On 15 February 1999 Abdullah Öcalan was abducted in Nairobi, Kenya. Öcalan was leader of the PKK, the leftist Kurdish guerrilla movement which had initiated an armed struggle against the Turkish government in 1984 in its quest for self-determination for Kurdistan, which spreads across Iraq, Syria, Turkey and Iran. Between then and 2012, over 20,000 PKK fighters were killed in the war. According to the Los Angeles Times, by 2010 four thousand Kurdish villages had been razed by the Turkish Army, while 35,000 Kurdish civilians and 5,000 Turkish civilians had been killed.
Öcalan’s capture followed a diplomatic impasse between Turkey – who demanded his extradition – EU nations, African countries and Russia. He’d lived in Syria – home to many Kurds – for much of the 1990s, and led groups of PKK militants for training in the Bekaa valley in Lebanon. He’d been forced to leave in 1998 when Syria was threatened with military action by Turkey. Prior to this, he had declared a unilateral ceasefire in 1993, and again in 1996. Labelled by the Turkish government as a terrorist leader, in the years prior to his arrest he had also been touring world capitals seeking moves towards peace.
When he was seized, Öcalan had been sheltering at the Greek embassy in Nairobi, trying to get to South Africa where Nelson Mandela had offered him asylum. Turkey had demanded his extradition from Italy, and then from Greece. There seemed very few places for him to turn to, until the Greeks suggested moving him to their embassy in Kenya. Mandela sympathised with the Kurdish cause, and doubtless in Öcalan recognised a fellow leftist struggling for equality.
Once in the Kenyan capital, Öcalan fell victim to a plot coordinated by the CIA, Mossad, and the Turkish National Intelligence Organisation. With Turkey a NATO member and a key US ally in the Middle East, the Americans were anxious to deliver Öcalan to them. Under huge pressure, the Kenyan authorities handed him over to the Turkish secret services, and he was flown to Turkey. There, he was convicted of terrorism and sentenced to death, though in 2002 the sentence was commuted to life imprisonment without hope of parole.
Öcalan has been in prison ever since at İmralı Island prison in the Sea of Marmara. For the first ten years of this time he was held in solitary confinement, unable to see the sky. Since 2009, he has been joined by five other inmates. This year marks the 25th anniversary of his capture in a move that presaged the policies of “extraordinary rendition” and extrajudicial confinement pursued by the Americans during the War on Terror. For Thomas Miley, lecturer in Political Sociology at the University of Cambridge and author of Your Freedom and Mine: Abdullah Öcalan and the Kurdish Question in Erdogan’s Turkey, “it was the first strike in the War on Terror in Turkey, which foreshadowed what happened after 9/11.” Just like the inmates of Guantanamo Bay, Öcalan has been held in appalling conditions; and as with them, much of the world has forgotten all about him.
Just like the inmates of Guantanamo Bay, Öcalan has been held in appalling conditions
He is just one of the many tens of thousands of prisoners of conscience around the world whose cases never attract broad public attention. This was brought home to the co-chair of the Kurdish People’s Council in London, İshak Milani, during a recent three-day campaign of marches across London to commemorate Öcalan’s imprisonment. Milani, who trained as a political scientist, was staggered that everyone he handed the leaflets out to on the streets had to ask him who the PKK leader was. Why should British people know or care? I asked him. “The Kurdish problem today, Middle Eastern problems today, were built by the British,” Milani argued. “They created the nation states, financed the Turkish state under Mustafa Kemal (Atatürk) as it committed genocides against the Armenians and the Greeks. They financed the road which Atatürk built to Kurdistan in the 1920s, which began the cultural war against Kurds.”
Öcalan’s invisibility is all the more difficult to understand given his career since incarceration. Despite the Turkish government allowing him only scant access to books and writing materials in prison, he has written a number of books and pamphlets advocating for a radical democratic solution to the Kurdistan crisis. His work has been translated into many languages and praised by luminaries on the left including the late David Graeber.
Inspired by the American libertarian municipalist and former anarchist, Murray Bookchin, Öcalan’s concept of democratic confederalism confronts the historic causes of violence in the Middle East, not just in Kurdistan but also Gaza, Lebanon and Israel. In his view, these conflicts stem from the collapse of the multi-ethnic and multi-linguistic Ottoman Empire in 1919, and its division into nation-states where – anxious to ensure that they have decision-making power within their state boundaries – majority groups have turned on minorities with catastrophic consequences.
The Kurdish problem today, Middle Eastern problems today, were built by the British
Democratic confederalism envisions a peaceful future that requires dismantling these state structures and building decentralised communities founded on gender equality and ecological sustainability. It’s a radical vision, but for Miley “we have to be thinking along these lines to survive in the 21st century… standard thinking has got us into this enormous mess, so we need some controversial ideas to get us out of it.” İshak Milani eloquently states Öcalan’s case: “To begin with we all wanted a Kurdish state as part of our struggle. But then we understood that the nation state was at the root of all our problems.”
