Kawa⚔️

An important 2025 publication investigating how Öcalan’s democratic confederalism opposes only one state, the Kurdish one, by socially engineering and removing Kurdish social and political structures that act against assimilation. This is proven using his own writings and notes. In his original Turkish he calls Turkey’s borders legitimate and says the Turkish flag can fly over his grave. He told Kurdish MPs that asking the state for Kurdish education “is a mistake”. He promised that his model removes the “danger” of Kurdish becoming an official language, and eases the assimilation process of Kurds in the countries they live in. He said he built the KCK during talks with Turkish intelligence chief Emre Taner. He also called the Kurdish National Congress the body that would “determine the Misak-ı Milli”, the 1920 pact that claimed Mosul, Kirkuk and Sulaymaniyah for Turkey. It draws on Öcalan’s post-2000 Turkish texts, including the KCK Social Pact, Democratic Confederalism, Problems of Democratization in Turkey, Defending a People and his İmralı notes from 2013 and 2014, and prints the originals in the footnotes. Democratic confederalism is presented as an alternative to the nation-state, yet it leaves all occupying forces that rule Kurdistan untouched and treats them as legitimate. The translation problem is specific. Democratic Confederalism is under 50 pages, yet its flag statements, “I respect the Turkish flag” and “your flag is mine”, appear only in the Turkish edition. The English version uses the word “assimilation” five times, always critically. The Turkish original uses it once, and there Öcalan accepts the “natural assimilation” of Kurds, describing them as a “sociological phenomenon” and a “richness” for the Turkish nation. Most Western scholarship on Öcalan, including Jongerden, Akkaya, Gunes, Dirik and Graeber, rests on these selective translations. Kamran Matin and Michiel Leezenberg are among the few critical exceptions. The story that Öcalan converted from Kurdish statehood to post-nationalism under Murray Bookchin’s influence does not hold, because there was no statehood project to give up. In 1977 he said the PKK “did not emerge exclusively for only one nationality”. In 2004 he admitted that “Independent Kurdistan” was a slogan and that the PKK never thought the question of a state through. In a 1988 interview with Mehmet Ali Birand he spoke of coexistence and “internal independence”. At a 1993 press conference in Lebanon with Jalal Talabani he said Kurds and Turks could not separate, comparing them to “a fingernail and the surrounding flesh”, and offered to disarm in return for legal guarantees. In 1996 interviews with Nabil al-Mulham he denied that Western Kurdistan exists, saying “it is correct to say Syrian Kurds”, and proposed federalism inside Turkey, Iran and Iraq on the German, Spanish and Swiss models. The real shift after his capture was from supporting Kurdish federalism to opposing it. He also claims that without his “insight” in prison he “would have been a primitive nationalist aspiring for the nation-state”, which contradicts his own account. Behind this sits a Kemalist view of Kurds that runs through his writing. In 2004 he wrote that Kurds “were not even aware of the extent of their betrayal” and that “neither human nor animal laws applied to them. They almost played the role of a third kind of being.” He spoke of the “old Kurdish trouble”. He told cadres that Kurds who believe they are free “must first be enslaved, and then these slaves must be freed”. He said his personality and principles “are more like those of a prophet”. In 1992 he told Birand that Kurdish power must stay under a single leadership: “I hold all these strings in my hand.” The PKK’s working language remained Turkish, and in 47 years it has produced no serious plan to revive Kurdish. Meanwhile the war emptied 2,685 Kurdish villages and hamlets by 1996, according to Human Rights Watch. A Van teachers’ union estimate puts the share of Kurds speaking Kurdish at 90% in the 1920s and around 7 to 8% today, with voluntary assimilation peaking during the Turkeyification years under the AKP. In Öcalan’s own words, democratic confederalism leaves the Turkish state untouched. “The institutions and existing borders of the Republic of Turkey are considered legitimate. Issues such as whether it should be unitary, federal or confederal are not discussed, and it is not even recommended to bring them up.” “Yes to state reform, no to opposition to the state.” A completely stateless democracy is “adventurism”. “I am not saying that Turkey should become confederal. I am saying that it should be a democratic republic without losing its