Blood and Belief: The PKK and the Kurdish Fight for Independence (Hardcover)

~ (Author)
Key Phrases: senior militants, village guards, Iraqi Kurdish, Iraqi Kurds, Kucuk Zeki (more...)

Editorial Reviews

From The Washington Post

Reviewed by Quil Lawrence

The guerrillas of the Kurdistan Workers Party, known by the initials PKK, are stuck in the mountains, literally and figuratively. The Kurdish rebels know every mile of the rough peaks and deep gorges along the borders of Iraq, Turkey and Iran. They have cliff-side bunkers, black-market supply routes and plenty of ammunition. What they lack is a path forward.

This fall, the PKK made a series of bloody raids into Turkey from its hideouts in northern Iraq, killing dozens of Turkish soldiers and practically daring the Turkish military to mount a large-scale, cross-border retaliation. This situation is precarious not only for the rebels, but also for U.S. forces. The Turks, who have massed tens of thousands of troops close to the Iraqi border, have been pressing the United States for years to crack down on the Kurdish independence movement. The U.S. military, however, has little to gain from opening a new front in Iraq. Twice in the past six months, the tensions have threatened to blow up into a full-scale war involving Turkey, Iran, Iraq and the United States -- the only question being exactly who would be allied with whom.

How this came to pass is the subject of Aliza Marcus's timely book on the PKK and its imprisoned leader, Abdullah Ocalan. A former correspondent for the Boston Globe and Christian Science Monitor, she draws on eight years of experience covering the Kurds and a vast reservoir of interviews with PKK fighters.

Blood and Belief begins with the formation of the PKK in 1978 by disaffected Kurdish students in Turkey. Ocalan's own beginnings are somewhat comical; his marriage to the daughter of a middle-class politician, he once said, was proof of his ability to withstand any hardship the rebel life had to offer. But his guerrilla career was anything but funny. In the 15 years after the PKK launched a separatist war against the Turkish state in 1984, the fighting claimed some 35,000 lives, mostly poor Kurds in southeastern Turkey. In 1999, the United States helped Turkey arrest Ocalan, who had fled to Italy and Russia and was finally captured in Kenya. Since then, the few thousand PKK fighters left in the mountains have stumbled between cease-fires and ultimatums, unable either to cut ties with their jailed leader or to figure out exactly what to do next.

On a recent journey to a PKK outpost inside northern Iraq, I found the rebels living in psychological as well as physical denial. "Why does everyone call us terrorists?" one Kalashnikov-toting Kurd asked. "The Turkish government has given the Kurds no rights, no schools, no language. We have a right to live in freedom."

The Kurds surely have a cause, but the PKK's disregard for civilian lives has put them on terrorist blacklists both in the United States and in the European Union. The guerrillas hint that they would stop fighting if offered a blanket amnesty. But they show no savvy about how to improve their image, especially their cult-like devotion to Ocalan.

Marcus's book helps explain this, too, by chronicling the horrifying business of the PKK's consolidation of power. Her account of Ocalan's quest to become the sole voice of Turkish Kurds is the first of its kind in English, describing the PKK's savagery toward groups that should have been fellow travelers in the fight for Kurdish rights. Ocalan shared the penchant of dictators around the world for killing any perceived rival, at times discrediting or executing even his most able lieutenants. It's an achievement of Blood and Belief that despite the bloodletting, Marcus still generates empathy -- not for the murderous Ocalan, but for the desperate Kurds who joined the PKK revolution feeling they had nowhere else to turn.

The book is not always an easy read. It suffers from the lack of a decent map, and sometimes the narrative becomes disjointed among all the changing names and factions of the PKK. On the other hand, Marcus is compelling as she describes the PKK fighters who continued with the cause, believing it was greater than Ocalan's obvious flaws. She conveys the trapped feelings of Kurdish boys and girls who train under a mural of Ocalan's face painted on a cliff. And she brings home the most important point: The PKK hasn't been rousted from its mountains in two decades of fighting, and there's no reason to think another Turkish incursion will bring the rebels down.

Copyright 2007, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

Review

"Blood and Belief offers unusual insight into the rebels' shadowy universe and, by extension, into Turkey's festering Kurdish problem. . . . [A] scholarly, gripping account."

- The Economist

"Blood and Belief gives meaning and context to the grinding guerrilla war that claimed tens of thousands of lives."

- Boston Globe

"It's an achievement of Blood and Belief that despite the bloodletting, Marcus still generates empathy—not for the murderous Ocalan, but for the desperate Kurds who joined the PKK revolution feeling they had nowhere else to turn."

- The Washington Post Book World

"MarcusÂ’ dispassionate recounting of events is impressive in its factual, documented style and avoidance of partisan shrillness."

- The Bloomsberry Review

"MarcusÂ’ dispassionate recounting of events is impressive in its factual, documented style and avoidance of partisan shrillness. While never condoning any of the PKKÂ’s excesses, she points out its one achievement: to haveÂ’put the Kurdish problem on the agenda in Turkey and in front of the world."

