Mountain Meeting with the PKK

The last Kurdish government checkpoint before PKK territory

The PKK, a radical Kurdish group fighting a civil war with Turkey, controls what is probably one of the most beautiful valleys in northern Iraq -- filled with golden pastures and hardwood groves just one giant rocky ridge line away from Iran -- where they have military and ideological training camps. On Thursday, I drove there with a few of my colleagues for a meeting with one of the PKK's top political officials, who came down out of the hills in a white four-by-four filled with bodyguards, some of whom had Che Guevera stickers on their Kalishnikovs, and met us at a base camp they maintain for receiving visitors.

Interviewing an ideologue is never easy. In fact, what we got from the PKK man was more like a repetitive lecture on how Turkey's oppresses it's Kurdish minority, complete with a lengthy and confusing historical comparison between Turkey and fascist Spain in the 1970's. When I asked for his title within the organization, he replied, "We're not an organization, we're a system." He then spent five minutes outlining various military and political structures and committees. I tried again: "So are you one of the leaders of the system?"

However, we did get some useable material from the interview, despite the fact that we only managed to get in maybe five full questions during the rambling hour an a half session. THe PKK still maintains that they have given up their demands for a separate Turkish state, and are open for dialogue as a means of settling the Kurdish question democratically and peacefully. The deadly clashes that occur in Turkey are the result not of planned PKK attacks, but are caused by Turkish army search and destroy missions against PKK partisans inside Turkey, he said. The whole idea that the Turkish army could finish the PKK by staging military operations inside Iraq is laughable, he said, because most of the fighters are inside Turkey.

Unfortunately, they wouldn't let us see their camps and operations for ourselves, despite the fact that a I'd spent a week with them two years ago. At that time, I'd visited one camp where they train male PKK soldiers and civilian activists how not to be sexist. (Half of the PKK's soldiers are women). I'm afraid the course -- called "Killing the Man" -- didn't work on me. I spent much of the trip thinking that Kurdish guerilla girls look very chic in revolutionary fatigues.

This time there would be no guerillas girls for me. Turkish spies had infiltrated the area, they said. Some of the spies were posing as journalists to assassinate the leadership and put cyanide in the soldiers' food. As a precaution, the PKK had disbanded all their camps, and never spent more than one night in the same place, they said.

I tried thinking of a way to reassure them that we weren't spies. "Last time I was here, did Tomahawk cruise missiles hit the camps after I left?" I told him that no one in America knew or cared much abut the PKK until now, when it looks like their presence in the mountains of Iraq could spark a mini-war between Turkey and Iraqi Kurdistan. Now was their chance to get their side of the story out, I said, along with all the other, "This is a historical moment, you need the media," lines. But all was for naught. If radical guerillas stuck in the mountains had good media advisors, perhaps they wouldn't be be radical guerillas stuck in the mountains.

A PKK activist whom I met in 2004 at a feminist training camp in the mountains. Her nom de guerre is Tecusin, which means "Struggle" in Kurdish.

--Andrew Lee Butters/Erbil