unitary structure.” Kurds should build their confederalism “without touching the borders”. The 2005 KCK Social Pact declares that three legal systems will now apply in Kurdistan: EU law, unitary state law and democratic confederal law. Öcalan describes the KCK as a civil society body that belongs “within the totality of the people or nation of Turkey”. He calls it parallel and complementary to the unitary state, and says its flexible idea of the nation will block “the problem-causing potential of federalist solutions”. He calls the nation-state fascist and compares it to Hitler and Mussolini, yet he declares the Turkish nation-state legitimate by calling it a republic. France, the first modern nation-state, was also a republic. Real multinational states such as Switzerland and Belgium rest on decentralisation and constitutional multilingualism, the very things Öcalan rules out. On where the KCK came from, the İmralı notes are blunt. “We want to be a fundamental democratic element of this state… I built the KCK on this condition during Emre’s time.” Emre Taner was then head of Turkish intelligence (MİT). Öcalan describes five exhausting years of negotiations with Taner and a 156-page roadmap that was rejected. In his 2009 book he calls for “an intensive dialogue with the state’s security forces” to resolve the KCK’s legal questions. The KCK came out of bargaining with the Turkish state, not out of a Bookchinite change of paradigm. Then there is the Misak-ı Milli. The last Ottoman parliament adopted it in 1920, and it defined Turkey’s borders as the armistice line of 1918. Mustafa Kemal’s own definition ran from south of İskenderun through the Jarablus bridge between Aleppo and Katma to the Euphrates and down to Deir ez-Zor. It included Mosul, Kirkuk and Sulaymaniyah, which means South and West Kurdistan. He wrote to Talat Pasha that “all our provinces where Turkish and Kurdish are spoken will belong to us”. He told parliament that “the line that we will determine with our strength and power will be the border”. Turkey annexed Hatay on the same logic in 1939, and Erdoğan invoked the Pact over Mosul in 2016. Öcalan presents this pact as a Kurdish-Turkish brotherhood. He writes that its borders were “built on the unity of Kurds and Turks”. He says its break-up after 1925 “is actually the fragmentation of the Kurds” and that “when we mention the Middle East Confederation, it is about reviving this”. He says he does not see it as “an imperial event”. He tells the PKK: “All Kurds will establish a strong alliance with Turkey. The National Pact Commission will discuss this… This alliance has existed since the Hittites.” He describes the KCK as an umbrella for “all Kurds of the Middle East within the framework of Turkey’s national integrity”. He builds a thousand-year history for this alliance, from Manzikert in 1071 to the Treaty of Qasr-e Shirin in 1639, which he calls a betrayal of it. He says he pitched the Mitanni-Hittite alliance to Emre Taner and the Battle of Manzikert to Taner’s successor, Hakan Fidan. He also claims Kemal’s speech of 23 April 1920 described Kurds and Turks respecting each other’s rights. The parliamentary minutes show that Kemal never mentioned Kurds. He spoke of Turks, Circassians and “Islamic elements” and put off all details until “after our existence is saved”. The plan was put into practice through the Kurdish National Congress. “This Kurdish congress will be the thing that determines the Misak-ı Milli,” Öcalan told a pro-Kurdish delegation. He proposed four conferences. One was in Diyarbakır and open even to Hizbullah and Kemal Burkay. One was in Ankara under the HDP, one in Europe, and one in Erbil, which “should approach it within the framework of the National Pact”, with Kurds from Syria taking part. When Selahattin Demirtaş asked for a message for the Erbil conference, Öcalan told him to explain “the issue of Misak-ı Milli in the right form”. HDP MP Nursel Aydoğan put it plainly: Öcalan “is the main obstacle to the establishment of a Kurdish state”, and every negotiation on İmralı aimed to resolve the Kurdish issue within the framework of the Misak-ı Milli. The whole project fits the AKP’s neo-Ottoman foreign policy. Öcalan says Jewish lobbies first planned “a proto-Israeli project” in South Kurdistan. Later they “got rid of Saddam” in order to take over the Kurds through Kurdish nationalism. He recasts Sheikh Said’s 1925 revolt as a British-provoked attempt to restore the caliphate, which reverses his earlier view that it was a religious and national uprising against near-genocidal attacks. He calls Iraqi Kurdish self-rule “a bomb” placed at “the very bottom of Turkey’s belly” and the Kurdistan