By then the net was already closing. On Sunday, Feb. 14, Kenyan security forces quietly surrounded the compound–along with a scattering of grim-faced white men in plain clothes. The standoff continued until the next day, when a small convoy of passenger vehicles left the compound. One car carried the Greek ambassador. Another vehicle carried Ocalan’s comrades. A team of Kenyan police rode with Ocalan himself in a third vehicle. The rebel leader and his friends balked at being separated, but the Greeks and the Kenyans ignored their complaints. The Kurds were all to be taken to the airport for a flight to an undisclosed country. “This will end in Ankara,” Ocalan was later quoted as predicting.
It hasn’t ended at all. The Turks’ capture of Ocalan last week provoked violent protests among Kurdish exiles all across Europe and even in Australia. Furious demonstrators occupied or besieged embassies, consulates and U.N. offices in more than 20 cities. Five protesters set themselves on fire, and more than 50 others threatened to do the same if police tried to arrest them. Besides targeting the Turkish government’s diplomatic outposts, the Kurds also vented their rage against Greece for letting Ocalan fall into the Turks’ hands, and against Israel for allegedly helping the Turks track him down. When rioters tried to storm the Israeli Consulate in Berlin, three of them were killed by the mission’s armed guards. (Israel vehemently denied any role in Ocalan’s arrest.) By the weekend police in most cities had managed to restore order–temporarily. But violence broke out in Istanbul despite heightened security efforts. At least one police officer was shot and wounded.
Ocalan’s trial, expected no later than April, is sure to bring further outbursts. Meanwhile, security forces around the world are bracing for riots and possible terrorist attacks against the Turkish government and its allies–especially the United States, which reportedly helped the Turks find their man. The Americans officially list Ocalan as a terrorist. Many Kurds hate and fear him for the Stalinist brutality he has displayed during his two decades as leader of the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), the main Kurdish guerrilla force in Turkey. At the beginning especially, Ocalan drew scant distinction between the blood of Turkish soldiers and that of Kurdish civilians who got in his way. In recent years, however, he has become a living symbol of his people’s struggle for survival and freedom–partly by default, since the Turks have jailed so many of his moderate rivals. Ocalan has been known to boast that many of his followers would commit suicide on his order.
It’s not empty talk. Last Tuesday afternoon, outside the Greek Embassy in London, a 15-year-old Kurd named Nijla Coskun doused herself in gasoline and set herself on fire. She survived, but just barely, with burns covering 40 percent of her body. “She is in agony,” her mother told NEWSWEEK. “She is in so much pain she cannot speak more than a few words.” By all accounts the girl had been a happy, well-read, studious kid who dreamed of someday becoming a lawyer. Now she’s at the start of a torturous process of skin grafts that will probably take years. Before the week was over, Kurds in Stuttgart, Copenhagen and Dusseldorf had followed her example. Two others in London soaked themselves in gasoline, but fellow protesters prevented them from lighting a match. Coskun has become a hero to many Kurdish teens. “I think what she did was really brave,” says Saran Dradui, 13, another Londoner. “But my mom told me not to do it.”
Most Kurds still want only to be left in peace. Yet the Turks’ campaign against the militants may ultimately prove unwinnable. The government has been trying to dispose of the “mountain Turks” (a term invented to avoid even mentioning Kurds) by forcible assimilation for 70 years. Much of their culture has been destroyed–and yet a new sense of Kurdish identity has grown in its ruins. The Army’s relentless counterinsurgency effort has badly hurt the PKK’s fighting strength. Hundreds of centuries-old Kurdish villages have been demolished, and hundreds of thousands of Kurds have been driven from their homes. Ocalan himself might face the death penalty for treason, but that would only make him a full-fledged martyr. His arrest has helped bring Turkey’s 12 million Kurds–a fifth of the total population–closer together. “There is a radicalization at work,” says Kendal Nezan, a leading moderate exile in Paris. “People are saying things like ‘If the world has become hell for the Kurds, then we have to mobilize to make the world a hell for Turkey and its allies’.”
Until a few months ago, most of the world had never heard of Ocalan. He emerged as an international figure last October, when the Turkish military promised war unless Damascus stopped sheltering the PKK leader. Ocalan had lived in Syria since 1980, but the Turks had never before had the firepower to get him out. Dislodged at last from his exile headquarters, Ocalan wandered from country to country begging in vain for asylum. His travels drew unprecedented publicity for the Kurds’ grievances. After the Russian government turned him away, two Kurds in Moscow set themselves afire in protest. Ocalan surfaced next in Italy, where the law forbids extraditing anyone to face a possible death sentence. He talked to reporters and pressed his case for asylum until mid-January, when the Italians made him move on. Ocalan dropped from public view.
Old friends feared for his safety. One of them, a retired Greek naval commander named Andonis Naxakis, decided to help. On Jan. 29 he and a group of sympathizers smuggled Ocalan into Greece in the guise of a Russian diplomat. Naxakis wanted to set up a meeting between the Kurdish leader and Theodoros Pangalos, the Greek foreign minister. Instead Naxakis got a personal visit from Haralambos Stavrakakis, the chief of Greek intelligence, who warned him to get Ocalan out of the country–fast. “They wanted to dump him somewhere off the coast of Libya as if he was a crate of merchandise,” says Naxakis.
