Pkk - History

History

In the early 1970s, the organization's core group was made up largely of students led by Abdullah Öcalan ("Apo") in Ankara. The group soon moved its focus to the large Kurdish population in south-east Turkey. A meeting on November 25, 1978, in a tea house near Diyarbakır is considered the founding meeting. On November 27, 1978, the group adopted the name Kurdistan Workers Party. Espousing a radical left, Marxist ideology, the group took part in violent conflicts with right-wing entities as a part of the political chaos in Turkey at the time. In 1979, as an act of "propaganda of the deed," the group tried to assassinate the Kurdish tribal leader Mehmet Celal Bucak. They claimed that he exploited the peasants, and collaborated with Turkey. This marked a period of intense urban warfare among other radical political elements.

The 1980 Turkish coup d'état pushed the organization to another stage, with members (such as Sakine Cansız, one of the co-founders) doing jail time, being subject to capital punishment, or fleeing to Syria. On November 10, 1980, the PKK bombed the Turkish Consulate in Strasbourg, France in a joint operation with the Armenian radical group ASALA, which they claimed as the beginning of a "fruitful collaboration."

Starting in 1984, the PKK transformed into a paramilitary group, using training camps located in France. It launched attacks and bombings against governmental installations, the military, and various "institutions of the state" — some of which were connected to the Southeastern Anatolia Project. The PKK became less centralized, taking up operations in a variety of European and Middle Eastern countries, especially Germany and France. The PKK has attacked civilian and military targets in various countries, such as Turkey, France, Belgium and Iraq.

Beginning with the mid-1990s, the organization lost the upper hand in its operations as a consequence of a change of tactics by Turkey and Syria's steady abandonment of support for the group. In the mid-1990s, it also began a series of 15 suicide bombings, 11 of which were carried out by women. In the late 1990s, Turkey increased the pressure and the undeclared war between Turkey and Syria ended open Syrian support. In 1999, Öcalan was captured, prosecuted and sentenced to death, but this was later commuted to life imprisonment as part of the government's seeking European Union membership.

With reduced security concerns, the Turkish parliament began a controlled process of dismantling the legal control, using the term "normalization" or "rapprochement," depending on the sides of the issue. It partially relaxed the bans on broadcasting and publishing in the Kurdish language - although significant barriers remained. At the same time, the PKK was blacklisted in many countries. On April 2, 2004, the Council of the European Union added the PKK to its list of terrorist organizations. Later that year, the US Treasury moved to freeze assets of branches of the organization. The PKK went through a series of changes, and in 2003 it ended the unilateral truce declared when Ocalan was captured.

Since Post-invasion Iraq, 2003–present, Turkey alleges that Massoud Barzani, president of the Kurdistan Regional Government, and the US-led coalition forces have not done enough to combat with the PKK and dislodge it from its base in the Iraqi mountains. In an interview during April 2010, Murat Karayılan, the leader of the armed wing of the PKK, admitted to his organization's having attacked a group of American soldiers in 2004 in North Iraq and killing at least one of them.