Report on Apo

[newsdesk_aps_nl at apsf.aps.nl]

From: newsdesk_aps_nl at apsf.aps.nl (newsdesk at aps.nl)
Subject: Report on Apo


      By Alistair Bell

    ANKARA, March 27 (Reuter) - Kurdish guerrilla leader Abdullah Ocalan,
a revolutionary of the 1970s who has fought successive Turkish governments
since 1984, has never given up his Cold War brand of nationalism mixed
with Marxism-Leninism.

    ``Even if 100,000 people die this year, our movement cannot be
disrupted,'' Ocalan, leader of the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) rebel
group, told a Turkish newspaper in 1992.

    More than 15,000 people have been killed since the PKK, at first only
a few hundred dedicated followers of Ocalan, took up arms 11 years ago for
a separate Marxist-Leninist state.

    The group is now a well-oiled guerrilla army of 5,000-10,000 men and
women with urbane representatives in Europe and battle-hardened fighting
units in both Turkey and northern Iraq.

    Turkey has launched the biggest military expedition in its modern
history, involving 35,000 troops, to drive the PKK out of mountain bases
in northern Iraq.

    A thick-set man in his mid-40s with a bushy black moustache, Ocalan
has said he prefers a federation with Turkey over a separate state but PKK
literature emphasises independence.

    Also known as Apo, Ocalan is believed to be based in Damascus or the
Syrian-controlled Bekaa valley in Lebanon. In 1993 journalists saw him
arrive in the Bekaa in a car bearing Syrian diplomatic licence plates.

    Late last year he launched a diplomatic offensive to secure a
ceasefire and international mediation to end the insurgency.

    ``International organisations can play a major role in finding a
solution,'' he wrote to Western leaders in November.

    Successive Turkish administrations have ruled out a political solution
or talks with the PKK, arguing that Kurds have equal rights in Turkey and
are not an ethnic minority.

    Turkish Prime Minister Tansu Ciller flatly turned down the ceasefire
offer, branding Ocalan ``a terrorist,'' and Western governments showed no
willingness to act as peace brokers.

    Just over a week after Apo's peace overture, two PKK gunmen shot dead
a teacher in the southeastern Turkish province of Mardin, raising doubts
over his sincerity to halt the campaign.

    The PKK, using mostly hit-and-run tactics against the much larger
Turkish army, has defied frequent government assertions it is all but
defeated inside Turkey. Ciller says a final push in Iraq will finish them
for good.

    Ocalan, born to a poor peasant family in the Kurdish village of Omerli
in the southeastern province of Sanliurfa, developed his revolutionary
ideas amid the violent political turmoil of Turkey in the 1970s.

    He fled to Syria before Turkey's 1980 military coup, which disrupted a
secret movement he founded in 1974 after dropping out of Ankara
University's political science faculty.

    He later acquired a reputation for ruthlessness in the southeast with
killings of suspected collaborators, pro-government tribespeople and
left-wing rivals.

    Alliances he has forged with the main Kurdish groups in Iraq have
fallen apart because of the Iraqi Kurds' anger at the PKK's willingness to
kill Kurdish civilians.

 REUTER