Abdullah Öcalan (aka Apo) was born of a part-Kurdish and part-Turkish family, in the village of Ömerli in eastern Turkey, maybe in 1947. He isn’t sure – and no official birth records exist. Confusingly, in April this year his supporters celebrated his 71st birthday – in his absence, naturally. For, since 1999, the de facto leader of the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) has been held at Imrali Island Prison on the Marmara Sea, Turkey, most of the time in solitary confinement.
How did a once hardcore Marxist-Leninist and nationalist guerrilla leader come to develop a politics of participatory democracy, feminism and ecology? Vanessa Baird traces Abdullah Öcalan’s journey.
