Yeni Yaşam with Cemil Bayik, co-chair of the KCK Executive Council,
The newspaper Yeni Yaşam carried out an interview with Cemil Bayik, co-chair of the KCK Executive Council. The interview was carried out by Nezahat Doğan.
Here is the first part of the interview.
Since the founding of the PKK in 1978, you have been fighting alongside Kurdish people’s leader Abdullah Öcalan against the policies of denial and annihilation. How did you manage to get from the hangman’s noose to the negotiating table?
Kurdish people’s leader Abdullah Öcalan is the son of a poor family and a broken society. He stood up for a society that had lost everything, that had lost hope, and believed that everything was over. He started a search on how one could revive a society that had been torn apart and lost everything, and based on this, began to create a way out. His entire effort was focused on creating a people who would hold on to their will and freedom under any circumstances, and on this basis, he launched and carried out this struggle. There is truly no comparable example to this in the world. Many countries have been occupied, have been colonized, but the situation of Kurdistan is very different. It has not only been occupied, but everything has been taken away from its people. It has come to the brink of complete annihilation. No hope was left; no life was left. Standing up for a people in such a condition is not something anyone could do. Kurdish people’s leader Abdullah Öcalan took the initiative for these people. He took up the cause of freedom for this people. In order to develop the struggle for freedom for the people, he developed a new kind of leadership, organization, method, and approach. As a result of this, he managed to bring together a people who were unorganized, scattered, and no longer accepted or taken seriously by anyone, and raised them to the level of one nation.
What he initiated for the Kurdish people at that time, he also developed for the women, because the situation of women was even worse than that of general society. They were there in name, but in reality they were robbed of their existence.
Is that why he defines the women’s issue as even more fundamental than the Kurdish issue?
Definitely! Kurdish people’s leader Abdullah Öcalan’s main goal is freedom. For this, it is not enough to defend Kurdish society and to develop a struggle in this regard. He assessed that freedom of society could only be achieved through women’s freedom. That is why he increasingly focused on women’s liberation.
Has Kurdish people’s leader Abdullah Öcalan based his solution on breaking away from the mentality of family and feudalism?
He based the struggle for women’s liberation on both the reality of family and the general situation the Kurdish society had fallen into. He developed the freedom struggle based on the necessities that were given by the reality of society, and that’s why, when defining the PKK, he said that it is a women’s party, a freedom party.
In the founding congress of the PKK, two women participated. Looking at it today, as the PKK is being dissolved, there are thousands, millions of women standing behind this movement. How did the inclusion of women in the struggle develop in those years?
Yes, there were two women participating in the first congress, and in the first group that left northern Kurdistan for training, as far as I remember, there were around 30 female comrades. It was not easy to include women in this struggle. Just as it was not easy to mobilize Kurdish society, it was not easy to mobilize Kurdish women. But the fact that the movement was able to launch this mobilization is due to the characteristics of Kurdish people’s leader Abdullah Öcalan and his approach. He never chose the easy path. He embraces what everyone calls difficult and seeks to achieve what is named impossible. This reveals the kind of leadership he managed to develop. Now he has rallied the Kurdish society, made it powerful, and even made it become a recognized and appreciated people in today’s world. He rallied women, gave them willpower and identity, and made them leaders of the global women’s liberation movement. And he is working on achieving the same for and with the socialist movement. After the structures of real socialism collapsed, socialism also faced a serious breakdown. In fact, the attacks on socialism reached the most intense level. At this time, while real socialism collapsed, socialism faced a serious situation, and the preparations for the international conspiracy were running high, Kurdish people’s leader Abdullah Öcalan crucially stood up for socialism.
Does he attribute the collapse of real socialism to the foundation of violence and the ongoing femicide?
