Word: ocalan
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...followers call him Apo, Kurdish for uncle. His enemies call him a terrorist and a "baby killer." But last week, Abdullah Ocalan, proud leader of the violent Kurdistan Workers' Party (P.K.K.), was just the cowed captive of the country he had fought for more than 14 years. As he sat strapped into the seat of a jet en route to Turkey, his face dripped with sweat and his eyes blinked nervously while he told his captors how much he "loved" Turkey and how eager he was to "render services" to them. Then he requested medicine for his heartburn...
...captured on a Turkish intelligence-service video, contrasted sharply with the macho image of the mustachioed Marxist guerrilla who has headed the long Kurdish insurgency that has left some 30,000 soldiers, rebels and civilians dead. But lest anyone imagine that the P.K.K.'s capacity for troublemaking ended with Ocalan's surprise seizure in Nairobi, his followers responded with a wave of protests across Europe and the Middle East. The violence reached its bloody climax in Berlin, where Kurdish militants burst into the Israeli consulate and security guards opened fire, killing three and wounding...
Turkey, which has fought a vicious war to suppress the P.K.K., hoped Ocalan's capture would decapitate the rebellion and finally bring it to an end. But the well-orchestrated reaction among Europe's 850,000 Kurds suggested that their quest for independence is hardly over. Indeed, the arrest and trial of Ocalan (pronounced Oh-ja-lan) could boomerang, uniting fractious Kurds and galvanizing global sympathy for their cause. For now, though, many Turks are too busy celebrating...
...story of how Ocalan wound up in his enemies' hands reads like a thriller. Since the mid-'80s, the Turkish-born university dropout had spent most of his time safely ensconced in Syria. From there, he directed terror against Turkish targets from P.K.K. bases in northern Iraq and southeastern Turkey. His goal: to force Ankara to grant independence to the country's 12 million Kurds, part of the estimated 20 million Kurds who straddle five nations. Turkey has sought to eradicate Kurdish nationalism by suppressing their language, culture and political rights. Even so, millions of Turkey's Kurds...
Last fall Turkey threatened to invade unless Syria handed Ocalan over. Unwilling to fight a war over a revolutionary vagabond, the Syrians in October dispatched Ocalan to Athens, then to Moscow. Five weeks later, following Russia's refusal to grant him refugee status, he flew to Rome and requested political asylum. In the face of Turkish diplomatic and economic threats, Italy refused and on Jan. 16 sent the guerrilla back to Russia...