Turkey, PKK, and the Black Panather Movement

Compare and contrast Turkey's president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan

 and  Efkan Ala, head of the The Ministry of the Interior (Turkish: İçişleri Bakanlığı) and formerly  Governor of  the primarily Kurdish province of Diyarbakır

 with the United States president in the 1970s, Richard Mulhouse ("I am not a crook") Nixon

 a and his shadow  self, John Edgar Hoover . . .

. . . not, in this image, wearing a dress.

 Erdoğan, after many false starts, faces a rebellion by the large, mistreated Kurdish population in Turkey.  Nixon faced, what he proclaimed as a rebellion of Black in the zuS.

 Nixon and Hoover

supervised an extensive program (COINTELPRO) of surveillance, infiltration, perjury, police harassment, and many other tactics designed to undermine Panther leadership, incriminate party members, discredit and criminalize the Party, and drain the organization of resources and manpower.

They won a temporary victory.  History suggests tht t multi-ethnic USA will emerge in spite of the best efforts of a ruling elite.

 Erdoğan's path to temporary victory is more difficult:  Kurds have powerful kin in the neighborhood, armed and influential; he has Russia to contend with; and the Kurdish minority is accustomed to his tricks.

Posted December 18, 2015

A Turkish Attack and Tactical Reconnaissance Helicopter performs a maneuver during a ceremony marking the 93rd anniversary of Victory Day in Ankara, Turkey, Aug. 30, 2015.  (photo by REUTERS/Umit Bektas)

Will Turkey end up stuck between Kurds, Russia?

An old Turkish proverb says, “You can’t carry two watermelons under one arm,” meaning that two big tasks should not be tackled at the same time. These days, the Ankara regime seems to be attempting exactly that. At home, it is waging a war on the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), and regionally, it is sliding into a cold war with Russia that carries the risk of heated confrontation. As a natural outcome, these two wars could draw Russia and the PKK together, creating a tough challenge for Turkey.

The first frost in the cold war with Russia came Nov. 24 when Turkey downed a Russian warplane on grounds it violated Turkish airspace at the border with Syria, where Russia is intervening militarily to prop up the Damascus regime and Turkey is backing opposition forces. A brief recollection of the past would explain why the PKK should not be overlooked in this cold war.

In the 1980s, Syria — the Soviet Union’s ally in the Middle East — offered safe haven and military and logistic support to the PKK in a bid to destabilize NATO’s flank country, Turkey, among other objectives. In the wake of the Soviet Union’s collapse, the Russian Federation — irked by the pan-Turkist winds blowing in Turkey and the support Chechen separatists enjoyed there — allowed the PKK to operate legally on its soil. The group was even allocated a "culture and education camp" near Yaroslavl, northeast of Moscow. No wonder Russia became the first country where PKK founder Abdullah Ocalan — now jailed on a prison island in the Sea of Marmara — sought refuge in 1998 after leaving his longtime safe haven in Syria, under Turkish pressure.

The PKK is again part of the Syrian equation today, though in a different form. The PKK’s Syrian offshoot, the Democratic Union Party (PYD), has emerged as the undisputed, dominant power in Rojava (the term Kurds use to refer to western Kurdistan in Syria), and a well-proven force in the fight against the Islamic State (IS). Ankara, however, sees the PYD as a threat, wary that the Kurdish autonomy in Rojava threatens Turkey’s territorial integrity.

In this context, Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Alexei Meshkov’s remarks on Dec. 16 suggest Moscow is already showing the tip of “the Kurdish card” to Ankara. “Turkey's actions — and on the contrary, its inaction on certain issues — pose a real threat” to Russian security, Meshkov told Russia's state-owned news agency RIA Novosti. “The Kurds, of course, should not be excluded from this process [of peace talks on Syria], as well as from collective efforts against [IS] and other terrorist groups in Syria and Iraq, where they play a significant role in countering the terrorist threat.” It is important to note that the PKK has been on the forefront of the fight against IS in Iraq. Thus, Meshkov’s comments reflect political support for the PKK as well.

His reference to Turkey’s “actions” and “inactions” describes Ankara’s Syria policy. If Turkey’s support for jihadis is the action Russia sees as a threat, then Turkey’s failure to do its part against IS must be the inaction Russia rebukes. This very policy is the core reason for the cold war between the two.

Turkey has refused to change its Syria policy, while at the same time piling pressure on the PKK by escalating the war in the Kurdish-majority southeast. The more the pressure grows, the higher the possibility of the PKK gravitating toward Russia.

