Abdullah Ocalan: The Imprisoned Sun of Kurdistan (1948–)
- Rezan Babakir
- Mar 16
- 10 min read
Updated: Apr 16
In 1999, a Turkish court sentenced Abdullah Öcalan to death. The sentence was later commuted to life imprisonment. He has been held since then in a prison on the island of İmralı in the Sea of Marmara, sometimes the only prisoner on the island, sometimes the only prisoner allowed outside his cell. He has been held in conditions that Amnesty International and the European Court of Human Rights have repeatedly described as amounting to torture by isolation. He has not been released. He has not stopped being politically significant. From his prison cell, he has written millions of words of political philosophy, negotiated ceasefire after ceasefire between the PKK and the Turkish state, transformed the ideological framework of the Kurdish movement he founded from Marxist-Leninist armed struggle to something he calls democratic confederalism, and remained — twenty-five years after his arrest — the most politically significant figure in the lives of millions of Kurds in Turkey, Syria, and beyond.
Table of Contents
Part 1: Ömerli and the Making of a Revolutionary
Abdullah Öcalan was born on 4 April 1948 in the village of Ömerli in the Halfeti district of Urfa province, in southeastern Turkey. He was the fourth of seven children in a poor Kurdish peasant family. The family's poverty was not unusual; the rural Kurdish population of southeastern Turkey in the 1940s and 1950s lived in conditions of structural marginalisation that were simultaneously economic, cultural, and political. The Kurdish language was banned in schools and public life. Kurdish cultural expression was suppressed. The region's economic development was systematically neglected by a state that viewed the Kurdish highlands as a security problem rather than a community requiring investment.
Öcalan experienced this marginalisation directly. He was a Kurdish child who had to be educated in Turkish, in a school system that treated his language and culture as non-existent. He was intelligent enough to advance through the educational system, eventually attending university in Ankara. But the experience of education in a Turkish nationalist framework that denied his identity's existence, while simultaneously exposing him to the political ideas that would eventually give his identity political form, was the foundational experience of his political formation.
Part 2: Ankara and the Political Formation of Abdullah Öcalan
Öcalan attended Ankara University's Faculty of Political Science in the late 1960s. He arrived in Ankara at a moment of extraordinary political ferment: the New Left, student radicalism, Marxist and socialist politics that challenged the established order across the Western world and in Turkey specifically. He immersed himself in left-wing student politics, joined various Kurdish activist circles, and began to develop the distinctive political position that would eventually produce the PKK. His reading was in the tradition of Marxist-Leninist political theory, but he was applying this framework to the situation of a people divided among four states, denied recognition by all of them, and living in conditions of economic and cultural marginalisation.
Part 3: Founding the PKK — 27 November 1978
On 27 November 1978, in the village of Fis (Ziyaret) in Diyarbakır province, Abdullah Öcalan and a small group of comrades formally established the Kurdistan Workers' Party — the Partiya Karkerën Kurdistanê, known as the PKK. The PKK's founding programme was explicitly Marxist-Leninist, calling for an independent Kurdish state to be established through armed struggle. Its class-based appeal gave the PKK access to social constituencies that the KDP and PUK had not reached — in particular the young, poor, urban Kurds of Turkish cities and the landless peasantry of the southeast. The military coup of September 1980 destroyed the Turkish left and imprisoned thousands; Öcalan had already left Turkey and was operating from Syria, where the Assad regime provided the PKK with a base for the following decade and a half.
Part 4: The Armed Struggle — 1984 and Its Consequences
On 15 August 1984, the PKK launched its armed uprising against the Turkish state with simultaneous attacks on Turkish military facilities in Eruh and Şemdinli in southeastern Turkey. The date marks the beginning of an armed conflict that has lasted, with periods of ceasefire, for over forty years and has killed more than 40,000 people. The PKK's armed campaign in the 1980s targeted Turkish military and security forces, but also — controversially — Kurdish tribal leaders and village guards who cooperated with the Turkish state. The Turkish state responded with massive military operations, the forced emptying of thousands of villages, and state violence against the civilian Kurdish population that displaced millions of people and drove mass migration to western Turkish cities.
Part 5: The 1990s — War, Atrocity, and the Peace Overture
The 1990s were the bloodiest period of the PKK-Turkey conflict. The Turkish security forces' counterinsurgency campaign included widespread human rights violations — village burnings, forced disappearances, extrajudicial killings of Kurdish political figures and journalists. An estimated three million Kurds were displaced from southeastern Turkey. Despite the conflict's brutality, Öcalan had already begun exploring the possibility of a political resolution. He declared unilateral ceasefires multiple times in the 1990s — in 1993, 1995, and 1998 — each time calling on the Turkish state to respond with political dialogue. The Turkish government refused to negotiate with an organisation it designated as terrorist, and each ceasefire eventually broke down.
