The PKK Assassinations in Paris

Sakine Cansiz

Somehow I find myself on the mailing list of the PKK (the Kurdish Workers Party), which is engaged in armed struggle against Turkey for an autonomous Kurdistan and cultural and political rights for all Turkish Kurds. According to Wikipedia, international human rights groups document decades of human rights abuses against the Kurds. In addition to criminalizing the Kurdish language, the Turkish government has deliberated destroyed 4,000 Kurdish villages and forcibly evacuated a million Kurdish civilians from their homes. This is in addition to the execution of 18,000 Kurds and the imprisonment of more than 119,000. Because Turkey is an ally, the US and the EU oppose the Kurds having an independent or semi-autonomous state and brand the PKK as a terrorist organization.

The newsletter is called Koma Civiken Kurdistan Info (in English Peoples’ Confederation of Kurdistan-Info). Founded in the early seventies, the PKK has backed away from its original Marxist-Leninist orientation (at least according to Wikipedia). However it’s the first newsletter I have read in more than two decades that still refers to it members as “comrade.” This makes me nostalgic for the old days. I suspect this is why I continue to subscribe.

I confess I don’t even open the newsletters most weeks. Following the assassination of three (female) PKK leaders in Paris last week, I read every single word of one I got on Sunday. For people who may have missed this story in the corporate media, this was a classic Mossad-style execution in which the killers got through an electronic lock system (requiring a code to get in) at the Kurdish Information Center. All three women died of three or four gunshot wounds to the head. The executions have occurred in the context of secret peace negotiations between the PKK leadership and the Turkish government. The day before the killing, rumors began to circulate that the PKK and the Erdogan government had agreed on a peace plan. The PKK has massive groups of followers in Europe, primarily in Germany, France, the Netherlands and Belgium. However according to the AL Monitor, this was the first PKK assassination carried out on French soil.

The Kurdish Rosa Luxemburg

Sakine Cansiz, one of the co-founders of the PKK, was the most prominent of the three. She organized the prison resistance movement during the decade she spent in prison in the 1980s. The fact that half of the PKK armed resistance are women is credited to Cansiz, often referred to as the Kurdish Rosa Luxemburg.

Is the Mossad Responsible for the PKK Executions?

Here in New Zealand we know all about the Mossad’s ruthless international assassinations (they will go anywhere and kill anyone to further Israeli Zionism). The Mossad was front page new in 2010 after our government discovered Israeli spies had used forged New Zealand passports to assassinate a Hamas leader in Dubai. Six months later, another suspected Mossad agent was discovered to have five passports on his person when he was killed in the Christchurch earthquake.

C. Tuttle, writing in Firedoglake also puts the Mossad high on the list of likely culprits. He refers to a November AL Monitor article by Sedat Laciner revealing that Israeli intelligence monitors PKK training camps continuously via drones, satellites and other electronic. John Robles, writing in The Voice of Russia, believes that Israeli or US intelligence, both eager for a pretext to invade Syria and/or Iran, would have an equally strong incentive to derail a PKK-Turkish peace settlement. Like Iraq, Syria and Iran have large semi-autonomous Kurdish regions, which the PKK uses as a base for military operations against Turkey. Robles reminds us that Turkey recently authorized military incursions into Iran, supposedly to seek out and attack PKK militants. It’s easy to see the US or Israel using the threat posed by Kurdish “terrorism” as an excuse to put boots on the ground in either or both countries.

The PKK Blames Turkish Gladio

In their most recent newsletter, the PKK agrees that the assassinations were an effort to derail the peace negations. However they hold the Turkish Gladio responsible. This is a shorthand reference to Counter-Guerrilla, the Turkish branch of the CIA’s infamous Gladio program. This is a clandestine US-backed force formed in France, Italy, Greece, Turkey and other countries with strong communist sympathies after World War II.

photo credit: txengmeng via photopin cc