The frontline in the new war with the PKK has shifted to urban areas in the southeast, leading to extensive destruction and collective punishment of civilian populations. Take, for instance, the Sur district of Diyarbakir, the region’s largest city, where police have been battling PKK militants entrenched in residential areas. The historical district last week emerged devastated after a nine-day, round-the-clock curfew, lifted for only 17 hours, drawing comparisons to Middle Eastern cities ravaged by civil war — and rightfully so. According to a tally by journalist Celal Baslangic, who closely follows the southeast, 40 curfews covering a total of 130 days were imposed on 18 districts in the region from Aug. 16 to Dec. 8.

What brought about fighting in the urban areas is the sociopolitical transformation that Turkey’s Kurdish movement has undergone in recent years. As the Kurdish question became highly politicized, the Kurdish movement grew into a popular movement with broad and vibrant bases in cities and towns. The security crackdowns were launched after the Patriotic Revolutionary Youth Movement (YDG-H), dominated by young PKK militants, assumed the role of a policing force in neighborhoods with strong pro-PKK bases as an alternative to state authority. The security operations, which began in July, were met with armed resistance on the local level, with militants digging trenches and erecting barricades in residential areas. According to statistics compiled by Turkey’s Human Rights Association and revealed Dec. 10 on the international Human Rights Day, 157 civilians have been killed in the clashes since July, in addition to 195 PKK militants and 171 members of the security forces.

On Dec. 15, the government ordered the army into action as the special police forces, which had led the operations so far, failed to break the resistance at flashpoints in the provinces of Diyarbakir, Mardin and Sirnak. Backed by tanks and armored vehicles, 10,000 troops have since launched operations in Sirnak’s towns of Cizre and Silopi, where armed PKK militants have been holding out for months behind barricades and trenches.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan keeps repeating that the fight against the PKK will continue as long as it takes. Yet a more reliable measure exists to guess how far the fight could go. Erdogan’s war on the PKK has become an indispensable vessel of his unyielding ambition for a shift to a presidential system, and it has already brought his party victory in the Nov. 1 elections. Thus, the regime will be compelled to carry on the war as long as it takes to secure the larger nationalist vote that any future referendum on a constitutional amendment will require.

Meanwhile, the regime’s mounting military pressure on the PKK is likely to make the group open to external support. Ending the cold war with Russia is thus imperative in terms of Turkey’s domestic stability as well. Yet normalization has become virtually impossible, with Russia demanding an apology and compensation for the downed jet as a precondition to mend fences. Agreeing to these demands would amount to a humiliating defeat for Erdogan, given that Ankara has said that the jet was downed for violating Turkish airspace and that it will never apologize for that.

In sum, the framework of a cold war enables Russia to increase military and political pressure on Ankara to deter it from backing jihadis. It remains to be seen how long Ankara will be able to sustain the cold war with Russia and the heated conflict with the PKK without letting its two adversaries link up.

  December 21, 2015

A boy walks past burning tires during a protest against the curfew in Sur district, in the southeastern city of Diyarbakir, Turkey, Dec. 14, 2015. (photo by REUTERS/Sertac Kayar)

The PKK's 'child terrorists'

The number of child convicts in Turkish prisons has increased fivefold since 2009, reaching 7,595 in 2014. In 2014 alone, the number increased 23.8% over the previous year. In terms of age groups, 13.5% (1,028) of imprisoned child convicts were 12-14 years old, while the remaining 86.5% (6,567) were 15-17, according to figures from the Turkish Statistical Institute (TUIK).

hese numbers could rise even higher this year, as the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) recruits children for its fight against security forces. The battles have been escalating since July.

Minors under the age of 18 made up 29.4% (22.8 million) of Turkey’s population of nearly 77.7 million as of December 2014, according to TUIK. In the predominantly Kurdish southeast, the rate was even higher — about 50% — meaning that one of every two people is a child.

In addition to those convicted, there are tens of thousands of minors being held in penal institutions under supervision or arrest, a criminal lawyer who wished to remain anonymous told Al-Monitor.

Turkish law defines minors as “individuals who have not turned 18,” while Article 31 of the Turkish Penal Code divides them into three groups in terms of criminal liability. Children who are younger than 12 when they commit an offense are exempt from liability. With children aged 12-14, officials consider an offender's capacity to understand the crime and control his or her behavior. Minors in the third group — those who have turned 15 — are considered to have criminal liability but are subject to a policy of reduced penalties.

Yet when it comes to “terror offenses,” minors are not that lucky. Under Article 2 of the stern Anti-Terror Law, those who are not members of terrorist organizations but commit offenses on their behalf are equally deemed to be “terror offenders.” The law does not distinguish between adults and minors regarding these offenses. In other words, a person who does not officially belong to a terrorist organization but is caught perpetrating an act of terror is automatically arrested as a terror offender, regardless of whether he or she is a minor or an adult.