- Bookforum

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 364 pages
• Publisher: NYU Press; illustrated edition edition (August 1, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0814757111
• ISBN-13: 978-0814757116
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6.1 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #856,819 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Blood and Belief: The PKK and the Kurdish Fight for Independence. , January 17, 2008

By	Michael Rubin "Middle East Quarterly" (Washington, DC) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Most writers on the Kurdistan Workers' Party, best known by its Kurdish language acronym, the PKK, substitute advocacy for accuracy, so their books about the PKK tend to have limited practical use for policymakers. But Marcus, a former international correspondent for The Boston Globe who spent several years covering the PKK, has done important work in Blood and Belief. While sympathetic to her subject--the substitution of "militant" for "terrorist" grates--she retains professional integrity and does not skip over inconvenient parts of the PKK narrative such as its predilection to target Kurdish and leftist competitors rather than the Turks; the patronage it has received from the Syrian government; and the important role of European states and the Kurdish diaspora in its funding.

Blood and Belief has four sections: on PKK leader Abdullah Öcalan's life and the PKK's beginnings, the PKK's consolidation of power, the civil war, and the aftermath of Öcalan's 1999 capture.

The Kurds inhabit a region that spans Syria, Iraq, Turkey, and Iran, and Marcus does not let national borders constrain her analysis. Events in Iraq--such as the squabbling between Patriotic Union of Kurdistan leader Jalal Talabani and Kurdistan Democratic Party leader Masoud Barzani--influenced Öcalan, who concluded that he should tolerate no dissent. "We believed in socialism, and it was a Stalin-type of socialism we believed in," one early PKK member relates.

Steeped in Kurdish and Turkish history, Marcus provides better context than many of the other journalists who tackled this subject. The PKK took hold, she shows, largely because of the weakness of the Turkish state in the 1970s. Between 1975 and 1980, the Turkish government barely functioned. After the 1980 coup, the Turkish military restored order. But when Barzani offered the PKK shelter in northern Iraq, the group remained beyond reach, allowing it to plan and launch a full-scale guerilla war against Turkey. Marcus concludes that the group's continued survival in Turkey is because, at some level and among some constituents, it remains popular; its support is not all driven by intimidation as some Turkish analysts claim.

Marcus impressively covers the civil war years (1984-99), and her narrative, combining dialogue and context, is rich and accessible. While many journalists and authors satisfy themselves with a single round of interviews, Marcus concentrates not on active PKK members, who she realizes do not enjoy the freedom to speak, but rather on past members, villagers, and family members whose accounts she cross-checks. She also incorporates Turkish language press accounts and interviews with Turkish officials.

It is unfortunate, though, that her coverage of PKK resurgence, between 1999 and 2007, is just thirteen pages long. An exploration of how Öcalan has retained control while in prison and where he and his henchmen might take the PKK has seldom been more relevant. One hopes that this new chapter of PKK history will become the basis for a sequel.

Michael Rubin
Middle East Quarterly
Spring 2008

11 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An exemplary account of an urgent topic, September 23, 2007

By	A. M. Apostolou "Andrew Apostolou" (Washington DC, USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

The PKK is a poorly understood group that is currently one of the most sensitive topics in U.S. foreign relations. Based in Turkey and along the border of Iraq's Kurdistan region and Turkey, the PKK is one of the most vexing issues facing the U.S. and its allies in the Middle East, in particular its allies in Iraqi Kurdistan and Turkey. How the PKK is dealt with will have a tremendous effect upon U.S. standing in the Middle East, the U.S. campaign in Iraq, the future of the Kurds, and the future of Turkey as a U.S. ally and Turkey's EU candidacy. Most writing on the PKK is tendentious and poorly sourced. Aliza Marcus's book is the opposite, carefully written, patiently researched and impressively sourced. She leads the reader through the twists and turns of PKK history with clarity and confidence. Anybody interested in international relations and the problem of terrorism, ethnic conflict and U.S. foreign policy should read this first class book.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Excellently written and researched, February 4, 2009

By	Conor Reynolds (Freiburg, Germany) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

In "Blood and Belief", Marcus provides a thorough overview of the PKK from its origins in the chaos of 1970s Turkey through the capture of Öcalan in 1999. The next 8 years are much less thorough (fitting into one chapter), but the book nonetheless provides an excellent foundation for understanding the PKK and the relationship between Kurds in SE Anatolia and the Turkish state.
The strength of this book is its use of interviews with former PKK members. These interviews do not paint a positive picture of the PKK- in fact, they completely remove any of the romanticism that could be associated with 'freedom fighters' in the minds of some. The brutality of both the Turkish army and the PKK (including the latter group's general disregard for human life, even that of its own members) is portrayed in detail. Marcus does not need to label the PKK as a terrorist group; this is a political designation that creates black and white distinctions, when in reality the situation is far more complicated. By presenting the situation in all its brutality and presenting the facts impartially, Marcus allows the reader to make the moral judgement on the PKK- its origins, methods, and goals.