Kurdish people’s leader Abdullah Öcalan is striving to rid socialism of all the disarray and transform it into a new force. That is what he wages this struggle for. This is not an objective that emerged suddenly or later. Already when Kurdish people’s leader Abdullah Öcalan took his first steps back then in Ankara, his goal was freedom and democracy, and he dedicated his whole life to this cause. He did not accept any other way of life. His entire effort was to lift up the Kurdish society and Kurdish women. Because both faced denial and annihilation. The struggle that Kurdish people’s leader Abdullah Öcalan developed was, in this regard, a historic intervention. Already when he was in Ankara, before the group that later became the nucleus of the PKK had formed, Kurdish people’s leader Abdullah Öcalan took a cautious approach to existing socialism.
Why?
At that time, the Soviet Union, China, and Albania had turned themselves into centers of what they called socialism. Almost every organization in Turkey that claimed to struggle for socialism had chosen to follow one of these centers. They only referred to the center they had chosen as socialist, refusing to recognize the others as such. All these organizations were pressuring Kurdish people’s leader Abdullah Öcalan to choose one of these centers. They even tried to force him to do so, but he asserted his uniqueness and independence. Pointing out, “We base ourselves on scientific socialism; we do not base ourselves on any of these centers.”
If he had not adopted this attitude from the outset, Kurdish people’s leader Abdullah Öcalan would not have been able to develop a different, new socialist understanding. But surely, the PKK was founded under the influence of real socialism. It was the center of attraction at the time, and everyone fighting for freedom and democracy took that as their basis. The PKK was also founded under those conditions, and accordingly there was such an influence, but Kurdish people’s leader Abdullah Öcalan approached it cautiously. When there were divisions within socialism, when people started to go against each other because of their different understandings of socialism, he realized that this was incompatible with the purpose and essence of socialism, so he adopted a different attitude and developed an according practice. He saw that real socialism had strayed far from the goals of socialism. Even before the collapse of the Soviet Union, Kurdish people’s leader Abdullah Öcalan made the following assessment at one of our central meetings: “The existing parties have no connection to socialism; the parties need to dissolve themselves and reorganize.” When we distributed this as a statement, the parties of the Middle East that were based on real socialism immediately attacked us.
What kind of attacks did your movement face in this course?
The way they framed it was that our movement would attack socialism. However, Kurdish people’s leader Abdullah Öcalan’s assessments were put into practice in the 1990s. The PKK began to gradually develop them. Until then, real socialism had been an obstacle to the PKK’s development. Once this obstacle was removed, the PKK began to develop more strongly and rapidly, and the initial cautious approach gradually gave way to self-confidence, leading to the further shaping and strengthening of its socialist ideology. The initial foundation is important. Everything grows from its roots; as is commonly said. Those are the roots of the PKK, and accordingly it gradually began to develop its own socialist and freedom ideology. At our 3rd congress, Kurdish people’s leader Abdullah Öcalan made a historic assessment: “It is not the individual who is being assessed here, but society; it is not the moment that is being assessed, but history.” In order to be capable of striving for his goal, the freedom of society, Kurdish people’s leader Abdullah Öcalan went back to research the beginnings of history, and he saw that the deviation in history had developed through the enslavement of women. Accordingly, he placed women at the center of the struggle for freedom. He took women’s liberation as a foundation and began to shape the movement accordingly. He developed the shaping of a women’s army and, by politicizing, turned the women’s organization into an autonomous party, thereby bringing the Kurdish women to the forefront of the struggle.
Back when ADYÖD was founded, still no female comrade had been part of a group. It was a small group, but it was a militant group, and so, during the founding process of ADYÖD, Fatma (Kesire Öcalan) was in the Turkish left and wanted to join us. Because of her background, our approach was to reject her, but Kurdish people’s leader Abdullah Öcalan took a different approach and said that those who aim for freedom in Kurdistan must include women in their ranks in order to develop and achieve their goals of freedom, and that they cannot do so without women. There is a collaborating class in Kurdistan; it is a segment that the state relies on. Kurdish people’s leader Abdullah Öcalan said, “Without defeating this segment, a freedom movement and struggle for freedom cannot develop in Kurdistan.” He approached the issue in this way, focused on winning over this woman, fighting against the collaborationist line in Kurdistan through her, and clarifying and strengthening the principles and standards of the movement on this basis. If this movement developed as a freedom movement, it is for this reason and is connected to its beginnings
