Osman Öcalan, brother of the founder of the militant PKK, is dead. Turkish nationalists wish him a “terrible hellfire”; his own people condemned him as a traitor.
Obituaries of such relentlessness were to be expected. “The terrorist Osman Öcalan is dead,” tweeted a senior Turkish nationalist politician. “May his hellfire be terrible.” The implacable words should speak from the heart of many in Turkey; Osman Öcalan was hated by all opponents of the Kurdish cause – and above all the cause of the militant PKK.
On the one hand, because it bore the name of PKK founder Abdullah Öcalan. On the other hand, because, as the younger brother of the PKK leader, he himself had long been a commander of the militant Kurdistan Workers’ Party and had fought against the Turkish state. Osman Öcalan, actually a teacher, rose to the top of the leadership circle, sat on the central and executive committee of the PKK, which is considered a terrorist organization in Europe and the USA.
Because Osman Öcalan sought and found reconciliation with the Iraqi Kurds who were fighting the PKK at the end during one of the eternal wars within the Kurds, he was sentenced to death by his own people in 1995 as a “traitor”. He was not executed. He was put in a kind of prison camp and rehabilitated four years later. Shortly before, his brother had been ostracized by his Syrian “hosts” and had wandered the world in search of a new exile, until he was caught by the Turkish secret service in Kenya in early 1999 and brought back to Turkey.
Öcalan disregarded a central rule
After this blow, the PKK needed the well-known name: the younger Öcalan rose again to the leadership – and offended again. In 2004 he married a 22-year-old and violated one of the most important rules of the PKK: The organization cultivates the features of a militant order, love relationships within its own ranks are not tolerated. Osman Öcalan, who lived in the Kurdish region of northern Iraq, left the PKK and founded the short-lived “Patriotic Democratic Party”. He later ran a bakery.
Occasionally he gave interviews in which he spoke out in favor of an end to the four decades-long conflict between the PKK and the Turkish state: “I am against war, I am for peace. What is happening in the region does not benefit the Kurds, it does certain groups in the region who want to spark a dispute in Turkey. “
His brother Abdullah had once deeply regretted that the younger boy had not been executed. Now the elder, who has been in solitary confinement on the Turkish prison island of Imralı in the Marmara Sea since 1999, has survived him naturally. In the last years of his life, Osman Öcalan was ill and, according to his two sons, suffered from paralysis and speech disorders. He died at the age of 63 in Erbil, northern Iraq, apparently of the consequences of Corona.