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Foreign Policy
Spring 1999
Kurdish Roulette
As European countries scrambled to indict General Augusto Pinochet, another international fugitive waited in heavily guarded isolation in Italy while governments bickered over who should take responsibility for him. But nobody in Europe wanted anything to do with Abdullah Ocalan, head of the terrorist Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), from the moment he was arrested in Rome on November 12, 1998, until February 16, 1999, when he ended up in Turkey, facing trial for the deaths of 30,000 people during the PKK’s 14-year struggle against Turkey.
Turkey would have been pleased to take Ocalan off European hands the instant he arrived in Italy from Moscow. The problem was that Italian law forbids extradition to a nation that upholds the death penalty. Ocalan would not be sent to Turkey.
Germany was another option: The government had issued an international warrant for his arrest in 1990 for the deaths of two German citizens, a move the Italians claim led them to apprehend the Kurdish leader. Citing Germany’s “moral responsibility,” Italian officials declared that Ocalan was Germany’s problem. Bonn, ever mindful of the volatile mix of its 2 million Turkish residents—a half-million of whom are Kurds—refused to request his extradition, leaving Italy in a quandary and the rest of Europe grateful not to be involved.
As Turkey hurriedly tried to push legislation to abolish the death penalty through a collapsing government, Italy assessed its options. Any action needed to be taken before December 22, 1998, when Italian law mandated that Ocalan be released from house arrest.
Ocalan had applied for political asylum in Italy, a proposal few officials supported. The Italians could try Ocalan at home (equally unappealing) or could request a trial in a third country. Expulsion ceased to be an option, as consultations with European Union partners yielded no refuge. Pier Ferdiando Casini, the secretary of the Italian political party Christian Democratic Center, could not resist a dig at Germany: “We are [left] in our underpants,” he said, by German prime minister Gerhard Schroeder’s refusal to act on the arrest warrant.
Italians were not mollified by Schroeder’s suggestion that a “European court” be convened to try Ocalan. However, other European nations were quick to call for collective responsibility. As Greek prime minister Andreas Papandreou noted, the Ocalan case is a European problem: “It fell in our lap, not an Italian lap, a European lap.” But the logistics of convening an unprecedented European tribunal—when no one could even decide where it should be held—in the days before the deadline proved impossible. After being refused political asylum in Italy, Ocalan was denied entry at airports across Europe. He was ultimately harbored in the Greek ambassador’s residence in Nairobi (the Greeks claimed they were sheltering him in order to find a pan-European solution for the problem), where he was soon rooted out by Turkish intelligence agents.
—FP