Latest news with #KurdistanWorkers'party
The Guardian
07-04-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Children of Radium by Joe Dunthorne review – complicity, courage and cowardice examined in a slippery marvel
Joe Dunthorne tells us he originally envisaged this book as a story of his grandmother's childhood escape from the Nazis; the reality turned out to be more complex. Narrated with the twists and turns of a detective story, Children of Radium is a family memoir that records the mazy path by which the prize-winning Welsh novelist discovered just how little he knew of his German Jewish heritage. His journey begins with 'a foot-high block of A4': a 2,000-page unpublished memoir by his great-grandfather, Siegfried, a Jewish scientist who worked at a secret chemical weapons laboratory near Berlin before he and his family left for Turkey – not the panicky flit Dunthorne imagined, but a relocation bankrolled by employers with plans for what he could yet do. Hunches, tip-offs, false trails and dead ends abound in Dunthorne's quest to determine how much Siegfried knew – and when – about his work's murderous potential after he was reassigned in 1928 from toothpaste manufacture by his firm, a specialist in radioactive products. Siegfried's memoir is circumspect, and the hunt for answers isn't straightforward: not only was the site of Siegfried's lab heavily bombed, but Dunthorne's mum also chucked his papers into the recycling while clearing out her late mother's flat. An eye for that kind of comedy, honed in Dunthorne's novels – the best known is Submarine (2008), filmed by Richard Ayoade – brightens a quixotic voyage into the heart of 20th-century darkness. The trail leads through libraries, museums and medical records, but also less obviously writer-friendly locales: in Germany, he wriggles belly-first into a fenced-off radioactive site in a clandestine hunt for soil to test for gas traces; and in Turkey, Dunthorne blags his way through military checkpoints in the company of a formerly jailed member of the Kurdistan Workers' party, having learned that one of the letters he has from Siegfried might hold evidence of culpability for a massacre in an eastern mountain town prior to the second world war. Dunthorne's voice – affable, warm, wry – casts a spell right from the book's dedication ('This book is for – and, arguably, by – my mother'), making light work of tricky ground as he weaves fact and guesswork, reading and testimony. Despite everything, humour is never far away. When, in Germany, he suddenly feels the need to apologise to an elderly interviewee for Siegfried's work with chemical weapons, the man demurs and instead apologises on behalf of all Germans to Dunthorne, a descendant of expatriated Jews; at which point the author apologises for putting him in the position where he felt he needed to apologise. It takes a special writer to generate embarrassment comedy from this material, but you come to feel that Dunthorne is probably the kind of author who is witty in his sleep: the Nazis didn't deploy poison gas on the battlefield, he says, because Hitler personally vetoed its use, 'creat[ing] the uneasy situation in which my great-grandfather's work might have been far more lethal without an intervention from Hitler', a line that manages to be heartfelt as well as undeniably comic. As discoveries and ambiguities mount, the book plays out as a tangled investigation of complicity, courage and cowardice, ceaselessly yo-yoing between potential indictment and mitigation. Dunthorne's instinctively jokey tone doesn't minimise the ever-present horror, yet he recognises, too, that the darkest aspects of his story are tricky to separate from the frisson of proximity, the fundamental thrill of the chase (one chapter ends: 'The real revelation came, several weeks later, via email...'). We catch his perverse sense of disappointment when his hard-won soil sample contains traces of everything but gas from Siegfried's lab. There's steady intrigue, also, in the unmistakable resonance of Dunthorne's decision to embark on an all-consuming pan-continental research quest while slap-bang in the middle of early fatherhood. It's also a kind of stealth post-Brexit narrative, as Dunthorne obtains German citizenship – an ambivalent reintegration by which the convenience of an EU passport is weighed alongside 'formal reconciliation with the country which had tried to systematically eliminate [his mother's] forebears'. Dunthorne recently told the Guardian how much he admired Laurent Binet's tricksy 2010 novel HHhH, a book that conspicuously shows its own working as it unreliably imagines its way into the Nazi era, and you can feel its imprint here. Children of Radium put me in mind, too, of Richard Flanagan's Question 7, another genealogical retracing that turns into a meditation on guilt, atrocity and unforeseen consequence. Dunthorne's tome is a humbler enterprise, keenly aware that the writerly ego can be led astray by an impulse to join the dots: witness the belated recognition that his focus might after all be entirely in the wrong place, thanks to a splendidly deflating comment from his mother, who wonders if Dunthorne should be writing instead about her great aunt – Siegfried's sister – who bravely oversaw a Munich children's home, caring for Jewish refugees amid rising persecution. By necessity, Children of Radium is piecemeal, inconclusive, full of pregnant silences, maybes and what ifs. Near the end, Dunthorne and his mother soak up memories in north London, where Siegfried spent his last days in a care home, regularly greeting his granddaughter and her boyfriend – the author's dad – with a meal of ox tongue. 'It speaks to a paucity of other research materials that I thought it worthwhile to cook an ox tongue,' Dunthorne tells us. He didn't know what to expect, and was alarmed when the length of flesh seemed to revive in the pan, 'writhing and flexing', refusing to stay put when prodded with a spoon, 'lifting the lid off the pot'. A metaphor, you can't help think, but it befits the procedures and conclusions of this slippery marvel that we can't quite say for what. Children of Radium: A Buried Inheritance by Joe Dunthorne is published by Hamish Hamilton (£16.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at Delivery charges may apply
