Duran Kalkan, a member of the PKK Executive Committee, spoke to Kurdish TV channel Medya Haber, where he highlighted the ongoing resistance of the PKK forces in Iraqi Kurdistan and called for a broad anti-fascist front to resist attacks by the Turkish state.
Kalkan criticised the mainstream Turkish media, noting that “the general public of Turkey do not know a lot of things, because they don’t get to know about them.”
The PKK executive said the Turkish media had attempted to hide news of at least 15 Turkish Unmanned Ariel Vehicles (UAVs), commonly known as drones, being shot down by the armed wing of the PKK (HPG) since February 2023.
“Now the debris of the AKP-MHP is raining down from the sky,” Kalkan added, metaphorically comparing the historic defeat of Turkey’s ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) – Nationalist Movement Party (MHP) alliance in the country’s local elections, and its possible decreased military supremacy, to the downing of the drones.
He continued by stating that Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan had praised the use of drones, technology implicated in war crimes, and that Turkish media has extensively reported on the issue, showing videos of these drones “flying and attacking, but never showing videos of them falling.”
Kalkan added that Turkish fascism is “not getting stronger, but it is crumbling” and that it is “trying to keep itself alive by force and prevent its collapse.”
Expressing his horror at the normalisation of the Gaza war balance sheet, he said that “the balance sheet is given as if you were drinking a glass of water. […] [over] 30,000 people have died. These are people, people! People are killing people! What kind of humanity is this? […] There is a massacre going on.”
He emphasised that the PKK is a “movement that wants freedom and democracy”, but that they, as imprisoned PKK leader Abdullah Öcalan has said, “have been forced into a situation where they need to fight to not be destroyed.”
The PKK executive dived even deeper into his analysis of the Turkish AKP-MHP government, saying it is “collapsing” and that the “AKP-MHP fascism is dissolving”.
“They are trying to hide it with their propaganda […] They are especially afraid of the foreign public opinion […] They are in a 24-hour state of fear. What if the truth is revealed? No matter what it does, AKP-MHP fascism will not be saved from collapse,” he said.
Furthermore, he claimed that Turkish media “have brainwashed a lot of people with money, with nationalist, sexist and religious delusions […] and have turned people into enemies of the Kurds.”
Kalkan, who is of Turkish origin himself, calls on “Turkey’s youth, women and workers” to “recognise this fascist aggression and persecution and to radicalise the resistance against it” and that “only through this [resistance] can this AKP-MHP fascism be destroyed.”
Calling on unity among the different peoples of Turkey, he said that they must act as a “United Revolutionary Movement of Peoples”, so that “the Turkish government does not do more harm to society”.
Reiterating this stance, he concluded with a call to unite and mobilise. Remembering the history of socialist struggles in Turkey, he urged “especially the youth” to not forget the fight of the Turkish Communist organisation DEV-GENÇ (Revolutionary Youth) and the Turkish revolutionaries Mahir Çayan, Deniz Gezmiş and İbrahim Kaypakkaya, who were all killed in the early 1970s by Turkish state forces and are seen as symbols of the resistance against Turkish fascism.
