By Franz Schurmann
Pacific News Service/San Francisco Examiner
September 5, 1996
His name is barely mentioned in officials accounts of why the United States launched cruise missile attacks on Saddam Hussein's military bases. But Abdullah Ocalan is creating waves that are destabilizing the Middle East far more than the Iraqi dictator.
Ocalan is the leader of the Maoist-inspired Kurdistan Workers Party- called the PKK- which has waged a decade-long guerrilla war in Turkey and is now viewed by many observers as the rising power in Kurdish-dominated northern Iraq.
Roughly 20 million Kurds inhabit the region stretching from eastern Turkey through northern Iraq into Iran, Syria and the Caucasus. Rarely throughout their 3000-years history have they been able to form a state of their own. Yet they have fiercely resisted every attempt to destroy or assimilate them.
At the same time, Kurds have long believed that they are destined for greatness. The greatest Kurd in history -Saladin- destroyed the crusader states in the Holy Land, unified Arabs, Turks, and Kurds, and paved the way for the Ottoman Empire's 500 year rule.
Could Ocalan become a modern-day Saladin? Expectations are rising rapidly in the region even as popular disdain deepens for the two quarreling Kurdish leaders -Masoud Barzani and Jalal Talabani- on whom the Clinton administration has pinned its hopes for stabilizing Kurdistan.
A year ago, the United States sponsored a summit between Barzani and Talabani in Dublin, but it flopped. A second summit, scheduled for last month, never got off the ground. In fact, U.S. policy was doomed from the start because it assumed that far too much power was in the hands of these two factions, while underestimating that of the PKK.
Last month the PKK demolished 24 of Barzani's military outpost in northern Iraq. Seeing his power seep away, Barzani turned to the only other leader able to help him: Saddam Hussein. Hussein obliged by attacking Talabani's stronghold, Irbil, a move that led to this week's U.S. retaliatory missile attacks.
Even the Iranian mullahs who preached an Islamic message similar to Mao' early on in their revolution are now fearful that Ocalan's message could spill over into Iran.
At the core of Ocalan's appeal is the fact that he, alone among Kurdish Leaders, understands that a social revolution is going on in Kurdish society everywhere. Kurds feel oppressed not only by their alien rulers, but also by one of the most rigid feudal social systems still in existence. The message of Maoism has always been to empower the poor and fight their oppressors. Like Mao, the PKK teaches it followers gender equality and willingness to sacrifice one's life for the cause.
Muslims preach that their common faith crosses all boundaries of nationality, race, and class. The Maoists agree on the first two, but not the third. Marxist ideas of class struggle have given them an organized militancy that the Islamic movements sweeping the Middle East generally lack.
If these two forces -Islam and Maoist ideology- should coalesce, the region is likely to see a new transnational empire arising that no amount of high-tech weaponry from the west can thwart, and Ocalan will go down in the history books as the Saladin of the late 20th century.
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