The militant Kurds of southeast Turkey, whose movement for independence appeared to be in its death throes after the Turks captured Kurdish leader Abdullah Ocalan in 1999, are suddenly at the top of the world news again. Their armed struggle threatens to complicate several of the most difficult issues confronting the already deeply troubled Middle East. Armed clashes between Turkish and Iraqi forces, new obstacles to Turkey's hoped-for entry into the European Union, and intensified sectarian divisions within Iraq are all possible results of resurgent Kurdish military activity.
These alone are reasons enough to read Aliza Marcus's history of the Kurdistan Workers' Party, or PKK, the organization that for more than two decades has been the main Kurdish militant group in Turkey. For most of that time, the PKK has maintained bases in neighboring countries. It is the PKK bases in Iraq that are at the center of the current international dispute.
"Blood and Belief: The PKK and the Kurdish Fight for Independence" gives meaning and context to the grinding guerrilla war that claimed tens of thousands of lives and led to the torching or forced evacuation of innumerable villages in southeast Turkey by government forces. It illuminates how and why the PKK, which many people thought was finished after Ocalan was sentenced to life imprisonment and renounced armed struggle, survived and began to rebuild. It explains how the United States arrived at its current, sticky position - protecting and supporting the Kurds of Iraq while opposing as terrorists the Kurds of neighboring Turkey. And it lays down fact after fact that build to the conclusion that the issue of Kurdish rights, and the violence that grows out of denial of those rights, will persist until the Kurds are recognized as a nation in one form or another.
For as surely as ties of language, ethnicity, and culture bind Jews to Israel and Tibetans to Tibet, the Kurds have been bound for millennia to the mountains where the borders of Turkey, northern Iraq, Syria, and Iran meet. Their tribal forebears fought the Greeks then the Romans, and eventually succumbed to the medieval Arabs. Most Kurds are Muslims, but as a group they are less orthodox than their Arab and Persian co-religionists. With an estimated population of more than 25 million, they are one of the largest ethnic groups in the world without a country to call their own.
There are many other things this book could have included. Surely there should have been a more vivid portrait of Ocalan, the poor, angry boy from the countryside who founded the PKK in 1978 and ruled it with an iron fist for 20-plus years. And it would have been interesting to get a real feel for what distinguishes Kurds from other peoples, religiously, socially, and culturally.
What the work perhaps would have benefited from most is better editing. Marcus is a veteran journalist who has reported for The Christian Science Monitor, The Boston Globe, and Reuters, and her attention to reporting details is evident. But she needed help painting with broader strokes and becoming more of a storyteller.
The book is short on fact-checking, too. In a story based on so many interviews with militants whose noms de guerre are more commonly used than their given names, a lack of consistency in naming sources can be annoying.
And while Marcus has the details fairly well in hand, there are occasional slips from which a decent editor or fact-checker would have saved her.
Such flaws notwithstanding, Marcus has made a valuable contribution to the understanding of current events in the region, for not only has she chronicled the rise and fall of Kurdish militancy, she has also forecast its resurrection and likely future as well.
Blood and Belief: The PKK
and the Kurdish Fight
for Independence
By Aliza Marcus
New York University, 368 pp., $35
Charles A. Radin, a former member of the Globe staff, works on international programs at Brandeis University.
