Ocalan capture by Ankara creates chance and chaos

By Gwynne Dyer

LONDON (JP): The long controversy about causation is over. The events surrounding the arrest of Kurdish leader Abdullah Ocalan over the past few days have conclusively shown that the world is not driven by conspiracies, but by clumsiness, incompetence, and sheer chance.

Two weeks ago, the Turks were trying to persuade the European Union to let them join, and the Greeks were minding their own business (apart from trying to block the Turkish application).

Germany was in the throes of changing its laws to give citizenship to millions of residents who were not of German ethnic origin (including two million Turks and half a million Kurds) -- and Kenya, for all practical purposes, was on another planet.

Now Ocalan sits in a Turkish jail while Ankara secretly wonders what to do with him (since his trial and punishment will vastly complicate Turkey's relations with European countries).

Greece and Kenya have had cabinet shuffles, with the ministers who got involved with Ocalan losing their jobs. Four people have died in Kurdish protests all over Europe, North America, and Japan -- and the legal reform that was to bring Germany into the modern world is getting less likely by the day.

The man who made all this possible has been a fugitive for months, having lost the base from which he led the guerrilla war for Kurdish independence for the past 14 years. Like many terrorist leaders, his basic cause (equal rights for Turkey's large Kurdish minority) was just, but his every action besmirched it.

Ocalan was a pitiless tyrant in the Maoist mold -- some would even say a Pol Pot in waiting -- when his Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) was still winning. He has become a pathetic wanderer since a ruthless Turkish counter-insurgency campaign re-established government control of the country's south-east, some 37,000 deaths later. Nobody wanted him -- or at least, nobody should have.

Turkey, above all, should not have wanted him. Once it drove him from his base in Damascus in October (by dint of virtually threatening war with Syria), he posed little further threat to the country. The effectiveness of the PKK's guerrillas in Turkey, already much reduced by Ankara's drastic policy of shifting the population into 'protected villages', fell to almost zero.

Ocalan was gyrating around Europe, from Russia to Italy to any other airport that would let him land, with no government willing to give him sanctuary and no real control over events. The war was practically over, and so long as Ocalan remained the PKK's nominal leader, nobody else would be able to revive it.

But did Ankara let well alone? Of course not. It tried to extradite Ocalan from Italy, and when he fled from there it resumed the search. It found him, unsurprisingly, in Greek hands.

All Greek governments loathe and distrust Turkey, but few would be foolish enough to give Ocalan shelter. Even the present Greek government wasn't that foolish at first -- but then some Kurdish supporters smuggled the PKK leader into Greece without the government's knowledge, and it succumbed to temptation.

Foreign Minister Theodoros Pangalos knew better than to keep Ocalan in Greece -- but he couldn't bear to let the Turks have him.

So began a two-week odyssey in which Greece flew Ocalan all around Europe in the fruitless search for a shelter elsewhere, and then flew him down to Kenya and hid him in the Greek embassy in Nairobi while it sought some African country that would take him.

Meanwhile Ocalan, never the brightest of men, called all over the world on his satellite phone (which, of course, told everybody's secret service just where he was). A Turkish snatch squad flew into Nairobi, grabbed the Kurdish leader late last Monday, and spirited him away. He was shown on Turkish TV a day later, sniveling that he loved Turkey and only wanted to serve it.

Pangalos and two other Greek cabinet ministers had to resign, while the whole nation writhed in humiliation at having let Ocalan fall into the hands of the arch-enemy. The Kenyan immigration chief and several other ministers lost their jobs on the same day. And all over Europe, Kurdish demonstrators attacked Greek, Kenyan and Israeli embassies and consulates (since they suspected Israel of assisting in Ocalan's capture), together with Turkish bars, restaurants, cultural centers and mosques.

The violence was worst in Germany: dozens of firebombs were thrown, hundred of Kurds were arrested -- and three were shot dead during an attack on the Israeli consulate in Berlin. Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder warned that Germany would "not tolerate having political conflicts from foreign countries carried over into German streets," and Interior Minister Otto Schily threatened to deport Kurds involved in violence.

It could not have come at a worse time, for the new Social Democratic-Green coalition government was already on the defensive over its plans to grant citizenship to the country's long-suffering "foreign" population (many of whom were born there). The opposition has launched a nationwide petition to keep German citizenship restricted to the ethnically pure -- and now these demonstrations have driven the final nails into the coffin of public tolerance.

The biggest losers will the two million ethnic Turks who make up almost a third of Germany's immigrant population. But everybody else in Germany will also lose from the imminent failure of this brave attempt to bring German law into the 20th century.

Meanwhile, Ocalan's trial will focus foreign attention on the poor state of human rights in Turkey and sabotage Ankara's campaign to enter the European Union, while some successor to Ocalan, freed of his presence, will try to revive the PKK and restart the war. And at this point I must ask: who wrote this script?

No saga of international intrigue written by Tom Clancy or John LeCarre would dare to appear in public with such a flimsy, random, and downright stupid plot. Nobody gets what they want, or even knows what they are doing. It is, I submit, proof positive that the world is not a conspiracy.