Lacie Walls Kurdistan Workers Party Origins To understand where the PKK came from, it’s important to know the background history of the Turkish treatment of the Kurdish people Since World War I, Kurds in Turkey have been the victims of persistent assaults on their ethnic, cultural, religious identity and economic and political status by successive Turkish governments The Treaty of Sevres was signed at the end of Ottoman Empire after World War One. There was an initial agreement on the boundaries of a Kurdistan but nationalist Kurds rejected this as it failed to include a region called Van and the treaty was never officially ratified.

Turkish Treatment of Kurds In 1923 the treaty of Lausanne created the modern states of Turkey, Iraq, and Syria, but Kurdistan was ignored. During Turkey's war for independence, Turkish leaders, promised Kurds a Turkish-Kurdish federated state in return for their assistance in the war. After independence was achieved, however, they ignored the bargain they had made. 1924 a Turkish mandate forbade Kurdish schools, organizations and publications. Even the words "Kurd" and "Kurdistan" were outlawed, making any written or spoken acknowledgement of their existence illegal. According to Association France-Kurdistan, between 1925 and 1939, 1.5 million Kurds, a third of the population, were deported and massacred. So you can see now how this feeling of resentment and anger that Kurdish people had towards Turkey developed

Ocalan- The Student Movement Abdullah Ocalan attended Ankra University as a political science major While attending the university, he started to adopt teaching from political theory from leaders such as Mao Zedong and Karl Marx He started to carry out these ideals from Maoism and Marxism with peers and classmates Ocalan joined a group known as Ankra Democratic Higher Education Association That group soon fell, which lead to the development of his new organization in 1975. The Kurdistan Workers Party was officially established in 1978

Objectives The PKK wanted to create and independent Kurdish state Through means of socialism, specifically Stalin inspired socialism In practice, this meant support for the policies and national interests of the Kurdish people Although closely aligned to Marxist principles, the difference here is to spread this ideology of an independent state on a national scale instead of creating an international movement The alienation of Kurdish people from the Turkish government is what set in motion these ideas of an independent state

Doctrine Kurdish nationalism Marxism Through Turkey’s continuous government alienation, Kurdish people responded to the injustice by wanting to create an independent Kurdish state Wrong doing such as trying to nationalize Turkish identity, stripping Kurdish people of their rights, and banning their language from media platforms Marxism The worker has no independent access to the means of production, owned by the capitalist class as a whole Essentially taking this ideology and relating it to Kurdish people as a whole, in the fact that they don’t have access to what is theirs An independent state, rights, government involvement, access to jobs, etc. The Turkish government owns everything in which the Kurdish people believe they should have equal access to