Nasrullah Kuran said that encountering the Kurdistan Freedom Movement transformed his life entirely, adding that what affected him most was learning that the person who gave them their first lesson in the guerrilla ranks had been an illiterate villager before joining the Freedom Movement.
Kuran underlined that Abdullah Öcalan’s analyses had a profound impact on his understanding of both his own personality and the reality of the Kurdish people. He said that despite everything he had experienced at every stage of the struggle, he had never lost his conviction as a revolutionary.
Nasrullah Kuran, who has spent the past 32 years of his life in prison and, for a period, remained alongside Abdullah Öcalan in Imrali, spoke to the ANF in the third part of an interview we are publishing.
Part one of the interview can be read here and part two here.
I was raw; I was shaped within the Freedom Movement
What did the Freedom Movement change in your life?
I could just as well answer by asking, ‘What did it not change?’ Joining the struggle and being shaped within a culture of struggle is a difficult and painful process. Encountering the Freedom Movement at a young age was an important advantage for me. At the same time, however, I was someone born into the existing order and shaped by its culture. When I joined the guerrilla ranks, I was quite immature as a person and extremely superficial in my thinking. My leftist side was dominant, but my awareness of Kurdish identity was weak. I had not yet developed a genuine sense of self. I was not in a position to know myself, to recognise my strengths and weaknesses. Coming from a working family and having taken on responsibilities at an early age, I did not have much difficulty with labour and taking on duties. I was proactive, but when it came to giving substance to what I did, I remained weak. To put it succinctly, I was raw; I was shaped within the Freedom Movement. Since this process of ‘being shaped’ spans an entire lifetime and requires continuity within a dialectical framework, it would be more accurate to say that I entered the path of being shaped.
There is, above all, a different spirit, emotional depth and intensity of thought within the Freedom Movement, shaped in both substance and form by the struggle itself. It is a philosophy, an ideology and an effort to put them into practice that places human beings, love for people and the act of turning this into a value at its centre; that embraces approaching life in all its richness in a pure and simple way, becoming self-sufficient, and drawing nourishment from a culture of humility and sacrifice. When you encounter this, no matter how reactionary, selfish or individualistic you may be, at some point you begin to question yourself.
I received my first basic education in guerrilla. The comrade who trained us was a villager; he had learned to read and write in the guerrilla ranks and had received only four months of ideological, political and military training during a winter camp. Most of our training group consisted of comrades who had come from university backgrounds. Despite this, his command of the subjects and his systematic way of explaining them left all of us astonished.
There was also a comrade who came from a madrasa tradition. I have never encountered anyone else who could explain dialectics so beautifully and with such vivid examples drawn from life. We, who had supposedly carried out work in university circles and taken part in discussions and meetings, saw ourselves as competent to speak on every issue. I remember very well that I took my first lesson from these comrades, experienced my first sense of shame in front of them, and began my first genuine self-questioning there.
I received my second lesson sometime later from our comrade Şiyar (Kazım Kulu), who we encountered in the Sineht region while crossing into Southern Kurdistan (Başur). He was on his way to Mardin Province to bring comrades who would take part in the process leading up to the Fourth Congress. When he learned that we had come from practice inside the country and had joined only a few months earlier, he came to speak with us and asked about our observations and thoughts.
When it was my turn, I began listing everything I had learned about guerrilla warfare from books based on the experiences of Che and Latin America, and I also gave examples of practices I had encountered in Besta and Cudi that seemed to contradict these theories. Inevitably, what emerged was a catalogue of complaints and the language of complaints. Comrade Şiyar listened until the end. When I finished speaking, he offered a broad assessment of the reality of the Kurdish people, their alienation from their own essence, and how this was reflected in the People’s Army Guerrilla.
Afterwards, he turned to me and said that my observations were valid, but that I had not interpreted them correctly. He explained that the source of this lay in my estrangement from the reality of the Kurdish people, and that over time, through practice, I would come to grasp this reality and overcome this deficiency. Indeed, as I encountered and struggled with the problems created by social fragmentation in practice, and as I began to set aside my preconceptions and grasp reality as it was, I realised that I was beginning to make progress towards solutions. In essence, I was part of that existing reality; I was that reality itself. The more I grasped it, the more I grasped myself and brought this understanding into consciousness.
