Page 240 - America's Failure to Perceive the PKK

Abdullah Öcalan, the leader of the terror organization, describes
himself in his book The Democratic Civilization Manifesto as a leader

who thinks of and plans everything for the Kurdish community, who
suffers for them and leads them to freedom and who strives to protect
the rights and traditions of the Kurdish peoples in the Middle East
against savagery in capitalist civilizations.

Öcalan's efforts to give the impression of being a divine being in
his book also attracted the attention of the prosecutor in what is
known as the KCK Case. In the indictment he drew up, Istanbul Pros-
ecutor Adnan Çimen described how Öcalan strove to portray himself
as a mythological and genderless semi-deity:

Indeed, Öcalan even seeks to deify himself and bestow on him-
self the title of a mythological and genderless semi-deity by com-

paring "his departure from Urfa to the departure of the Prophet
Abraham from the Hebrew people and his capture to the cruci-
fixion of the Prophet Jesus."

Therefore, Öcalan, whom the contract seeks to embody as the
leadership, acquires both a physical and a spiritual identity, and
is heralded as the sole and universal representative of the Kur-
dish people, while efforts are made to maintain Kurdish society

at the level of a specific reflex by way of Öcalan...
The way that the leader of the organization compares himself to
the Prophet Abraham (pbuh) is also tragicomic. Because as the
indictment states in various places, he holds the religious factor
responsible for the backwardness of the Kurdish people and for

other negative qualities. The effort of such a person to equate
himself with concepts regarded as sacred at the popular level is
simply misappropriation.

Selim Çürükkaya, one of the founders of the PKK who subse-

quently left the organization and relocated abroad, describes the dis-
turbing psychology in Öcalan's attitude as follows:

238 America's Failure to Perceive the PKK