soL English

Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) is a Kurdish organization founded in 1978 and launched an armed campaign aganist Turkish state in 1984 for establishing an independent Kurdish state. Its leader Abdullah Öcalan is imprisoned as the only prisoner on İmralı island in the Marmara Sea.

The organization was renamed as the Democracy Congress of Kurdistan (KADEK) and the People’s Congress (Kongra-Gel) but PKK is still being used to refer to it.

The organization had established training camps in Bekaa Valley in Syria in the early 1980s. But in 1998 Öcalan was expelled from Syria and the training camps were moved to the north of Iraq. In 1999 Öcalan was captured by CIA agents and handed over to Turkish authorities, which was also a sign of the rising hegemony of the US administration on the Kurdish question in Turkey.

The role of the US has become decisive after the occupation of Iraq. Although the US condemns PKK as a terrorist organization its existence in Iraq has been tolerated.

During the first years of its activity the ideology of the PKK was defined as Marxism-Leninsm by its leadership. As a national liberation movement the group was stressing the backwardness of the Kurdish regions of Turkey, the hegemony of tribal classes which were collaborating with the Turkish state and the rejection of basic rights for the poor Kurdish population. However with the collapse of the Soviet Union the organization has drifted its position to a more nationalist line and adopted a strategy based on exploiting the conflicts between different states including the imperialist countries.

Despite its strong diplomacy with the imperialist centers, the United States, the European Union and NATO added the PKK on their lists of terrorist organizations.

The organization has been declaring unilateral cease-fire but it has not abandoned armed struggle. More than 30 thousand people have died in the clashes between the PKK forces and the Turkish army.