Ocalan's political history
Ocalan was born in 1948 in the village of Omerli in southeastern
Turkey, close to the Syrian border. He became politically active
during his university years in Ankara, where he studied political
science but dropped outBy 1973 he had organized a Maoist group
whose goal was a socialist revolution. He founded the PKK in 1978
as an extreme-left nationalist group that launched a war against
the Turkish government to set up an independent Kurdish state
along Marxist lines.
Ocalan fled Turkey before the 1980 military coup and lived in
exile, mostly in the Syrian capital Damascus and in the Lebanese
plains under Syrian control, where he set up his PKK headquarters
and training camps. In late 1998, under intense pressure from
Turkey, Syria closed the camps and expelled Ocalan, who started
an odyssey through various nations in search of political asylum.
In February 1999, he was nabbed in Kenya after an undercover
operation and spirited back to Turkey. Ocalan, a heavily built
man with a thick black mustache, propagates a Cold War brand of
nationalism mixed with Marxist-Leninist doctrine.
"You must believe before everything else that the revolution
must come, that there is no other choice," he is reported to
have said in an address to a Kurdish youth rally last August.
"You must say no to betrayal and denial. Even though I am 50
years old, I have never allowed myself to get old. I am going on
with the struggle."