Kurds in Sweden: ‘Is the PKK more dangerous than Putin?’

Distrust is great when the correspondent of NRC walks into the Kurdish community center in the Swedish capital Stockholm. The center makes no secret of its sympathy for the Kurdish guerrilla movement PKK. On the walls are portraits of PKK leader Abdullah Öcalan and PKK fighters killed fighting the Turkish army. On the table is a petition calling on the European Union to remove the PKK from the list of terrorist organisations.

The center recently had a bad experience with a journalist from Turkey who paid an unannounced visit. The man pretended to be a Kurd. He drank tea, chatted, took pictures of the portraits of fallen PKK fighters, and was gone after ten minutes. A few days later, the pro-government Turkish newspaper Sabah an article he wrote with the headline ‘Images that [de opstelling van] Justifying Turkey: Sabah in the PKK’s lair in Stockholm’.

Hence the cross-examination before members of the center are prepared to speak to the new visitor. Under no circumstances do they want their name in the newspaper. “The piece in Sabah was full of lies,” says a bald man with an Öcalan mustache. “That journalist has good contacts with President Erdogan’s AK party. He described us as a terror cell recruiting fighters while we are a cultural center. The only thing that made sense was the photo.”

The members of the center fear that their activities will be curtailed under pressure from Turkey. The Turkish government is blocking Sweden and Finland’s accession to NATO because these countries are said to be too sympathetic to the PKK and its Syrian sister organization YPG. President Erdogan demands that they cut ties with the YPG, and deal with affiliated Kurdish groups at home. Otherwise they can forget accession – war in Ukraine or not.

“According to Turkey, every Kurdish organization has links with the PKK,” said the man with the Öcalan mustache. “But we are a center that promotes the Kurdish language and culture. Since Western countries cooperate with the YPG in the fight against IS in Syria, the position of Kurdish organizations in European countries has improved. We fear that Erdogan is using Sweden’s accession to put an end to that. We do not want Sweden to sacrifice the Kurds for NATO membership.”

Although NATO and the European Union consider the PKK a terrorist organization, many European countries remain a safe haven for the group, according to Turkey. The YPG and other Kurdish organizations affiliated with the PKK have offices in European cities. “Sweden and Finland are protecting these terror groups, along with the police in Germany, the Netherlands and France,” Erdogan said early this month. “During demonstrations, they carry portraits of their terror leaders.”

Sweden is an important center of the Kurdish intelligentsia in Europe. In recent decades, many Kurds have fled to Sweden because of the war and repression in Turkey, Iraq, Syria and Iran. Among them are many highly educated refugees who feel at home under the warm blanket of Swedish social democracy. Sweden now has about 150,000 Kurds, 109 Kurdish foundations and organizations, and six Kurdish parliamentarians from all political persuasions.

Celebrated Writer

The Baksi family is prominent in the Kurdish community. Mahmut Baksi fled Turkey in 1970 and ended up in Stockholm, where he developed into a celebrated writer and made friends in the highest political circles. His cousin Nalin Pekgül was the first Kurd to be elected to the Swedish parliament in 1994, ahead of the ruling Social Democrats. His cousin Kurdo Baksi became a well-known Kurdish activist.

“I came here when I was fourteen,” says Kurdo Baksi, an energetic man with a bald head and a stubbly ring beard, in the lobby of the Radisson hotel in Stockholm. He came just before the coup in 1980. “Because we are an old Kurdish family, we were warned forty days in advance by military friends. Turkish intelligence even helped with my bags.” He smiles. “They were glad we left because they couldn’t kill or imprison us.”

Kurds came to Sweden in waves, following the political tides in the Middle East. “The first guest workers came for work,” says Baksi. “Political refugees came mainly because freedom of expression is so well regulated. And in 1975, Sweden passed a law giving the right to education in your mother tongue. This is a gift from God for the Kurds, the Tamils ​​and other stateless peoples, whose mother tongue is being oppressed in their country.”

Sweden grew into a cultural center for the Kurds. They founded small publishing houses, which publish Kurdish books and music. “In Sweden, twice as many books have been published in Kurdish as in Turkey,” says Baksi. “More Kurdish music has also been released here. That changed after Erdogan came to power. I don’t like Erdogan, but I have to hand it to him. He gave the Kurds more space. Back then he was still Dr. Jekyll, now he’s Mr. Hyde.”

