The ideal organizational personality for Öcalan

Aytekin Yılmaz's book "Son Diktatör" (The Last Dictator) sheds light on the background of Turkey's most painful problems and periods with its powerful and authentic literature and its sincere observations and assessments. It touches a received formula that sees the PKK as a result produced, even overflowed, by the Kurdish question. It demolishes, with more authentic narratives, a received formula that had previously come close to reducing even this question to the tortures in Diyarbakır Prison. It reveals how, throughout the nineties, the state's prisons became intensive training camps and hearths for recruiting members to the organization.

These perhaps were not unknown things. But what Yılmaz recounts, conveying in a striking manner the testimony he bears with what he lived inside the prison, with his concerns, his intellectual honesty and his questioning spirit, will undoubtedly lead us to name the problem differently. The PKK is not a result of the Kurdish question, but on the contrary an actor that does everything in its power to make it an even bigger problem. We have seen this in all its subsequent reflexes as well.

Remember what anger was provoked, in the periods when we passed through radical stages such as the democratic opening and the resolution process, by our President Mr. Recep Tayyip Erdoğan's words "The Kurdish issue is over for us." What Erdoğan said by no means meant a denial of Kurdish identity or of the problem; he was trying to say that, through the openings carried out so far under his own leadership, the Kurdish issue had now been solved. Yet since the HDP and PKK circles knew very well that their existence subsists only on a problem, they could not by any means tolerate the slightest word to the effect that the problem was over. Because the problem was not the Kurds but the PKK. The PKK's existence was tightly bound to the continuation of the problem. Even the possibility that the Kurdish question might have been solved was enough to stir up anger.

In Yılmaz's account, the prison dimension of the performance the PKK has displayed in further enlarging the Kurdish question is laid bare. It was not something unknown, but in my opinion it has so far not been sufficiently appreciated how much it contributed to the problem reaching these dimensions.

The prisons as training camps are like a factory for producing the personality useful to the organization, or rather a soulless mankurt, abstracted from his personality, ready to die and to kill. The techniques of a full-fledged industry of militant production are applied. And the mankurtizing element in this industry is none other than Abdullah Öcalan himself, whom Yılmaz calls the "Last Dictator."

Mankurtization is a Mongol technique; other organizational structures have also applied it by different means, sometimes by the most modern and sometimes by the most religious ways. The techniques by which the FETÖ turns its own members into will-less, personality-less corpses before their "hocaefendis" are also noteworthy.

In the PKK's methods, one must admit, there are many peculiarities. But the outcome leads to the same door.

Yılmaz reflects at length, and makes us reflect, on how the Apo cult, created by force and pressure in those intensive mankurtization procedures, could be sustained even at moments when it called black white and white black. Even as early as 1999, Öcalan himself recounted with relish that at least 15 thousand PKK militants in the mountains had been executed within the organization for treachery, corruption, nonconformity, suspicion or one reason or another. Yılmaz calls this "killing one's own comrade." The more painful and the more merciless it is, the more of a controlling effect it has on those who remain. Even though such an event might be expected to create discontent, suspicion and unbelief among those who remain, it is in vain. All the ways are stopped up. These things were recounted only to further reinforce unconditional, absolute loyalty to the leader.

For the organization, which turns the bodies of its comrades into soulless apparatuses of dying and killing, in prison alone, even Kurdishness and the Kurdish language are nothing but instruments offered as gifts to Apo's existence. For example, the organization presents the pressures and bans on the Kurdish language as if they were its reason for being. Yet Yılmaz also draws attention to the contradiction that in the prisons where it had established full dominance for years, and even put its own model of administration into practice most audaciously, the organization's official language always remained Turkish. Why? What is it that prevented speaking Kurdish in the wards entirely under the PKK's control? Why was speaking Kurdish never even on the agenda?

The story of the many "comrades" who, because they could not resist the police and talked under torture, were subjected to prison conditions, tortured and even executed inside the prison is heartbreaking.

The organizational structure makes the common mind work to seek a miracle in everything Öcalan does. The central mind is in any case embodied in Öcalan's words and presence. Öcalan alone represents the mind of thousands of years of Kurdish existence. Objecting to him is resisting a historical existence and the truth.

The order of discourse produces the nothingness of the most fanatical disciple before the most corrupt sheikh, which ensures that no contradiction is ever seen in any action of Öcalan. With all his discourses Öcalan never hesitates to demean all his militants and, when the occasion arises, all the Kurds. The obedience and admiration of those who are demeaned, after a certain point, is not satisfying, but it makes the dictatorship even more merciless. Being demeaned, in turn, becomes an addiction.

Indeed, with Öcalan's capture in Kenya and his being brought to Turkey, the situation took a wholly different turn for a while. The "serok" who sent tens of thousands of people to death with no regard for their lives, the "leader" who granted no right to life to the traitors who talked to the police, opened the way to a new path without showing any sign of resistance: "I am ready to serve the state."

Afterwards, he had the lawyers who visited him on İmralı ask Doğu Perinçek, with whom he was known to have fallen out for some time, whether the death penalty would be abolished or not.

For the PKK members whose existence was given as a gift to the leader's existence, these are at first glance a cause of devastation. How could they not be?

But, lo and behold, among the many personalities Öcalan describes and classifies, the "disciple personality" or "mankurtized personality" in short sums up the situation and he finds a way to interpret even this situation away.

What happens when reason and will, the greatest blessing God has bestowed on human beings, are surrendered to someone else is what happens in the end: servitude to a servant.

Yılmaz's book gives very instructive cross-sections of the various states of humanity.