Summary
Gevorg S. Khoudinyan
Key words – Abdullah Öcalan, defense speech, civilization, capitalism, democratic society, democratic nation, United and independent Kurdistan, Democratic confederate Kurdistan, W. Wilson’s arbitral award.
The five volumes of Abdullah Öcalan’s works that are published in Russian in Moscow in 2011-2015 are written as extensive arguments of his defense speech in the Turkish court, but in fact they are scientific and political justifications for the political claims of Kurdish people. The rich knowledge and desire to find universal solutions to national problems show that in the person of A. Öcalan, who has achieved great intellectual progress of the Kurdish people, we are dealing with a surprisingly harmonious image of the national figure.
In the first volume of his works, representing the alternation of the cradle of Near-Middle Eastern civilizations and separate civilizations that emerged from GöbekliTepe-Portasar (not far from his native Urfa), Öcalan uses the fact that the geographical coordinates of the Taurus-Zagros arc as «Fertile Crescent» base correspond to the current places of residence of the Kurds and reckons them among a number of famous peoples of the Axis time, such as Assyrians, Armenians, Greeks, Jews or Persians. Thus, he repeats the groundless attempts of some Kurdish authors who make such judgments based on the play of words with historical tribes and toponyms that are close to the word «Kurd». This he distorts the fundamental principles of F. Braudel, whom he repeatedly quoted. The Brodelian notions of historical times and the «longue durée», necessary for assessing the history of civilizations, are completely distorted.
In the second volume of A. Öcalan’s works «Capitalist civilization» an attempt was made to overcome the Marxist perception of this concept and to view capitalism as a System that was formed along with commodity-money relations, and then together with the city and the state. Thanks to this, Öcalan identifies civilization and the social system, which allows him to give some civilizational essence to the struggle against capitalism, which he believes repeats the Hitler experience of creating an indicative society through his three branches (sex, sport and show).
In the third volume of his works A. Öcalan sees the solution of the fundamental problem of building a democratic civilization in the formation of political and democratic confederations to unite nations, which, in his opinion, is the only way to overcome homogeneous nation-states that are not alien to genocides and other state crimes.
In his fourth volume entitled «The Crisis of Civilization in the Near and Middle East» A. Öcalan passes to the problems of the region where he was born and fought for the solution of the Kurdish problem. Here he tries to gently transform the fact of the correspondence of modern geographic coordinates of the Kurds settlements with the cradle of ancient civilizations and turn it into the idea of the Kurdish homeland. To do this, he again and again creates unreasonable, absolutely fictitious and unscientific parallels between Sumerians and Hurrites and the Kurds now living on this territory.
The Öcalan program on the solution of the Kurdish question is more extensively presented in the fifth volume entitled «The Kurdish Question and the Implementation of the Democratic Model of the Nation». Although Öcalan considers Armenians to be a direct and immediate heir of Urartu culture, but in his vast historical digression the concept of «Armenia» is almost absent, And from the 11th century, when the Seljuks appear, he immediately replaces Armenia with the non-existent «Kurdistan». He stubbornly avoids answering one elementary question – which state existed in these territories for two thousand years after the fall of Urartu.
In the issue of assessing the causes of the Armenian Genocide, Öcalan partially repeats the statements of Marxist historians about the «expansionist goals» of the Armenian bourgeoisie as a result of the early development of capitalism among the Armenians. He also partially repeats the thesis about the «Turkish rebuff», invented by Turkish historiography, on the Armenian demand for independent statehood on the eve of the First World War. By transforming the internationally recognized (in 1914) problem of implementing reforms in Western Armenia in «Armenian separatism», he bypasses the issue of the responsibility of the Kurds for the Armenian Genocide. Meanwhile, the recognition of the Armenian Genocide and the responsibility for it not only of Turkey as a state, but also of the Turkish and partly Kurdish people who directly and voluntarily participated in this bacchanalia, is the only way to build a democratic society in our region.
Moreover, based on the ideas of a democratic society and democratic nation (which were discussed by A.Öcalan), the greatest democrat of the first decade of the 20th century – US President Woodrow Wilson, on November 22, 1920 has already made a true fraternal division of Armenian historical lands between Armenians, Turks and Kurds and the results of his arbitral award are fixed on the corresponding map on the basis of the international mandate. According to this arbitration, Armenians do not get «Great Armenia», as the Turkish falsifiers of history say, but only a third of their historical lands.
And irrespective of whether this division comes from the San Remo conference decisions, from the Treaty of Sevres or Woodrow Wilson’s arbitration, which retained its legal force, it was the greatest victory of democracy in our region, which was only temporarily suspended by the joint efforts of the Kemalists and the Bolsheviks. These decisions of the international community have nothing to do with the neo-imperial program of the United and Independent Kurdistan or the Democratic Confederate Kurdistan, which is the cover of the first. Because the creation of the Great Kurdistan instead of Turkey is not part of the plans of world powers.