This video is really interesting. It’s about the Kurdistan Worker’s Party, an insurgent army in Turkey that’s been fighting since the 70s. In this video, a CNN reporter is hanging out at one of their camps that reminds me quite a bit of a forest defense camp. There’ve been a few articles in the news recently about clashes with turkey, and more interestingly about the important role of women in the PKK [infoshop.org discussion].

Are these people freedom fighters or terrorists? The age-old question, right? They formed under marxist and maoist ideology, fighting for the freedom of kurdistan, hoping to form a socialist republic. Later, they stepped back a bit from communism and adopted more nationalistic and, it is argued, islamic beliefs. However, these days it looks like their main stance is actually a fight against the patriarchal world. Really quite interesting. Historically, however, they’ve been kidnapping tourists, utilizing suicide bombers on non-military targets, and generally being the kind of bastards that so many guerrilla groups are. If the wikipedia article is to be believed, a large number of their militants were given false promises of having their families taken care of. It’s harder to get a grasp on their modern ideology (at least for me, thousands of miles away and just looking at the internet as of this morning).

I always get my hopes up when I see videos like these. Here’s a guerrilla group that is dedicated to fighting for cultural independence, social reform, and gender equality. I want to like them, I really do. Turkey has pretty much wholesale banned speaking in kurdish, singing kurdish songs, really having any kurdish identity, despite 20% of their population being kurdish. But apparently there are reformist kurds attempting to work for greater kurdish representation in turkey’s government, and the PKK have assassinated a few of those people. The comparison in my mind would be if the ELF burned down the house of the president of Sierra Club.

And the PKK have apparently bombed shopping centers and other civilian targets, something which there is really no excuse for. There’s a 1998 documentary about the PKK and their old leader on youtube, 19 minutes long.

Every time I get my hopes up about a group like the PKK just to have them shattered I remember how much I love the EZLN.