INTERNATIONAL ASPECTS OF THE PKK

Turkey is determined to put an end to PKK terrorism and sees Greece as the keystone. Ocalan’s arrest provides invaluable information and a golden opportunity. Ankara has initiated step-by-step action to achieve this and international conditions facilitate its implementation.

PKK leader Abdullah Ocalan’s handcuffed and blindfolded photographs were not good publicity for Turkey. Most people thought that he was being unnecessarily humiliated, if not tortured, by this treatment. In his first pictures on board the aircraft that brought him to Turkey from Kenya he said that handcuffing was not necessary, but the Turkish officer in charge replied that it was for his own security.

Indeed, neither the handcuffing nor blindfolding was without reason. Turkish security forces had planned the entire operation right down to the smallest detail and decided not to give him an opportunity to commit suicide upon realising that he had been arrested. A way of committing suicide by well-trained, professional spies and terrorists is inhibition – hitting with one’s fingers the sensitive parts of one’s throat or some other vital parts to kill oneself.

Turkish security forces could not take any chances about allowing such an occurrence, as the information Ocalan would give was vitally important for the future orientation of the country’s international relations. Also, it would give the perfect opportunity to Turkey’s enemies to carry out world-wide anti-Turkish propaganda. Hence handcuffing and blindfolding Ocalan was neither to humiliate him nor "disorient him", as claimed by the BBC. It had nothing to do with torturing him either. It was simply a necessity for the success of the Ocalan operation in its initial stage.

Intelligence interrogation in Ankara before the judicial one

As for blindfolding him, that was also a necessity for the success of the intelligence interrogation that was carried out before the judicial interrogation on the island of Imrali. Before Ocalan was taken to Imrali, he disappeared from the public eye for two days.

The aircraft Ocalan was travelling in arrived on the military apron of Istanbul airport at 0300 hrs on February 16^th for refuelling and then proceeded to Bandirma Airbase. Meanwhile, news was disseminated that a frigate was taking Ocalan from Bandirma to Imrali and that the storm was causing delays to reach the island. It was part of the carefully prepared operation. Actually, from Bandirma Airbase Ocalan was brought to Murted Airbase by a Turkish Air Force jet in the early hours of the 16^th. From there he was moved to the Special Security Forces Headquarters in Golbasi near Ankara under heavy security precautions in the evening. He was blindfolded and handcuffed the whole time, but far from unnecessarily torturing him, Ocalan’s guards were doing their best not to disturb him too much and leaving his ties as loose as possible for his comfort.

In Golbasi he underwent intelligence interrogation by MIT (Turkish Intelligence Service) and the Special Forces Command that had jointly abdicated him from Nairobi. Major General Engin Alan, Commander of the Special Forces, regularly provided information to PM Ecevit during these two days of intelligence interrogation. The photograph of handcuffed and blindfolded Ocalan in front of two Turkish flags that became the front cover of several big European and American magazines was taken in Golbasi and not in Imrali as most people thought.

After invaluable information had been obtained from this 2-day intelligence interrogation Ocalan was moved to Imrali via Bandirma on February 18^th. During this time Imrali Prison was evacuated for security reasons and the judicial interrogation and process began. On February 25^th two lawyers saw Ocalan in Imrali. At the same time, the National Security Council in Ankara was reviewing the outcome of the intelligence interrogation and taking policy decisions about the future steps to be taken in this matter.

From the other side of the world, in Manila, President Demirel had already announced the gist of these measures: "We want to give Greece a last chance. We are safeguarding our legitimate rights deriving from international law if they choose to sustain their illegal subversive activities," said Demirel in Manila on February 22^nd during his State visit to the Philippines. He also called on the allies to include Greece in the list of the countries that resort to or harbour terrorism.

President Demirel said over the Philippines TV, Channel PTV-4, "Greece is providing shelter, training facilities and logistics to the PKK terrorists who are looking for somewhere to harbour them. Greece has never denounced the PKK’s terrorist actions. On the contrary, it has announced once again only very recently that it does not see the PKK or its leader, Ocalan, as terrorists. Greek rulers have also confessed that the terrorist chief went to Kenya with their help and arrangements. Greece and its accomplice, the Greek Cypriots, have been captured red-handed in these terrorist activities. It has now been proved with concrete evidence that they are accomplices of the PKK terrorism’s bloody crimes."