The Guardian
27-02-2025
- Politics
- The Guardian
Jailed Kurdish leader Abdullah Öcalan calls for PKK to disarm
The jailed Kurdish leader Abdullah Öcalan has called on the Kurdistan Workers' party (PKK) to disarm, in a letter read out by his political allies in an Istanbul conference room on Thursday. The statement attributed to Öcalan and read out by members of the pro-Kurdish DEM party said due to improvements in freedom of expression in Turkey and Kurdish cultural rights the PKK had lost meaning and become redundant. 'I call for laying down arms and assume the historical responsibility of this call,' the letter said. The PKK has been fighting the Turkish state for more than 40 years and initially sought an independent Kurdistan before shifting to a demand for greater autonomy in Turkey. The group is considered a terrorist organisation by Ankara and Turkey's western allies
The Guardian
27-02-2025
- Politics
- The Guardian
Why has PKK leader called on group to dissolve – and why does it matter?
The jailed leader of the Kurdistan Workers' party (PKK) has called on the group to disarm and dissolve itself, in a major development that paves the way towards ending the 40-year conflict between militant Kurdish groups and the Turkish state, as well as having far-reaching implications across the Middle East. 'I am making a call for the laying down of arms, and I take on the historical responsibility for this call,' Abdullah Öcalan was quoted as saying in a letter read out by allies in Istanbul. 'All groups must lay down their arms and the PKK must dissolve itself.' The declaration follows a a surprise peace gesture to Öcalan from Devlet Bahçeli, a hardline nationalist ally of the Turkish president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, last October. When the Ottoman empire collapsed after the first world war, efforts to create an independent Kurdish state failed, turning Kurds into minority populations in Turkey, Iran, Iraq and Syria. In Turkey, Kurdish rights were so heavily repressed that for decades the state denied the existence of the ethnic group altogether. The Kurdistan Workers' party (PKK), a leftwing guerilla movement, was founded in 1978, demanding south-east Turkey become an independent Kurdistan. At least 40,000 people have been killed and hundreds of thousands displaced in on-and-off fighting that has spilled into other parts of the region. In the 1990s, the PKK dropped its demand for independence, calling instead for greater autonomy inside Turkey's borders. Today it is still considered a terrorist organisation by Turkey, the EU and the US. Öcalan, now 76, is one of the founding members of the PKK. He was born in Şanlıurfa in southern Turkey but after the creation of the group fled to Syria. After being forced to leave Damascus, he was arrested by Turkish intelligence agents in Kenya in 1999 and sentenced to life imprisonment on İmralı island, off the coast of Istanbul, where he has been held incommunicado for long periods of time. Öcalan has advocated for a political solution to the conflict since 1993. He has continued to write books from prison and has been involved remotely in previous rounds of peace talks. The imprisoned PKK leader has received three visits from members of the pro-Kurdish Democrat (DEM) political party since the olive branch from the Turkish government last autumn. DEM co-chair Tuncer Bakirhan said earlier this month that Öcalan's message would be 'a roadmap for the democratic resolution of the Kurdish problem, taking it from an arena of violence to one of politics, law and democracy'. It is widely believed that Erdoğan is seeking to restart the peace process with the PKK because it is both popular with voters, and is linked to geopolitical tensions caused by the war in Gaza, the fall of Syria's Bashar al-Assad, and rising hostility between Israel and Iran. The last peace agreement between Erdoğan's government and the PKK in 2013 was enthusiastically received across the country, but hostilities restarted two years later. In Syria, a PKK offshoot known as the YPG, or People's Protection Units, forms the backbone of the US-backed Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF). It currently controls the north-east of the country and has fought against the Turkish army and Turkish-backed Syrian militias for years. If the PKK lays down its arms, an agreement between the autonomous Kurdish-led administration and the new Turkish-backed interim Syrian government will be easier. A major question that remains is how Öcalan's message will be received by the PKK's military leadership, which is mostly based in northern Iraq's mountains. The area has been heavily bombed by the Turkish air force for several years.