I learned the reality of the Kurdish people through Öcalan’s analyses
I came to know myself through the reality of the Kurdish people, and to understand the reality of the Kurdish people through myself. The greatest source that nourished this process of bringing both into consciousness was Abdullah Öcalan’s analyses. His assessments, which addressed the problems of war and struggle under guerrilla conditions, struck me deeply. Despite the demanding and multi-layered atmosphere of practice, I always made time for myself to read these analyses.
I can say that, although it may seem paradoxical, I found the greatest opportunity for this in prison. As I mentioned before, both the book editions of the analyses and their video recordings were delivered regularly to the prison where I was held. We had built up an immense library of such material.
Until the years 2000 to 2004, we centred both our collective education and our individual periods of concentration around these analyses, and we defined our subjects of study and research within this framework. Naturally, this did not only lead to a level of mastery and accumulation in how we approached ideological and political questions, as well as the problems of war and struggle; it also gave rise to a particular language and style.
This process fostered an approach of knowing and interpreting both oneself and one’s society, as well as the enemy, at the same level. Through analyses of personality, each of us recreated ourselves. Undoubtedly, this is an extremely difficult and painful process on the hollow ground of inflated egos that are produced by the education and formation methods of capitalist modernity. For those who have internalised bourgeois culture, it is a wounding process, one that demands self-criticism and, in many ways, amounts to a kind of ‘confession’. When you look at the world through the mirror of ego and self-admiration, this is inevitably the case. But if you say that ‘a human being exists through other human beings’, that is, if you believe that you are a social being subject to the dialectics of life, then you also believe in the healing and formative power of these analyses.
Every analysis that begins with the principle of ‘know yourself’ first teaches a person to look inward and to educate their own spirit. Can someone who does not possess knowledge of their own inner world truly come to know another person and address them freely?
Go out into the streets if you want to understand the given reality of life. You will encounter countless people who are unable even to name the source of their pain and joy, let alone understand it. Mediocrity and a lack of meaning have become the most fundamental illnesses of our time. With such crowds, you can do many things; but you cannot build democracy or socialism, nor can you create values in their name. Where human beings are devalued, life itself ceases to be a value.”
You shape yourself and gain a personality through your own choices
What lies at the root of this process of devaluation?
It lies in ceasing to be a moral and political being, in ceasing to exist for a purpose. Once a person stops being a being of purpose, they become instrumentalised. The capitalist system and its nation-state extension are mechanisms that instrumentalise human beings in every respect. From this flows an attempt to grind down the original and autonomous structure of society into uniformity, and from there to produce biological beings whose primary concern is material dependence. Personality analysis exposes the illusion that Marx described as our chains being ‘imaginary flowers’ and enables us to break those chains and cast them aside.
In a sense, it is like the Native American saying: ‘If you do not listen, your tongue will make you deaf. If you do not confront, your heart will enslave you. If you do not understand, your mind will drive you mad.’ Listening, confronting and understanding are the acts that truly liberate a revolutionary. In this integrity, the Freedom Movement offers you a life shaped by the search for truth. Will you stand at the margins of that life, or will you place yourself at its centre? The choice is yours. Through your choices, you shape yourself and gain personality and character.
As Abdullah Öcalan has emphasised, this naturally requires passion, a personality of love and its sharpened will. I believe this appears in one of Gabriel García Márquez’s books: ‘If you laugh together, it is happiness; if you cry together, it is friendship; but if you fall silent together, that is love.’ Comradeship as a being of purpose actually goes beyond even this, because within comradeship there is always an effort that pushes you towards concentration and self-transcendence.
In short, my answer to the question of what the Freedom Movement changed in my life is everything I have described so far. For people like us, life, at this point, is the Freedom Movement itself.
Those who fail to turn the negative into the positive fall into helplessness
Have you ever had negative thoughts?
If by ‘negative thoughts’ you mean a lack of belief or a loss of confidence in an ideological and political sense, then no. At no point in my personal history did I fall into such a state of feeling, thinking or wavering. I had the opportunity to examine many ideologies that present themselves as alternatives, and I saw that none of them were as coherent, radical and grounded in practice as the Freedom Movement.