Part 6: Capture — The Betrayal in Nairobi
Abdullah Öcalan was expelled from Syria in October 1998 under Turkish pressure and began a months-long odyssey across Europe, seeking political asylum. He was denied entry or expelled from Russia, Italy, Greece, and several other countries. In February 1999, he arrived in Kenya, where he was staying at the Greek embassy in Nairobi. On 15 February 1999, Turkish intelligence agents, working with American and Israeli intelligence support, seized Öcalan from the Greek embassy, bundled him onto a plane, and delivered him to Turkish custody. He was brought to Turkey, tried before the State Security Court, convicted of treason and armed rebellion, and sentenced to death on 29 June 1999. The Turkish government commuted the death sentence to life imprisonment in 2002. He has been held on İmralı Island ever since.
Part 7: İmralı — The Prison Island
İmralı is a small island in the Sea of Marmara, about thirty kilometres southwest of Istanbul. Since Öcalan's arrival in 1999, it has functioned as a dedicated maximum-security facility — for much of the time, with Öcalan as its only prisoner, and periods when he was its only prisoner allowed out of his cell for the single weekly hour of exercise. His conditions have been the subject of sustained criticism from Amnesty International, the Council of Europe, the European Court of Human Rights, and the UN Committee Against Torture. Access to his lawyers has been systematically restricted. There have been periods of years during which he was permitted no visits from his lawyers and no contact with the outside world at all. And yet from this cell, he has written. The volumes of political philosophy that he has produced in prison have been smuggled out, translated, published, and have shaped the political thinking of millions of people.
Part 8: The Intellectual Transformation — Democratic Confederalism
The most extraordinary dimension of Öcalan's story is not his years of armed struggle but his intellectual transformation in prison. The Öcalan who was captured in 1999 was a Marxist-Leninist who had spent twenty years building a movement aimed at establishing an independent Kurdish state. The Öcalan whose political philosophy emerged from İmralı over the following decade had abandoned both Marxism-Leninism and the goal of independent statehood in favour of something he calls democratic confederalism — a non-state political theory derived in part from the work of American anarchist thinker Murray Bookchin. It proposes a form of political organisation based on grassroots direct democracy organised through local communes and councils that operate across existing state borders without seeking to replace those borders with a new Kurdish state. It is explicitly feminist — women's liberation is identified as the central revolutionary project. It is explicitly ecological. And it rejects the nation-state model as a form of organisation suited to the twenty-first century.
Part 9: The Rojava Connection — His Ideas in Action
Democratic confederalism found its most dramatic practical expression in the cantons of northern Syria — Rojava — after the collapse of Assad's authority there in 2012. The Kurdish political forces of northern Syria, organised through the Democratic Union Party (PYD) and its armed wing the YPG, implemented Öcalan's political ideas in their administration of the predominantly Kurdish cantons. The Rojava experiment — with its system of local councils, its mandatory gender co-presidency, its women's military forces, and its multi-ethnic governance structures — attracted extraordinary international attention. The YPG became America's primary partner in the military campaign against the Islamic State in Syria from 2014 onwards — a strategic alliance that created the paradox of the United States simultaneously supporting Öcalan's political experiment in Syria while designating the PKK as a terrorist organisation in Turkey.
Part 10: Legacy — The Imprisoned Sun of Kurdistan
The assessment of Abdullah Öcalan's legacy is genuinely divided. For millions of Kurds — particularly in Turkey, Syria, and among the Kurdish diaspora — he is a hero: the man who gave the Kurdish people of Turkey political consciousness, who built a movement that forced the Turkish state to eventually acknowledge the existence of a Kurdish question, and whose political philosophy provides an inspiring alternative to the nationalist state model. For others — including many victims of PKK violence and international observers who focus on the conflict's death toll — his legacy is inseparable from the violence and suffering of forty years of armed conflict. What is beyond dispute is his significance. He is, in the early twenty-first century, the most politically consequential Kurdish figure alive — and he has been in prison for a quarter of a century.
Key Events Timeline
Early Life & Political Awakening (1948–1978)
4 April 1948 — Humble Beginnings: Born in the rural village of Ömerli, located in the Halfeti district of Turkey’s Urfa province. Growing up in an impoverished agricultural region heavily shaped his early worldview and his understanding of the socioeconomic struggles facing the Kurdish population.