The Guardian
27-02-2025
- Politics
- The Guardian
PKK leader calls on Kurdish militant group to disarm, signalling start of fragile peace with Turkey
The ageing leader of a Kurdish militant group imprisoned on a remote Turkish island has called on the group to disarm and dissolve itself, signalling the start of a fragile peace with Turkey after four decades of guerrilla warfare, attacks and reprisals. Abdullah Öcalan, a founding member of the Kurdistan Workers' party (PKK), a group long regarded as a terrorist organisation in Turkey as well as in Britain and the US, issued the message in a letter read out by allies in Istanbul. 'I am making a call for the laying down of arms, and I take on the historical responsibility for this call,' Öcalan was quoted as saying. 'All groups must lay down their arms and the PKK must dissolve itself.' Öcalan's message will have far-reaching implications across the Middle East, not least in Syria where Kurdish forces control significant territory, but also in Iran and Iraq. The 75-year-old is serving a life sentence at an island prison south of Istanbul, after being captured by Turkish special forces in Kenya in 1999. The PKK has been responsible for a string of attacks since its founding in 1978, notably car bombings and shootings primarily aimed at Turkish military and security targets. The group claimed responsibility for an attack on a state-owned arms company near Ankara last October, killing at least five people and wounding 22 more. A ceasefire between the PKK and Turkey collapsed in 2015, prompting Ankara to renew attacks on the group using drones and airstrikes, targeting fighters across the mountains of northern Iraq. The International Crisis Group thinktank estimates that more than 7,152 people have been killed in clashes or attacks in Turkey and northern Iraq in the years since, including 646 civilians, over 4,000 militants, and almost 1,500 members of Turkish security forces. Öcalan's message is set to ripple across factions of Kurdish armed groups spread across northeastern Syria and northern Iraq with links to the PKK, particularly the US-backed Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) who battled IS militants and remain in control of a swath of territory including two major cities in eastern Syria. The group is in talks with the new authority in Damascus after the overthrow of former president Bashar al-Assad, negotiating control over northeastern Syria as well as their future role in a nationwide military force. Öcalan's announcement appears set to further pressure and isolate the SDF, who have clashed with Turkish-backed militias in Syria and long been targeted by Turkish strikes. Gönül Töl, an analyst at the Middle East Institute in Washington, said Öcalan likely decided the time was right to call for an end to hostilities as 'he thinks things are not going well for the PKK right now'. 'It's about his legacy,' she said. 'He wants to be the one who ended this fight, and the PKK doesn't have many options. There is a new authority in Syria, and the Syrian Kurds don't have a strong hand. In Iraq there's a new central government that is more willing to work with Turkey to squeeze the PKK.' Berkay Mandıracı, of the International Crisis Group, said the PKK appeared to be 'weakened' after a decade of intensive fighting. 'Turkish officials now appear to assess it is a good time to end the 40-year conflict with the PKK through a mix of military force and political manoeuvring,' he said, spurred by regional shifts across the Middle East. With Ankara poised to play a major role in Syria and the wider region, he said, Turkish officials wanted to remove any potential impediments. Rumours of a declaration have rumbled for months while Turkey's pro-Kurdish DEM party shuttled between different Kurdish factions and Öcalan's island prison for negotiations. How the different factions within the PKK might respond to Öcalan's call also remained opaque. Earlier this month, one PKK commander told a television channel close to the faction that much of the group would only regard the command as serious if Öcalan demands they disarm after walking free from prison. 'This work cannot be done only through a call,' he said. 'We are a movement with tens of thousands of armed people. These fighters are not on a payroll to be sacked. These are ideological fighters.' Öcalan, he said, 'has to speak while free. If not, how can [PKK militants] be convinced to lay down their arms?'