According to Baksi, there are no PKK members in Sweden. He says the PKK has shrunk to about 100 people, he says, including leaders in northern Iraq’s Qandil Mountains. “It is a very closed organization and membership is very difficult. Perhaps some members live in Germany, but not in Sweden. Of the 109 Kurdish NGOs in Sweden, only a small number have sympathy for the PKK. The PKK is part of the Kurdish issue, not the leader.”

dividing lines

While many Swedish Kurds sympathize with the PKK’s struggle for Kurdish autonomy and self-government, there is also a large group of Kurds who dislike Öcalan’s dogmatic, Marxist-rooted ideas. The divisions often follow borders in the Middle East: left-wing Kurds from Turkey and Syria are more likely to show solidarity with the PKK than liberal Kurds from northern Iraq, where the ruling Barzani clan has close ties to Erdogan.

“I don’t know anyone who supports the PKK,” said Aziz Abdulkadir, a Kurd from Iraq who runs a restaurant in Stockholm – Kurdish pop music plays from a TV. He fled to Sweden with his family during the First Gulf War in 1991. “We fled from a dictator, so I stay away from politics. I don’t even know who the Swedish defense minister is. We have the luxury here that you don’t have to know that.”

Abdulkadir’s aversion to the PKK comes from experience. As a young student at the University of Erbil, he was brought to a PKK demonstration under threat of violence in 1994. „They forced us to shout slogans and APO [koosnaam van Öcalan] to scan. I hate the PKK. People who go to the mountains [allegorie voor zich aansluiten bij de PKK]are thieves and murderers without any training.”

Abdulkadir loves Turkey. He has two apartments in Antalya, where he has been vacationing with his family in the summer for fifteen years. “The people in Turkey are warm and welcoming, the food is good. I feel at home there. Why should I support the PKK? Why would I want Turkey to look like Iraq? In the fifteen years that I have lived in Sweden, I have never returned to Iraq because my homeland has been completely destroyed.”

Abdulkadirs restaurant is located in the center of Stockholm’s deprived district of Tensta, where many migrants live. Although the neighborhood has been rocked by several shootings in recent years, the atmosphere is pleasant on a sunny afternoon. Residents lie in hammocks between the pastel-colored concrete flats. Ahead is a market. It’s Midsummer, in central Stockholm people are drunk. Many city dwellers have left for their summer homes.

Andreas, an anarchist activist from Tenstra, has to keep working. The tall, blond Swede and some comrades projected a huge PKK flag on Stockholm City Hall. Photos of the action were eagerly taken over by the Turkish media last week, as proof that Sweden is sympathetic to the PKK. The Swedish government was not amused and spoke of a “malicious influence campaign.”

“We wanted to show our solidarity with Rojava with the action,” said Andreas, who uses the Kurdish name for Northeast Syria and not his last name in the newspaper because of the sensitivity of the subject. The action was claimed by the Rojava Committee, a network of left-wing activists who translate Öcalan’s books into Swedish and organize demonstrations. “Öcalan has modernized Marx’s political ideas. The YPG is putting it into practice in Rojava.”

Important voter group

Amineh Kakabaveh, an independent Kurdish MP of Iranian descent, is also charmed by the left-wing experiment in northeast Syria. To secure Swedish support for this autonomous Kurdish region, she struck a deal last year with Magdalena Andersson, the leader of the Social Democrats. If Andersson continued to support the YPG, Kakabaveh would help her gain a parliamentary majority and make Sweden’s first female prime minister.

Meanwhile, Kakabaveh is deeply disappointed in the government. Because after the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the Social Democrats withdrew their opposition to NATO accession. “I am against accession,” says Kakabaveh. “We are giving up 200 years of independence to join a military alliance of which Turkey is a part and abandoning our principled foreign policy. When Turkey recently arrested 16 Kurdish journalists, we did not condemn it.”

Kurds are an important voter group for the Social Democrats. Therefore, Stockholm is unlikely to withdraw its support for the YPG. Moreover, NATO countries support the YPG just as well. Turkey is obstructive because it wants to pressure NATO to end that support.

Baksi believes that if Turkey continues to resist, Sweden should withdraw its request to join NATO. “The United States and the United Kingdom guarantee our security even without us being members of NATO,” he says. “Sweden has survived two hundred years of Russian threats. Is the PKK really more dangerous than Putin? Are we so afraid of the despot in Moscow that we turn to the despot in Ankara?”