Nearly two weeks after the death of three Kurds on rue d'Enghien, several thousand people from all over Europe attended the commemorations in Paris on Saturday of the assassination, ten years ago, of three Kurdish activists in the capital. . The opportunity for our correspondent in Turkey to return to the misunderstandings that undermine relations between Paris and Ankara on the Kurdish question, too often confused or reduced with that of terrorism.
"During the racist attack of December 23, three members or sympathizers of the PKK were killed." This is how the Turkish ambassador, Ali Onaner, reacted to the massacre in the rue d'Enghien: "The first elements communicated by the French judicial authorities have definitively put an end to the propaganda of the PKK trying to insinuate a link with A strange country."
This intransigence no doubt explains why the funeral of one of the victims, the singer Mir Perwer, which was held Thursday in Mus, in eastern Turkey, was marred with tension.
On December 2, Mir Perwer and two other people were killed at the Ahmet Kaya cultural center in Paris. An establishment that houses the headquarters of the Kurdish Democratic Council in France (CDK-F), known for its proximity to the PKK, the Kurdistan Workers' Party. "How can terrorists who openly claim to belong to the PKK benefit from such impunity in the heart of Paris, in a place about which French justice has taken a decision to dissolve because of links established with terrorism?" asks the diplomat, stationed in Paris since December 2020.
Founded in 1978 by Abdullah Öcalan, the PKK is an armed political organization considered terrorist by Turkey but also by the European Union, and therefore France. On 14 December, the Court of Justice of the European Union rejected the PKK's request to be removed from the list of terrorist organisations, considering that it could not "call into question the Council's assessment relating to the persistence of a risk of terrorist involvement by the PKK".
Members of this group have been worried by French justice for extortion, criminal association or financing of terrorism. However, if the researcher Didier Billion, deputy director of the Iris (Institute of international and strategic relations) specialized in Turkey, considers that it is necessary "to dissociate the Kurdish question from the question of the PKK", the image of the group remains associated with that of the Kurds in general in French public opinion.
"Mistrust vis-à-vis Turkey, for reasons which may be entirely justified, has led French public opinion to take up the cause of the Kurds, to the point of sometimes considering members of the PKK as combatants. of freedom who fight for our values."
Feminism, secularism, federalism or socialism are part of the ideological lexicon of the PKK, which explains why the French left can regularly display its proximity to the group, but the values claimed hide another reality: attacks, revolutionary tax, drug trafficking, conscription obligatory, desire to create a "new man" which is reminiscent of a certain fascist rhetoric, prohibition for professional executives to marry or have sexual relations, cult of the personality of "Apo" (nickname of 'Abdullah Öcalan).
The structure of the group, the indoctrination it practices, the actions it claims are far from the values in which most French people can recognize themselves. Some may not know it, others probably prefer to close their eyes by focusing on what they perceive as a common enemy: Turkey.
In Turkey, the group is accused by the authorities of being solely responsible for the 40,000 deaths in the violence linked to the insurrection since 1984. Some may have considered excessive the summons, on December 26, of the French ambassador by the Turkish Ministry of Foreign Affairs. But for Ali Onaner, such a reaction was natural: "Imagine for a second the shock and indignation that the images of the French Minister of Justice welcoming three terrorists provoked in Turkish opinion."
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