Page 282 - America's Failure to Perceive the PKK

people who left their villages and schools for the freedom of the
Kurdish people and with strong nationalistic ideas were massa-
cred arbitrarily by this brutal cycle of the PKK. 108

According to information submitted by İbrahim Güçlü to the
Human Rights Investigation Commission of the Turkish Parliament,

a part of that 17,000 Kurds executed by the PKK are those members
that the PKK and Öcalan considered rivals. In his statement under the
heading "Executions against Kurdish groups and internal executions,"
Güçlü reported that Öcalan said, "Let's kill them and be the authority"
with regards to these executions.

According to Şemdin Sakık, one of the founders of the PKK, it is
none other than PKK leaders Abdullah Öcalan, Cemil Bayık, Murat
Karayılan and Sabri Ok who give the internal PKK execution orders.
And if the targets are senior-level members or founders, the sole deci-
sion for executions lays with Öcalan. 109

The details in Sakık's confessions are spine-chilling. He reveals
that a militant doesn't even need to be accused of spying to be killed,
and that he could be killed only for the reason that a dead militant is

preferable to the PKK over a wounded one:

... we chose tens of militants getting shot over one militant run-
ning away because the dead ones did not harm, but helped, the
PKK. Their brothers, families and next of kin became attached to
the organization. It was for this destructive effect that in 1992

Cemil Bayık, one of the current leaders of the organization, had
17 wounded militants shot by a firing squad in a cave in the
Haftanin valley, just to make sure they didn't get caught by the
security forces. Furthermore, making sure that militants
weren't captured alive was a policy of the organization and sim-
ilar incidents happened quite frequently because death was
regarded as a gain, while getting captured as a loss. Even the

wounded ones getting captured by the state was not tolerated.

280 America's Failure to Perceive the PKK