the Kurdish movement in the last decade. Their personal enmity against Ocalan is in stark contrast to the huge mass support he still has in Kurdistan. To include at least some interviews with active PKK members or sympathizers would have made the panorama much more complete. Many of Marcus' fellow journalists did such interviews in 2006 and 2007, making the lack of them in "Blood and Belief" even more dramatic. 

The author herself defends herself already in the introduction against possible criticism, albeit giving the wrong reasons: 

"There are some who will complain that this book places too much stock in information provided by former PKK members. They will argue this information is suspect, because people who have taken part in an illegal, violent movement cannot be trusted. In response, three things must be noted. First, I believe that in order to really understand the PKK - or any such movement, for that matter - it is necessary to talk to those people who actually were part of it. (For a variety of reasons, but mainly because current PKK members rarely speak freely, I limited my interviews to former members.) [...] Third, while interviews with ex-PKK members form the core of this book and give it structure, they were not the sole source of information. This book incorporates information from a variety of sources, including interviews with well-known Kurdish opponents of the PKK, independent Turkish and Kurdish activists, and foreign sources with knowledge or former connections to the group. [...] As the reader will discover, the sources utilized in this book are varied and many." 

Many indeed, but not as varied as one might wish to see. Focusing almost entirely on the Kurdish side and therein on (today's) opponents of the PKK, she actually defends the position of a minority inside a minority. The former top militants all seem to say "PKK was good as long as it fought for independence and as long as I was in it. Now it's bad." While this is an understandable standpoint, Marcus nowhere appears to be critical of this. 
    
The author's narrow focus on Kurdish statehood makes her unable to explain the shifting of the Kurdish movement's focus away from a nation-state towards democracy and autonomy, dismissing them merely as poor maneuvers of a coward leader. Therefore the book unfortunately gives a distorted perspective and provides little guidance for policy makers or scholars who are dealing with recent developments in the Kurdish question. The book would have been outstanding if it had appeared in 1999. Today, something more insightful is needed. "Blood and Belief" tells a lot about the past of the PKK, but little about the present.