Written by
Stefano Rossi 

 

Gulten Ucar, 33 years old, spent seven years in the mountains as a combatant in the PKK. She has spent five of them in jail and now is a member of the peace group. She is one of eight members of the first peace group that on September first, 1999, passed over the border of southern Kurdistan and Turkey. She was one of the first guerrillas to put down arms and to collaborate actively in the ceasefire of 1999 that ought to have led to dialogue between the government and the PKK.

A difficult life. Gulten comes from Adiyaman, a village close to Nemrut Dagi, a very famous archeological site in Turkey, visited every year by thousands of people.  She began to be interested in the Kurdish question in her high school years, when she began to be political--up until the moment she decided to leave and go into the mountains, together with some thirty of her friends. Short, small, dark haired—one doesn’t imagine her with a rifle in her hand while seeing her seated in a bar in Piazza Taksim in Istanbul. But her eyes are hard and determined when she speaks, with a hardness that one time served her in combat, but today has been put in the service of the cause of peace. “I decided to become a guerrilla,” she says, “when I understood that we found ourselves facing the extinguishing of a people and that the Turkish state denied us the right of our very existence. The first days in the mountains were hard. I grew up in the city and in the mountains it snowed. But thanks to our dreams and ideals we remained firm. I was only 19.” Gulten had to suddenly adapt herself to hard military discipline. She says, “When the weather allowed it (in winter a great deal of snow falls in the mountains of Kurdistan) we did military exercises in order to prepare ourselves for war, and we prepared plans for attacking the enemy.” The PKK relied above all on Gulten’s instruction, using her as a teacher, given that she had completed high school. The ex-guerrilla continues: “In our organization each person was utilized according to his capabilities. If you are good at combat, they give you a rifle, while if you have a certain level of culture, they prefer to use you as a teacher of politics, history, geography. I specialized in the education of the guerrillas.” Political education for a Marxist party like the PKK is important, as the feminine component is important. Of ten thousand guerrillas presently in the mountains of Kurdistan, it is calculated that four thousand are women. Gulten, in addition to teaching, recruited future guerrillas. “I have also been in Greece,” she admits, confirming that supporters of the Kurdish guerrillas come from the Hellenic country that has never loved Turkey. To the question of whether she was ever afraid Gulten answered: “At first I was afraid of many things. When I left the city for the mountains I heard shots at night and I was terrorized, but then I got used to it. Human beings can get used to everything.”

Surrender or peace? Seven years as a guerrilla. Then, at a certain point, something happened. She tells it herself. “Our leader, Abdullah Ocalan, decreed a ceasefire from the prison of Imrali. What he had in mind wasn’t entirely understood. We guerrillas talked at length about it. Then we decided to send to the valley a peace group, around a thousand people, to see if it was possible to have a dialogue with the government. We made a sacrifice.” Gulten went down from the mountains and ended up in prison. She recounts: “To go into prison was the thing that frightened us less. We thought that they would kill us. I was sure that I would die. Instead, to my great surprise, the Turkish soldiers  treated us well.  In prison we discussed with them what they wanted to know: if the PKK had made this change because it was convinced of it or only for tactical motives. I believe that our arrival in jails, for those soldiers and for those who were confined there, has been important.” The ex-guerrilla got out of prison in November of 2004. Now she is a member of the peace group. Her aim, like that of her friends, is to pursue the objectives of peace and democracy. Gulten meets with intellectuals and journalists to seek to resolve  the Kurdish question peacefully. And if someone points out to her that it’s a leap to pass from being a guerrilla to being a pacifist, she answers: “Yes, certainly, there is a great contradiction in this. It was not easy for us to make this choice. But there have been so many examples of this kind of thing in the world. And we have thought that if we continued to make war, things could only get worse. We cannot live our entire lives in the mountains. Someone must take the first step to have a dialogue.”