Region “a cheap collaborator state”, likening it to Enkidu. In the Social Pact, self-determination shrinks to villages, neighbourhoods and cities managing their own affairs, and the UN system is dismissed as a failed model built on nation-states. From 2004 the Kurds stop being a nation in his writing and become a people, and Kurdish becomes “the local language”. By 2011 he questions whether Kurds have even “reached the stage of nationhood”, while Turks remain “the Turkish nation”. He writes that “considering the Kurds as a sociological phenomenon serves the interests of the Turkish nation better” and that “leaving social phenomena to natural assimilation” has been humanity’s basic tendency. His “fraternal unity” comes with a guarantee: “With this approach, there is no danger of Kurdish becoming the official language, followed by a federation.” He dismisses insistence on nation and language as “dogmatic values” and writes that he was “born into a society that has not really progressed beyond Neolithic culture”. He calls this policy Türkiyeleşme (Turkeyification) and presents it as Atatürk’s own inclusive idea of a “nation of Turkey”. In reality Kemal used “Turkish State” and “Republic of Turkey” interchangeably, spoke of the “Turkish nation”, and called Kurdish identity an “incorrect label” left over from despotic times. Turkeyification is voluntary Turkification. The İmralı notes from 2013 show where this leads. When pro-Kurdish MPs pressed for state-funded Kurdish education, Öcalan replied: “Asking the state is a mistake. This is not the duty of the state but of society. If you cannot teach your mother tongue to your own child, how can you ask the state?” He said there is “a principle of equality in the constitution”, so such education “cannot be demanded”. He said boycotts only inflame things and that the MPs should open model schools in Diyarbakır instead. A Kurdish school did open there in 2013, and the authorities later sealed it. Elsewhere in the notes he says: “I am not even discussing language education.” When the PKK leadership in Qandil demanded that the new constitution name the existence of the Kurdish people, he refused: “Do not conflate national identity with state citizenship.” The only wording he proposed was “our constitution accepts all historical cultures as the richness of Turkey”. He told MPs “we belong to the state” and borrowed the AKP’s Islamic language of a shared millet. He summed it up: “There is a Turkish nation, and that is a reality… We can call it the nation of Turkey.” Elsewhere he says: “We have no objections to the unitary state, to the republic. Turkish will remain the official language, the flag will of course be there.” This is the constitution he declared legitimate. Article 66 says that everyone bound to the state by citizenship is a Turk. Article 42 says no language other than Turkish may be taught as a mother tongue. The preamble places sovereignty in the Turkish nation alone, and Article 301 of the penal code makes “insulting Turkishness” a crime. It is the system İsmet İnönü summed up as “our task is to Turkify everyone, no matter what the cost”. Iran’s constitution allows regional languages in the media and the teaching of their literature in schools, which is more than Öcalan asks for. His position also falls short of UN standards on language rights. It is a neoliberal position: a self-declared enemy of “capitalist modernity” leaving the survival of Kurdish to the market. In 2003 he wrote that forced assimilation should end and “voluntariness should be the basis”, because “the necessities of life take care of one’s own language”. He warned that forcing Kurds to count as Turks damages “Turkish purity” and produces “an ugly hybridisation”. In 2004 he described assimilation before the Republic as “peaceful and culturally enriching”. The results can be measured. A 2023 Kurdish Studies Center survey found that only 30% of Kurds in Turkey are proficient in Kurdish, 30% have intermediate skills and 40% do not use it in daily life. More than half the children of fluent parents know little or no Kurdish, and nearly 60% of respondents report discrimination. Öcalan’s prescription leads to language death from the top down. He says that Kurdish can only be encouraged at primary level, and he treated Turkish as the sole official language. Öcalan opposes a Kurdish state, not the nation-state. His proposal asks Turkey to tolerate the physical existence of Kurds and to replace forced assimilation with voluntary assimilation, and in return he promises that Kurds will not seek federalism or official status for their language. The result is a “civil society of subjects” under colonial sovereignty.