After Syria, Ankara warns Greece with tangible evidence and testimony

The President’s warning to Greece was similar to the one he had made to Syria during his address at the inauguration of the new parliamentary year on October 1^st. The President also told Syria that Turkey was safeguarding its legitimate retaliation rights against Syria’s support of the PKK.

Actually Turkey’s tough action against Syria, which brought the two counties to the brink of war last October, was due to the first-hand information received from the PKK’s second-in-command, Semdin Sakik, after his abduction from Syria with a similar operation. This time the information given by Abdullah Ocalan about the details of Greece’s involvement in PKK terrorism was triggering off another move by Turkey with the determination to put an end to this terrorism before long.

Washington was prompt to answer Demirel’s appeal and announced that a country could be included in the terrorist countries’ list if the evidence showed sustained and systematic acts to harbour and assist terrorists.

The MFA (Ministry of Foreign Affairs) has been busy preparing documents to prove such sustained and systematic support to PKK terrorism by Greece. The information received from Ocalan was backing up the already heavily documented evidence that Turkey had been storing for years about the Greek and Greek Cypriot involvement in the PKK.

A document entitled "Greek-PKK relations with evidence" has already been handed to international organisations such as the EU, the UN Security Council, the OSCE, and NATO. In his capacity as the EU President, the German Foreign Minister, Joschaca Fischer, was the first to receive this document from Turkey’s Permanent Delegate to the EU, Ambassador Nihat Akyol. This document was urging these international organisations to outcast Greece because especially NATO and the OSCE have explicit provisions to ban terrorism and engage in co-operation against it. This matter will also be brought up with the Anti-Terrorism and Human Rights Committee of the UN Geneva Office when it holds sessions for a month in April.

This document, which was also handed to the diplomatic missions in Ankara, contains 12 pages of evidence about Greece and PKK relations. Detailed information is given about the terrorist camps in Lavrion and Southern Cyprus. In return, Greece is expected to put pressure to bear upon Turkey for the political solution of the Kurdish issue. Ocalan’s interrogation has provided Turkey with additional information about the arms and money support to PKK terrorism.

Meanwhile, at Turkey’ insistence, Belgium has warned Med-TV against its broadcasts inciting violence in Turkey and Europe by the PKK. Belgian authorities and prosecutors are now examining tape-recordings of Med-TV broadcasts to see how it incites PKK violence.

The US provides the biggest support to Turkey in anti-PKK fight, but…

Since Turkey toughened its stance as from last September against the external support to the PKK, the biggest support surprisingly came from the USA that eliminated the weakest point in Turkey’s cause. This weakest point was that Greece and several other European countries were viewing the PKK as freedom fighters and thus legitimising its violence as part of a war for independence.

At the critical point when Italy was officially taking an absurd stance after Ocalan’s deportation from Syria, Washington came to Turkey’s help with documents to prove what a terrible terrorist organisation the PKK is, with indiscriminate massive murders of babies, women and aged civilians. This objective stance on the part of Washington was the biggest factor in Turkey’s successful operation in Nairobi, even though it is evidently wrong that the secret services of Israel and the United States are the main forces behind it.

PM Ecevit does not deny that there has been external intelligence support to Turkey who knew precisely minute by minute every step of Ocalan’s aircraft after it left Rome on January 16^th, but time will show which intelligence co-operation was behind it. Only surveillance from a satellite can provide such precision to a country and it is obvious which country has the possibility of providing this information to Ankara if it is not the US. (Turkish Entebbe..)

As for Mossad’s or the CIA’s involvement in Ocalan’s arrest, both Israel and the US categorically deny it and even though they are telling the truth no one believes them. It is because of the nature of co-operation that started between Turkey and Israel during the then Foreign Minister Hikmet Cetin’s visit to Israel in 1992. Both military and intelligence co-operation between the two countries started with the agreements Cetin signed in Tel Aviv.