Instead, on Feb. 2 they put him aboard a nine-hour flight to Nairobi. Ocalan was given a Greek Cypriot passport in the name of Lazaros Mavros, a well-known journalist. Pangalos says Greek intelligence chose Nairobi because of the city’s large Greek-expatriate community. Unfortunately for Ocalan, the place has also been crawling with Western intelligence personnel ever since last August’s U.S. Embassy bombing. On Feb. 4 the Turkish intelligence service got a tip from an unidentified foreign government that Ocalan was in town, a guest of Giorgios Kostoulas, the Greek ambassador. Did the CIA blow the whistle? “No U.S. personnel participated in the apprehension, turnover or transport of Ocalan to Turkey,” said a White House spokesman. But all signs were that U.S. intelligence tracked Ocalan as he crisscrossed Europe and Africa with his mobile phone. American officials helped persuade several countries to deny him sanctuary, sources said. A team of Maroon Berets, as the Turkish Army’s elite commando force is known, flew to Kenya on Feb. 5 and staked out the embassy. The plan to capture Ocalan was given the code name Operation Safari.
On Feb. 12 a member of the surveillance team managed to photograph Ocalan at Kostoulas’s door. A Turkish diplomat delivered a copy of the picture to Kenyan authorities. Confronted with such evidence, the Kenyans reportedly promised to help the Turks capture their most wanted fugitive. Confident that at last they would get him, Turkish officials scrambled to arrange a secure and inconspicuous means of transport. They found a Turkish businessman with a private Falcon 900-B jet, and they removed all unnecessary markings, including the Turkish flag. The pilots were not told what cargo they would be bringing back from Africa. Fewer than a dozen senior government officials in Turkey had full access to the details of Operation Safari.
On Monday, Feb. 15, the Maroon Berets were ready to act. According to Turkish sources, Kenyan officials summoned Kostoulas to the Foreign Ministry and told him they knew all about his guest. The Kenyans demanded that he hand Ocalan over to them. Greek officials vehemently deny surrendering the PKK leader to any foreign authorities. But his friends lost sight of his car on the road to the airport. The next time they saw his face was in a videotape released by the Turkish government. Ocalan, bound and blindfolded, was seated in the passenger compartment of an airplane, surrounded by hooded Turks. Dazed and visibly distraught, he professed his “love” for Turkey. “I have a hunch I can be of service to the Turkish people and the Kurdish people,” he said. “My mother is a Turk. Let there be no torture or anything.” Behind him his captors joked and traded high-fives.
The Turkish plane was still in the air when the street protests began. MED-TV, a Kurdish-language satellite station with offices in England and Belgium, announced the news of Ocalan’s disappearance. It was nearly midnight in Western Europe, but young Kurdish exiles began pouring into the streets within minutes. In thousands of Kurdish homes from Stockholm to the slums of Istanbul, the station is always tuned in. Ankara’s ban on Kurdish-language TV has eliminated any competition for Kurd viewers, leaving the “independent” channel to rule the airwaves. The station’s managers don’t like to talk about PKK ties because of their license’s “fairness” requirement. But its programming has helped make Ocalan a superstar among young Kurdish exiles, who had surrounded Greek offices almost everywhere in Europe before the night was done.
The demonstrations were somewhat delayed in Athens. Hundreds of displaced Kurds had been camping out for months in the city’s central square. But on Monday the government suddenly herded the protesters aboard buses, saying they would be taken to shelters elsewhere. That was before Ocalan was captured; soon afterward the Greek authorities rounded up more than 100 militants and issued an emergency order that groups of two or more Kurds in the streets would be subject to immediate detention. But Greece’s foreign missions received no advance warning of impending trouble. In The Hague, protesters burst into the Greek ambassador’s home in his absence. They seized his wife, his 8-year-old son and a Filipino au pair and held them hostage for several hours.
By Thursday the protesters had turned out in Athens as well. Most Kurdish exiles in Greece are from Iraq, traditionally none too friendly toward Turkish Kurds. But outrage over Ocalan’s arrest transcended borders–and ethnicity. The Greek prime minister, Costas Simitis, sacked his intelligence chief along with three cabinet ministers, including Pangalos. The shakeup did little to ease the shame and rage many Greeks have felt since the fiasco. Meanwhile, Simitis himself kept out of sight. His office said he had the flu.
Ocalan’s arrest might allow the Turks to end the war–if they want to. Last November in Rome the PKK leader told Nezan he wanted to negotiate with the Turks. Ocalan wanted a guarantee of Kurdish cultural rights (especially to teach and broadcast in their own language), amnesty for his fighters and permission to organize nonsecessionist Kurdish political parties. Negotiating with Ocalan would be political suicide in Turkey. Still, the caretaker prime minister, Bulent Ecevit, promised late last week that guerrillas who surrender will get not only amnesty but job training. Talk of deeper reforms will have to wait until a new government is chosen in April.
Meanwhile, the war continues. The Turkish government celebrated Ocalan’s capture with an attack on PKK forces inside northern Iraq. Several thousand Turkish troops pursued a group of rebel Kurds thought to include Ocalan’s potential successor, his brother, Osman. As long as armed might is working, many Turks see no reason to talk about the Kurds’ basic rights.
Related Link: Kurdish Plight (This Week’s Photo Gallery)