Article 5 of the same law stipulates longer sentences for terror offenses — up to six years in jail if the offense is perpetrated individually and up to nine years if it is perpetrated collectively. Though the penal code stipulates reduced sentences for minors, it's questionable whether that is considered in terror cases.

The same lawyer told Al-Monitor that Kurdish minors aged 12-17 make up the vast majority of suspects who have been temporarily detained or arrested pending trial for terror offenses since the clashes between the security forces and the PKK resumed in the southeast in July. Most of them, the lawyer said, belong to the 15-17 age group. It follows that the same age group will make up the majority of Kurds being arrested and put on trial for “terror offenses” in a recent operation that security forces launched to overcome resistance in six urban centers in the southeast. The operation began Dec. 17 and is likely to continue for at least 10 more days.

To determine the criminal liability of these minors, called "child terrorists" in Turkey, a meticulous investigation is required. However, in conflict zones, where the abnormal has become the norm, escalating clashes mean local security forces and the judiciary lack both the means and the time to conduct such investigations. When it comes to terrorism, the need to protect minors, especially those who have been “dragged into crime,” is inevitably reduced to secondary importance.

And what is the logic leading the PKK to push untrained and inexperienced minors to the forefront of the clashes? To start with, these children are residents of the cities and neighborhoods where the clashes take place. By using these minors, the PKK is able to turn local sentiment against the security forces.

Similarly, the deaths and funerals of the minors are instrumental in keeping popular pro-PKK mobilization alive.

Furthermore, when most of the PKK’s experienced fighters are deployed in Syria, using minors in urban clashes in the southeast allows the PKK to wage the conflict in Turkey in a manner that is less costly, less risky and more efficient.

Finally, once these children have criminal records, the PKK is able to tear them away from society and recruit them at a relatively low cost.

The PKK nowadays is creating “urban guerrilla” units, combining experienced “staffer terrorists” and “accidental child terrorists.” The children take to the streets as casually as they would to a neighborhood soccer match — perhaps out of curiosity and youthful excitement, peer pressure and/or ideological convictions.

The Turkish General Staff said Dec. 17 that 69 terrorists had been killed in operations launched by army troops in the southeast. How many of those killed were staffers and how many were accidental child terrorists is unknown. Yet one thing is clear: The more the urban clashes intensify, the more they amplify the problem of child terrorists facing Turkey’s security forces and judiciary.

Judging by their actions, decision-makers in Ankara seem concerned mainly with the “terrorist” aspect of the problem, ignoring the “child” aspect. And this perfectly serves the PKK’s aim to enlist popular support in neighborhoods and towns through the deaths and arrests of the local youngsters it drives to the forefront of the unrest. Regardless of whether the child terrorists are apprehended or killed, the PKK wins in both cases.

Black Panther Party

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Black Panther Party or BPP (originally the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense) was a revolutionary black nationalist and socialist organization[1][2] active in the United States from 1966 until 1982, with its only international chapter operating in Algeria from 1969 until 1972.[3]

At its inception on October 15,[4] 1966, the Black Panther Party's core practice was its armed citizens' patrols to monitor the behavior of police officers and challenge police brutality in Oakland, California. In 1969, community social programs became a core activity of party members.[5] The Black Panther Party instituted a variety of community social programs, most extensively the Free Breakfast for Children Programs, and community health clinics.[6][7][8]

Federal Bureau of Investigation Director J. Edgar Hoover called the party "the greatest threat to the internal security of the country",[9] and he supervised an extensive program (COINTELPRO) of surveillance, infiltration, perjury, police harassment, and many other tactics designed to undermine Panther leadership, incriminate party members, discredit and criminalize the Party, and drain the organization of resources and manpower. The program was also accused of using assassination against Black Panther members.[10][11][12][13]

Government oppression initially contributed to the growth of the party as killings and arrests of Panthers increased support for the party within the black community and on the broad political left, both of whom valued the Panthers as powerful force opposed to de facto segregation and the military draft. Black Panther Party membership reached a peak in 1970, with offices in 68 cities and thousands of members, then suffered a series of contractions. After being vilified by the mainstream press, public support for the party waned, and the group became more isolated.[14] In-fighting among Party leadership, caused largely by the FBI's COINTELPRO operation, led to expulsions and defections that decimated the membership.[15] Popular support for the Party declined further after reports appeared detailing the group's involvement in illegal activities such as drug dealing and extortion schemes directed against Oakland merchants.[16] By 1972 most Panther activity centered on the national headquarters and a school in Oakland, where the party continued to influence local politics. Party contractions continued throughout the 1970s. By 1980 the Black Panther Party had just 27 members.[17]