Turkey refrained from keeping these agreements secret and has since been repeatedly assuring the world and especially the Arabs that there is not a strategic alliance between Ankara and Tel Aviv. In Ankara’s view this co-operation with Israel is useful, and is against no one. In other words, Turkey does not accept the outlook in this co-operation that "your enemy is my enemy". This being the case, Turkish statesmen did not refrain from visiting Palestine and Arafat during their official visits to Israel. At the beginning Israel objected to it, but it has now come round to accepting it. When that was the case, Turkey’s enemy, the PKK, was not Israel’s enemy either and Ankara did not expect it to be. The Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz has written "The Kurds are not our enemies." Far from reacting to it, as Israel had objected to Turkish statesmen’s visits to Arafat, most Turks’ reaction to that article was, "Neither are the Kurds our enemies. It is the outsiders who confuse Turkey’s reactions to PKK terrorism with the Turks’ behaviour towards the Kurds who are our brethren."

Nevertheless, the world was not aware of these details and when Ocalan was abducted to Turkey the whole world jumped to the conclusion that Mossad was behind it. This misunderstanding went as far as the occupation of Israeli diplomatic missions in Europe, resulting in the deaths of three PKK members in the Israeli Consulate-General of Berlin. The PKK’s mouthpiece Med-TV, in particular, and the world media, in general, are, knowingly or unknowingly, continuing to disseminate this misinformation, if not disinformation and it is presenting an incorrect image for the world public about Turkey’s international relations.

NATO and other organisations to be arenas for Turkish-Greek struggle

In April NATO will hold its Summit in Washington to mark its 50^th anniversary, and will unveil its new strategy for the new century. US Defence Secretary William Cohen explained at the Munich Conference on Security Policy on February 6^th (where the Turkish Defence Minister was absent) the highlights of the "Transatlantic Partnership on the Threshold of the Next Millennium". The new NATO strategy will be based on "Protecting ourselves against terrorism. It means having greater intelligence, we have to gather more information, we have to share that information on a collective basis, if, in fact, we are going to be able to defeat those who seek to bring great casualty to our populations. These efforts will enhance, they will not eclipse, the work that is already underway across the Alliance," said Cohen. "Preparing our forces for the future also means preparing for the possibility of terrorist attacks against NATO forces and facilities. Again, each of us, individually, is taking measures to combat this. But collectively we have to do more to address this threat of terrorism; and, I believe, the Washington Summit is going to afford us the ability to really lay the ground work for dealing with this threat as an Alliance and not simply individually," he added.

Now when this collective fight against terrorism is the basis of NATO’s new strategy, what chance does Greece stand in explaining to the allies that it was "humanitarian work" to harbour "the biggest terrorist of the century", according to American classifications.

And it is not only in NATO, but also in other international organisations of common membership with Greece. Turkey will follow it up. These organisations are the UN, the OSCE, the Council of Europe and the BSEC (Black Sea Economic Co-operation).

Within a step-by-step follow-up programme adopted by the NSC (National Security Council), Turkey will try to make Greece denounce the PKK a terrorist organisation, as other allies do and to have the PKK’s terrorist camps closed in Greece. Ankara will stress that there can be no alliance with a country harbouring terrorists on its territory against a next door neighbour.

About Washington’s call for sustainability and systematic work concerning these activities before a country is labelled terrorist, Ankara will bring up Greece’s support of ASALA and the 17 November terrorist organisation’s activities against Turkey, according to the MFA Acting Spokesman, Sermet Atacanli. Libya and Iran have been included in the terrorist countries’ list by the United States with much weaker evidence than Greece’s support of terrorism, say official sources in Ankara.

In addition to these activities in the international field, Turkey will try to eliminate four leaders of the PKK. They are Faysal Dunlayici (code-named Kani Yilmaz), Yasar Kaya, Osman Ocalan and Cemil Bayik. The first two are in Europe and the others are at the fighting front in the region. Starting from the leader-to-be who has not yet been determined, they will be captured by the security forces, one by one. "Our hitherto performance is the assurance of our success in eliminating them too, once they decide about who will be the PKK leader to follow Ocalan," say Turkish intelligence sources. uras@ada.net.tr,   February 26^th, 1999