Late 1960s — The Crucible of Ankara: While studying political science at Ankara University, Öcalan became deeply immersed in Turkey’s vibrant, and often turbulent, leftist student movements. It was here that he began fusing Marxist-Leninist ideology with Kurdish national identity, moving away from mainstream Turkish leftism to develop a distinctly Kurdish revolutionary politics.
27 November 1978 — Founding the PKK: In the Lice district of Diyarbakır province, Öcalan and a small group of student activists officially founded the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK). Their initial, uncompromising goal was the establishment of an independent, socialist Kurdish state spanning across the traditional Kurdish regions of Turkey, Syria, Iraq, and Iran.
Armed Conflict & Regional Exile (1980–1998)
September 1980 — The Coup and Relocation: Following a brutal military coup in Turkey that led to the severe suppression of leftists and Kurdish activists, Öcalan and the PKK leadership were forced to flee. They established training camps in the Bekaa Valley (then under Syrian control), leveraging geopolitical rivalries to secure a safe haven.
15 August 1984 — The Uprising Begins: The PKK launched its first major coordinated attacks against Turkish state forces, marking the official beginning of a protracted and bloody armed conflict. This insurgency would define Turkish politics for decades, resulting in tens of thousands of casualties and the displacement of millions.
1993, 1995, 1998 — The Stalled Peace Process: Recognizing the military stalemate, Öcalan declared a series of unilateral ceasefires, signaling a shift from seeking total independence to demanding political autonomy and cultural rights within Turkey. However, the Turkish state consistently refused to negotiate, viewing the PKK strictly as a terrorist organization and opting for military solutions.
The Search for Asylum & Capture (1998–2002)
October 1998 — Forced Out of Syria: Facing immense military pressure and the threat of war from Turkey, Syria expelled Öcalan. This triggered a frantic, months-long search for political asylum. He bounced between Russia, Italy, and Greece, sparking diplomatic crises wherever he landed, as European nations hesitated to grant him refuge due to pressure from Turkey and NATO.
15 February 1999 — The Capture in Kenya: In a dramatic operation involving intelligence cooperation between Turkey, the US, and allegedly Israel, Öcalan was captured by Turkish agents en route to the airport in Nairobi, Kenya. His arrest sparked massive, sometimes violent, protests by Kurds across the globe.
29 June 1999 — The Trial: In a high-security trial on the prison island of İmralı, Öcalan was convicted of treason and armed rebellion and sentenced to death.
2002 — A Spared Life: In a massive turning point, Turkey abolished the death penalty as part of its efforts to meet human rights standards for European Union accession. Öcalan’s sentence was subsequently commuted to aggravated life imprisonment without the possibility of parole.
Ideological Evolution & The Rojava Experiment (2002–Present)
2002–Present — The Philosopher of İmralı: Held in near-total isolation on İmralı Island, Öcalan underwent a profound ideological transformation. Heavily influenced by the works of American anarchist thinker Murray Bookchin, he abandoned Marxist-Leninist state-building. Instead, he developed the theory of "Democratic Confederalism," a model based on grassroots democracy, radical feminism, environmentalism, and a rejection of the traditional nation-state.
2012 — Theory Meets Practice in Rojava: Amidst the chaos of the Syrian Civil War, Syrian Kurds aligned with Öcalan's ideology (primarily the PYD and its armed wing, the YPG) established an autonomous zone in northern Syria.
References
Frequently Asked Questions
Who is Abdullah Öcalan?
Abdullah Öcalan (born 1948) is the founder of the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK), which launched an armed uprising against Turkey in 1984 that has lasted over forty years and killed more than 40,000 people. Captured by Turkish intelligence in 1999, he has been imprisoned on İmralı Island since then. From prison, he developed the theory of democratic confederalism — a non-state political philosophy that has been implemented in the Kurdish regions of northern Syria (Rojava) and remains the governing ideology of the PKK and affiliated movements.
What is democratic confederalism?
Democratic confederalism is a political theory developed by Öcalan in prison, influenced in part by American anarchist Murray Bookchin. It proposes grassroots direct democracy organised through local communes and councils, operating across existing state borders without seeking to establish a new Kurdish state. It is explicitly feminist — women's liberation is identified as central — and explicitly ecological. It represents a fundamental departure from the Marxist-Leninist armed-struggle framework with which the PKK was founded.
What is the Rojava connection?
After the collapse of Assad's authority in northern Syria from 2012, Kurdish political forces affiliated with Öcalan's ideas established self-governing cantons in Rojava (northern Syria). These cantons implemented democratic confederalism — with mandatory gender co-presidency, women's armed forces, and multi-ethnic governance. The YPG, the canton's military, became America's primary partner against ISIS in Syria from 2014, creating the paradox of US support for Öcalan's political experiment while Turkey designated the PKK as terrorist.