The Statelessness Paradox of the Kurds

İsmail Beşikci
August 14, 2025 – 23:02

Eastern Kurdish academics Kamal Soleimani and Behrooz Shojai have published a book titled The Statelessness Paradox of the Kurds. This is a study that criticizes the thoughts of PKK leader Abdullah Öcalan.
The book’s full title is: The Statelessness Paradox of the Kurds, Öcalan’s Strategies of Confederalism and Becoming-Turkish, Doz Publications, July 2025, Istanbul, 264 pages.
Kamal Soleimani (1968, Piranshar/Eastern Kurdistan, faculty member at El Colegio de México)
Behrooz Shojai (1968, Kutul yan Kutur/Eastern Kurdistan, working on language rights education in Sweden)

After the First World War, there were substantial changes in the world’s political landscape. New states were established. But the international community imposed very heavy and very unjust sanctions against the Kurds and Kurdistan. In the 1920s, during the League of Nations period, the Kurds and Kurdistan were divided, fragmented, and partitioned. In this process, we see the cooperation and alliance of the two imperial powers of the time, Britain and France, as well as the two rooted states of the Middle East, the Ottoman Empire/Turkish Republic and the Iranian Empire/New Pahlavi Iran. This created an effect on the Kurds akin to the dismemberment of a human skeleton, the brain being rendered dysfunctional. After these dates, the Kurds in each part—Başûr, Bakur, Rojhilat, Rojava—became the target of burdensome assimilation policies. All Kurdish values were confiscated. Great efforts were made to erase the Kurds, their language, and their culture from history and from the earth. These unjust policies continue in one form or another in all four parts of Kurdistan. It should not be forgotten that one part of Kurdistan is also in the Caucasus.

From the perspective of our subject, the importance of this brief reminder is this: In the face of this concrete situation of the Kurds and Kurdistan, in the face of this disaster experienced by the Kurds, wherever a guerrilla movement might begin, the aim of the Kurds should be to reclaim these values that were seized from them. Efforts may be made to liberate a particular part, but this analysis is necessary before starting guerrilla warfare. Such an effort naturally makes the people and the organization nationalist.
At this point, it is necessary to state in parentheses that Arab, Persian, and Turkish nationalisms are racist. Each nationalism has the aim of assimilating the Kurds, erasing them from languages, from histories, and from the earth. All three nationalisms use state terror intensely to achieve this aim. Kurdish nationalism, without doubt, has no such aim. Kurdish nationalism is the effort to regain these usurped rights. This is evaluated as an effort to gain universal values against oppression and tyranny.
Abdullah Öcalan, on the other hand, emphasizes that he is against nationalism and that it is a primitive attitude (p. 170). Since the 1960s, Turkish official ideology has accused those who study Kurds and Kurdistan of primitive nationalism. There is no difference between Turkish official ideology and Öcalan on this matter. Öcalan stresses that the state is bad, that Kurds do not need a state, that he does not want a state for the Kurds, and that he conducts no criticism against Arab, Persian, or Turkish states. He only states that he is against a possible Kurdish state. Turkish official ideology also condemns the Kurds having a state in the Middle East as being a “second Israel.” Öcalan’s view, as well as those of Yalçın Küçük and Doğu Perinçek, are in this direction. All three try to delegitimize a future Kurdistan by calling it “Barzanistan.” At this point, Öcalan shares the same view as the official Turkish position. Apart from these facts, Öcalan, both in thought and in practice, has not served the Kurds; by his own words, he has “served and wants to serve the Turkish state.”
For these thoughts and this stance, Abdullah Öcalan, of course, must be criticized. But when beginning criticism of Öcalan, the Kurdish academics, especially in Northern Kurdistan, should be blamed for not bringing these relations to the agenda.

