The Kurdistan Communities Union (KCK) Executive Board Co-Chair Cemil Bayık spoke about the 42nd foundational anniversary of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) and the significance of Abdullah Öcalan in leading it.
Bayık stated that Abdullah Öcalan, leader of the PKK, came from the 1968 generation and in the beginning, Öcalan considered social and political issues through a religious motivation. However, Bayık stated that Öcalan later adopted socialist ideas: “He decided to improve the revolutionary movement over the incidents that included Mahir Çayan and his friends being murdered and the executions of Deniz Gezmiş, Hüseyin İnan and Yusuf Aslan”.
“Öcalan (Apo) became the most well known student leader of Ankara in a short period of time”, Bayik noted. “In the period that he organized the People’s Liberation Party-Front of Turkey (THKP-C), he increased his research and application to the cause. He concluded that Kurdistan was a colony and a struggle must be carried out to liberate it. When he was organizing the revolutionary youth in Ankara, he expressed that idea in various forms. He took his five friends to Çubuk Dam with him in the spring of 1973 and asserted the view that ‘Kurdistan is a colony’. The meeting in Çubuk Dam became the first core meeting of the Apoist youth group. With the Dikmen Meeting in 1976, he said that all staff of the party turned their focus towards Kurdistan and the group settled in Kurdistan entirely”.
Bayik added: “After Haki Karer’s death, he stated that a new decision was made to preserve and protect the organizational style of the organization. Öcalan said: ‘It was decided that an organizational construct and a struggle based approach which met the needs of developing an idea that belonged to Kurdish society could be constructed only under the condition of it being a party. That could also be enabled by organizing a frequent popularization and transformational base that could engage in struggle”.
To these ends, Bayik recounted that “twenty two youngsters came together in the Fis Village of Lice (Amed) to found a party. That was how the founding declaration of the PKK evolved”. Bayik emphasized that the Maraş Massacre took place on 19-26 December 1978 and the attack was organized to bear down upon the rising revolutionary movements. Noting that leader ‘Apo’ travelled abroad in order to ensure the security of the organization and to develop political relations in the Middle East – with Palestine being a priority – Cemil Bayık expressed the following regarding the struggle against the outcome of the September 12 military coup: “To re-organize the people and the organization in such an environment of the defeat psychology caused by the September 12 military-fascist coup could only be possible through a great stance and effort of the leadership, and this was achieved by leader Apo. The feelings and the efforts of the leadership, the status of the people of the organization, what has survived each and everyday, each of these shows how thorough a struggle the PKK raised in each of these difficult periods. The basic organizational culture, the leading power and the great stance of the leadership is fundamentally a product of this period. The works conducted then supplied twenty years of moving energy and experience to the organization. It is beyond doubt that the difficulties which the organization faced in the struggle against liquidationism during 1999 and 2005, and the struggles of that period and the experiences gained, have maintained our movement as a fighting organization for around 20 years”.