PKK and Gulen Movement; an unholy alliance?

ERBIL, Kurdistan Region— On April 6, Turkish police forces detained a group of Kurdish activists in the town of Urfa, southwest of the provincial capital of Diyarbakir, whom authorities later accused of having links with both the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) and the transnational religious movement of Fethullah Gulen.

The news rapidly made headlines in the mainstream media. This wasn’t due to the fact that activists affiliated with the two groups were rarely jailed in Turkey— in fact, over the past few years police has locked up some 5000 protesters, many of them accused of collaboration with either Gulen or PKK guerrillas.

What made the Urfa arrests newsworthy was the implication of a possible alliance between Gulen’s people, commonly known as the Cemaat, and the diehard warriors of the PKK.

Many columnists feverishly speculated that the two distinct groups had found a common enemy in the country’s overconfident president, Receb Tayyib Erdogan. But others questioned any genuine collaboration between the two organizations.

“They are fundamentally different movements,” said Mehmet Qaplan, a researcher at the Istanbul University, “The PKK is an armed political group while the Cemaat try to portray themselves as a civic social movement,” Qaplan told Rudaw.

Regarded as one of the most influential figures in recent Turkish politics, Fethullah Gulen, a 74-year-old Imam, was once a key supporter of Erdogan in his rise to power in mid-2000.

But their relation came to an abrupt end in 2013 after a corruption scandal involving Erdogan’s closest circles pitted the two men against one other.

Erdogan, then the prime minister, swiftly accused Gulen of initiating the corruption investigations that were systematically targeting his close allies, including his own family members. Soon thereafter the polemical premier opened court cases against the US-based Imam and his Cemaat, referring to them in the media as the “Gulenist Terror Organization.”

The PKK and the Cemaat, which are now both seen as terror groups by the government, have had rocky relations in the past, with Gulen movement explicitly working against PKK’s leftist-Kurdish approach.

Many believe the Cemaat’s enormous influence within the police force and the judiciary made it easier for the government to crack down on the Kurdish protests in the country and put activists in jail.

Similarly, the PKK has over the past decade viewed the Cemaat as its professed ideological nemesis. In 2013, PKK’s jailed leader, Abdullah Ocalan, accused Gulen of a coup against Erdogan as relations deteriorated between Ankara and the Cemaat.

But things have shifted for both the PKK and the Gulen movement since 2013 as Erdogan repeatedly vowed to “rout out” all “terror groups once and for all,” apparently unwilling to take any risks.

“The government deliberately sends police forces that are known to be members of the Cemaat to the war zones in southeast to fight the PKK guerrillas,” said Savas Genc a professor at the university of Fatih and himself a faithful member of the Gulen movement. “The government wants to deepen the rift between the two groups,” he added.

But Fatih said he and the Cemaat were happy to see the pro-Kurdish People’s Democratic Party (HDP) enter the parliament as “a just movement.”

And similarly the PKK’s strongman Cemil Bayik was quoted recently in the Turkish press saying that the group was trying to  “communicate” with Gulen movement but without success.

“We wanted to communicate with the Cemaat, but they were apparently not too keen on the idea,” Bayik was quoted saying by columnist and blogger Rusen Cakir. “The Cemaat asked us to be impartial in the war between them and the government,” Bayik was quoted. 

For now, however, the pro-government media seems to believe that it can attract large numbers of voters to Erdogan’s camp by associating the leftists guerillas with the Muslim activists as the country is expected to vote on a new constitution.