Kesire Yıldırım

Kesire Yıldırım (born October 21, 1951 in Karakoçan ) is a founding member of the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) and the wife of Abdullah Öcalan . Kesire Yıldırım used the code name Fatma in the PKK. Her real name has been Kesire Öcalan since she married.

Life

Yıldırım was the eldest daughter of a medium-sized Kurdish - Alevi family with close ties to the formerly ruling Cumhuriyet Halk Partisi . Kesire Yıldırım graduated from the teachers' school in Elazığ and initially worked temporarily in the primary school in Yeniköy. She passed the university entrance examination and enrolled at the Press and Publications College in 1974, which was part of Gazi Üniversitesi . The family moved to Ankara with Kesire and settled in the Etlik district in Ankara-Keçiören .

Yıldırım married Abdullah Öcalan on May 24, 1978. Muzaffer Ayata was the best man . Yıldırım was already active in the political left spectrum during his studies. With Öcalan she took part in the founding of the PKK and was one of two women to take part in the founding meeting of the organization in the village of Fîs . Later she was a member of the Central Committee of the PKK.

Reservations and suspicions

The PKK had reservations about Kesire Yıldırım from the start. She came from better material circumstances than her comrades-in-arms, who often came from poor and rural backgrounds. Within the left, this origin was defamed as petty-bourgeois. It was also said that her family was a family of collaborators. According to the organization, the relationship with Kemal Pir in particular was so tense that Mehmet Hayri Durmuş is said to have intervened. Even the marriage met with internal resistance. The fellow campaigners feared that they would weaken Öcalan's devotion to the cause. Kesire Yıldırım was also a self-confident and emancipated young woman and the way she treated Öcalan was, in the eyes of many PKK members, a disrespect for “the leadership”.

In 2008, while in prison, Abdullah Öcalan told his lawyers that Kesire had tried to infiltrate the PKK with the help of the MİT secret service . A few months later, Öcalan said differently that he was not quite sure whether Yıldırım had been in contact with the state, but that her father Ali Yıldırım was an employee of the MİT.

Break, imprisonment, death sentence and escape

Abdullah Öcalan had his wife detained in the Lebanon camp . Aliza Marcus writes that Öcalan perceived her behavior as undermining his authority. There were also rumors that Öcalan had cheated and that Yıldırım had found out. The Middle East correspondent for the Neue Zürcher Zeitung wrote in 1993 that Öcalan had fallen out with his wife “because of his brutality towards civilians”.

In court, Öcalan stated that the PKK Congress had sentenced his wife to death, but that he had prevented the execution of the "death warrant".

According to Osman Öcalan , Abdullah Öcalan's brother, a power struggle was the cause of the rupture. Leading cadres of the PKK feared that Kesire Yıldırım would have taken power after the possible elimination of Abdullah Öcalan, and so eliminated them. Cemil Bayık in particular couldn't stand Yıldırım.

Yıldırım managed to escape from arrest and came to Europe with the help of friends and is believed to live in Sweden. Yıldırım has not commented publicly on her fate or the PKK since then.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Serxwebûn 259, p. 25
2. ↑ See Aliza Marcus: Blood and belief - The PKK and the Kurdish fight for independence. New York University Press, New York / London 2007, p. 42f.
3. ↑ Serxwebûn 321, p. 40
4. ↑ Serxwebûn No. 324 p. 39
5. ^ Aliza Marcus: Blood and belief - The PKK and the Kurdish fight for independence. New York University Press, New York / London 2007, p. 110.
6. ↑ NZZFolio from November 1993
7. ↑ Hürriyet of June 2, 1999
8. ↑ Interview with Osman Öcalan on rudaw.net from August 20, 2017