The PKK has been Turkey’s biggest enemy for decades. All this time, the Turkish army has been fighting the members of the PKK, but still without success. By the way, many of the PKK members are not in Turkey, but live in the mountains in Northern Iraq.
Turkish Kurds and the PKK
Turkish Kurds generally remain very loyal to the PKK. This is because they believe that the movement is fighting for their own state that they also want.
What is the PKK?
The PKK was founded in 1978 as the Kurdistan Workers’ Party. Its founder was political science student Abdullah Ocelan. The main goal of the organization, which is based on Marxist-Leninism, is its own state. This Kurdistan should consist of parts of:
- the southeast of Turkey
- Northeastern Syria
- Northwestern Iran
Kurdish state has been abandoned by the PKK
In the mid-1990s, the PKK gave up its demand for its own state. From that moment on, the PKK wants autonomous and more cultural rights for the 15 million Kurds in southeastern Turkey
The PKK as a terrorist organization
The European Union, the United States, Turkey and NATO and many other states and agencies consider the PKK a terrorist organization.
Fires in Kurdish villages
The battle between the Kurds and the Turkish army was at its fiercest in the 1990s. Many Kurdish villages then emptied because people were afraid of losing their lives. Now that there is no more fighting there and people are returning, many fires rage in the area every summer. The Turkish government says this is the result of fighting, but the Kurds say the fires are being set.
Big consequences
However, the fires raging in the Kurdish villages have major consequences for the economy of the area, because the grass in the livestock farming area burns down and the cows have nothing to eat. In other villages, the fruit trees in particular have burned down, which also means much less income. Where arable farming is the main income, a large part of the harvest has been lost.