The anarchist roots of Öcalan’s ideas may explain the reluctance of Western leftist movements to adopt his cause as their own. His outright hostility to the nation state sits awkwardly with many traditional left-wing views of the role of the state as a means of ensuring redistribution in society. Yet some of Öcalan’s ideas have actually been put into practice over the last decade in the Autonomous Kurdish region of Rojava, otherwise known as The Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria. Rojava has played an important role in the struggle against ISIS. The region has been variously described as a “dream of a socialist utopia” in the New York Times, or a “web of contradictions” in UnHerd. Certainly, pragmatism and idealism share an uncomfortable coexistence here: Government by community councils with male and female co-chairs, alongside multilingual education for its Arab, Armenian, Assyrian, Kurdish, and Yezidi communities, is the norm. But on the other hand, Rojava has often depended on US military air defence and black-market oil revenues in spite of its stated commitment to an ecological future.
Many Kurdish observers have become used to the general silence about the decades-long confinement of their ideological leader. Aladdin Sinayic, the former editor of the weekly Kurdish magazine in London Telgraf, sees the silence as part of the broader tragedy of Kurdish history, where in spite of Öcalan’s radical roots his case does not match the ideological commitments of the 21st-century left. “What Öcalan is writing about does not fit comfortably into the model,” he says. “Turkey is part of the BRICS movement, is supporting Palestine. Talking about Kurdistan has always caused problems in people’s careers.”
Yet for people like Sinayic, these ideas have never been more relevant. The shattering war in Gaza and Lebanon is a reminder that the solution to the British and French Mandates in the Middle East following World War I has been an unending catastrophe: an inevitable outcome of the attempt to engineer decolonisation by imposing nation states across the region. As Thomas Miley explains, for Öcalan decentralisation is the only path that offers a genuine hope of peace in the future. For him, “the solution in Israel and Palestine is not a two-state solution. It’s a no-state solution”.
This suggests a further explanation as to why his cause does not attract large-scale support. His ideas can antagonise those on the right who support Israeli statehood and its war, those in the centre who advocate for two states, and those on the left who advocate for a single Palestinian state. Öcalan’s stance has also created divisions within Kurdish movements. As he himself noted, when he moved from advocating for a Kurdish state to this decentralised model, many saw it as an admission of defeat. It may sound far too radical to be practical, but Sinayic puts it differently: “It is the solution. Perhaps that’s why no one wants to talk about it.”
Meanwhile, Öcalan’s 25-year incarceration has turned him into a figure mythologised in his own lifetime. Even after his first decade of solitary confinement ended, his prison conditions have been brutal and have repeatedly been said to break international law. For periods of up to eight years, Öcalan has been barred from all communication with the outside world or visits even by his lawyers; and the most recent such period, of 44 months, only came to an end on 23 October when he was visited by his nephew, the first concrete proof for over three years that he was still alive.
This visit also offers hope that maybe – just maybe – prospects for change are in the air. The day before his nephew’s visit, the leading Turkish nationalist politician Devlet Bahçeli called on Öcalan to be allowed to address parliament, and suggested that he could be offered freedom if the PKK would disband. However, on 23 October itself a deadly terrorist attack took place in Ankara on a leading Turkish aerospace firm. The PKK claimed responsibility, evidence of the tensions within different parts of the group. Deadly airstrikes followed that night from the Turkish air force in Rojava.
Nevertheless, for Thomas Miley, the crisis in the Middle East has shifted the dialogue on Öcalan. Referring to the Turkish president, he said, “Erdoğan has called for unity in the face of the Palestine crisis, and that includes a deal for Öcalan. The left can’t continue to pass this over. He is the last Mandela-like liberationist figure going: a thinker who has made revolutionary inroads in his quest for peace.”
As this article went to press, Miley shared a message from Öcalan’s nephew which he had received via a Kurdish friend: “On October 23, I met with Mr. Öcalan at İmralı Island Prison. This visit was held within the scope of a family meeting. During the meeting, Mr. Öcalan made evaluations regarding general political developments and asked for the following message to be conveyed to the public: ‘The isolation continues. If the conditions are right, I have the theoretical and practical power to pull this process from the ground of conflict and violence to the ground of law and politics.’”
Öcalan’s nephew concluded: “He was in good health and sent greetings to everyone” – a statement both moving and shattering considering how much is at stake.
Toby Green’s new book, “The Heretic of Cacheu”, will be published by Allen Lane in July 2025