The Freedom Movement also has a distinctive internal dialectic that is difficult to put into words. No matter how harsh and complex the conditions may be, you sometimes find yourself in a place where the world seems united in giving it only hours, months, or a short lifespan. Yet, like resilient plants that grow out of cracks in rocks, it finds a fissure of its own, takes root there, and grows even stronger. This instils an immense sense of trust and confidence in a person.
If, however, you approach this in terms of the pessimism of reason and understand pessimism as calculating negative possibilities and carrying their anxiety, then certainly having such a systematic way of thinking, questioning processes and phenomena from every angle, is a revolutionary duty. As a member of the Freedom Movement, in the face of many developments and processes, I have inevitably engaged in questioning and drawn conclusions on the basis of ‘why, how, and what is to be done?’
For a person of struggle, failing to engage in such questioning would in fact be the real shortcoming. Without it, you can be neither a genuine cadre nor a genuine organisation. At the same time, in our literature, ‘negative thought’ refers to a way of thinking that lacks self-confidence, views what exists as fixed and outside of change and transformation and therefore freezes development within itself. To freeze thought within itself leads to all forms of dogmatism and, inevitably, to a mindset that affirms itself while negating everything outside itself. It also triggers perfectionism, which is a dead end.
Any line of thinking that does not strive to transform the negative into the positive, that fails to create the means and methods to do so and thus condemns itself to helplessness, is, in our view, negative thought. In the face of problems, the determination that ‘we will either find a way or create one’ is a fundamental principle.
I tend to approach this issue from the following perspective: what philosophical essence does the ideological, political and organisational contents rest upon? Do they embody a value relationship centred on human beings, society and nature, and an operational expression of all this? If the answer is yes, then the rest is a matter of putting it into practice. And since you do this with people, it is inevitable that you will encounter insufficiency as much as adequacy, lack of quality as much as quality, fear and weakness as much as strength and courage.
If we say that human beings are incomplete beings, then we must also know that, illuminated by theory, they can develop themselves through practice, stumbling and rising along the way. The real question is whether the individual uses this opportunity on the path of liberation or instead abuses it by living parasitically off organised labour. This, perhaps, is the true negative reality, both intellectually and in practice.
The greatest motivation, the greatest struggle is to live a meaningful life
Losses happened, some left, others gave up. What kept you going?
The main force that has motivated me as a member of the Freedom Movement is, of course, the philosophy of Öcalan that makes the Freedom Movement what it is, and the ideological and political organisation that puts this philosophy into practice. It is this organisation that strives, regardless of who a person is or where they come from, to turn them into a value grounded in what is good, right, beautiful and free.
It is true that there were losses, that some left and others gave up. But there is also a greater truth: the promise of commitment to the cause and of victory, the thousands of martyrs, the thousands of militants who keep the fire of resistance alive on the fronts of struggle, and the reality of a people, indeed of peoples, numbering in the millions who live in fidelity to the values of the struggle.
The existence of this living reality, which illuminates itself and others, is the greatest motivation, the greatest struggle, and the most meaningful life.
In one of his reflections, René Descartes says, ‘If you turn your back on those who shed light on your path, the only thing you will see is your own darkness.’ This captures precisely what I mean. Ultimately, an Apoist militant is a moral and political human being. They are a person with a conscience proportionate to their spirit and consciousness. Conscience requires respect for labour, loyalty to values, and a principled stance. You may be pushed to your limits, you may writhe in great pain, and you may even suffer serious injustices, but you do not lose your direction, and you do not betray your own existence.
If you love your people, your country and free humanity, and if you insist on remaining human, then you must stand with them; you must become their language, their consciousness and their actions. Because what brings us into being, names and defines us, and unites us with love and labour, is their very existence.
A person who fails to define their ideological source of nourishment correctly may grow weak in the course of the struggle, may stumble, become blocked, and be thrown back. This, too, is part of the dialectic of life. Yet one must have a moral compass and, at the very least, possess the kind of stance embodied by Doctor Bernard in Albert Camus’s novel The Plague.
If you have read it, you will recall that Doctor Bernard says: ‘All I stand for is this: in a world where plagues exist and people fall victim to them, it is up to us, as far as we can, not to side with the disease.’
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