Another critical issue Öcalan emphasizes is “becoming-Turkish” (Türkiyelileşme). Becoming-Turkish means Turkification. Öcalan says they are different. While becoming-Turkish refers to a country-centered policy, the second focuses on Turkish ethnicity (p. 178). If we recall the assimilation policies that the state has been applying against the Kurds for over a century, it becomes clear that becoming Turkish is exactly Turkification. It is unacceptable that many Kurdish academics, working both in Turkish universities and in the diaspora, present becoming-Turkish as a correct thesis for the Kurdish nation. Becoming-Turkish is the continuation of the policy of Turkifying the Kurds, carried out for more than a century, indeed more insidiously and dangerously. Moreover, intellectuals who say “Öcalan is my leader or my will” must also be heavily criticized. In recent years, some Kurdish academics working in Turkish universities, not wanting their comfort zones disturbed, openly defend the thesis of becoming-Turkish (and thus Turkification), which clearly means serving Turkish official ideology and colonialism.

Kamal Soleimani and Behrooz Shojai have been academically criticizing Öcalan’s thought and stance for years. Their work is a very valuable study. It is very valuable that these two academics, despite not mastering Turkish, have studied the PKK and Öcalan’s ideas with great academic responsibility and written this book. Until today, the books written about Abdullah Öcalan have mostly been uncritical and praiseworthy. However, the study of Kamal Soleimani and Behrooz Shojai consists of scientific and objective criticisms.
At this stage, Abdullah Öcalan says that for Kurdish society to integrate with the Turkish state, he has abandoned all values of being Kurdish. He rejects the collective rights of the Kurds, even their cultural rights. He says he unconditionally accepts the Turkish Constitution and the unitary structure of the state. He uses slogans such as “one flag,” “one state,” “one homeland,” and “one language.” He has no demands regarding the Kurdish language. Just like Turkish generals, he says Kurds can use Kurdish not as a collective right, but only individually among themselves at home. Autonomy and federation have long been abandoned (p. 74).
For Öcalan, the Turkish state is untouchable, as are the Arab and Persian states. For example, to better align with the Syrian regime, he says: “There is no part of Kurdistan called Syrian Kurdistan. These are Kurds who migrated from the North to Syria after the Sheikh Said resistance and later the Ağrı, Zilan, Sason, Dersim resistances” (p. 31).
Yet, in the early 1960s, the Ba’ath regime seized the lands of Kurds in Rojava and exiled them to the South and East of Syria. Arab families were brought from elsewhere and settled in the villages vacated by Kurds. This was an operation to alter Rojava’s Kurdish demographic structure and increase the Arab population in the region. These operations took place at a time when Syria, together with Egypt, established the United Arab Republic. The head of state was Gamal Abdel Nasser. This union did not last long. It was established in 1958 and dissolved in 1961. The Prime Minister was Nazim al-Kudsi.
The operations to disrupt Rojava’s Kurdish demographic continued in the late 1960s during President Nureddin al-Atassi’s term and later under Hafez al-Assad as well.

Alongside the untouchability of Turkish, Arab, and Persian states, Öcalan is also very indifferent to the division, fragmentation, and partition of Kurdistan. Yet this is the most critical imperialist partition policy after the 1916 Sykes-Picot, the 1920 Treaty of Sèvres, and the 1923 Treaty of Lausanne: the imperialist partition of Kurdistan. It is surprising that Öcalan, indifferent to this process, describes the 1925 Sheikh Said resistance as an event that achieved the partition of Kurdistan (p. 118).
Abdullah Öcalan dwells heavily on Democratic Confederalism (pp. 51–88). He presents this as the solution to the Kurdish question. While establishing Democratic Confederalism, he emphasizes that borders will never change. He wants borders to be considered not as obstacles but as bridges (p. 63). When we consider what Arab, Turkish, and Persian states have done to the Kurds in the last century, Democratic Confederalism remains a dream. For example, even when kolbars, who survive by carrying loads across the Iran–Iraq border, show their IDs to the Iranian police, they are shot. Unless these states open up to democracy, this project cannot come to life (p. 233).

Öcalan’s failure to criticize racist policies, his legitimization of the Constitution and institutions, and his project that does not firmly demand mother tongue rights all show that his project is not one of national liberation. However, since he forgets everything the state has done and seeks greater integration with the state, these projects may secure his personal freedom.