Who is Abdullah Ocalan?

By Beat Witschi
CNN Interactive

(CNN) -- To the majority of the Turkish people, Abdullah Ocalan (pronounced URGE'ah-lohn) is a child murderer and terrorist whose violent campaign for Kurdish autonomy threatens the very foundation of modern-day multiethnic Turkey.

But for many Kurds -- both in the impoverished southeast of Turkey and abroad -- Ocalan and his banned Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) are battling Ankara's iron-fisted oppression of Kurdish culture, identity and political aspirations.

So who is this man who has spent much of his life outside Turkey and now risks being executed for his terrorist/freedom fighter campaign?

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A number of biographical dates and developments have been reported repeatedly by Turkish, Kurdish and international media.

Ocalan was born in 1948 in the village of Omerli in southeastern Turkey, close to the Syrian border.

He became politically active during his university years in Ankara, where he studied political science but dropped out. By 1973 he had organized a Maoist group whose goal was a socialist revolution. He founded the PKK in 1978 as an extreme-left nationalist group that launched a war against the Turkish government in order to set up an independent Kurdish state along Marxist lines.

Ocalan fled Turkey before the 1980 military coup and lived in exile, mostly in the Syrian capital Damascus and in the Lebanese plains under Syrian control, where he set up his PKK headquarters and training camps.

Late last year, under intense pressure from Turkey, Syria closed the camps and expelled Ocalan, who started an odyssey through various nations in search of political asylum. In February, he was nabbed in Kenya after an undercover operation and spirited back to Turkey.

Ocalan faces a possible death sentence on treason charges for leading a 15-year-old armed struggle by Kurdish rebels seeking self-rule in southeast Turkey

Ocalan, a heavily built man with a thick black mustache, propagates a Cold War brand of nationalism mixed with Marxist-Leninist doctrine that in many ways belongs to another era.

"You must believe before everything else that the revolution must come, that there is no other choice," he is reported to have said in an address to a Kurdish youth rally last August.

"You must say no to betrayal and denial. Even though I am 50 years old, I have never allowed myself to get old. I am going on with the struggle."

But the man who is said to speak very little Kurdish has gradually dropped his demands for Kurdish independence, saying the violent conflict can end if Ankara grants the Kurds autonomy or cultural and linguistic rights.

That retreat, some observers say, may well be linked to the Turkish military's success in destroying much of the PKK's power base both inside Turkey and across the border in northern Iraq.

Turkish journalists who have interviewed Ocalan have come away with the impression of a "megalomaniac" and "sick" man who has no respect for or understanding of the "superior values of European civilization."

"Everyone should take note of the way I live, what I do and what I don't do," a December edition of the Turkish Daily News quoted Ocalan as saying in one of his many speeches.

"The way I eat, the way I think, my orders and even my inactivity should be carefully studied. There will be lessons to be learned from several generations because Apo (Ocalan) is a great teacher," he is quoted as saying.

By many accounts from inside and outside Turkey, Ocalan is a dogmatic and tyrannical leader whose organization is involved in drug trafficking, robbery, extortion, arson, blackmail and money laundering.

Some international human rights monitors have put him on a par with former Chilean dictator Gen. Augusto Pinochet or war crimes suspect Radovan Karadzic in Bosnia-Herzegovina.

Many international Turkey watchers agree that Ocalan wiped out rival Kurdish movements as well as potential personal rivals with ruthless determination.

According to the Turkish Daily News, Ocalan underlined his personal hunger for absolute power at the helm of the PKK in a party publication in 1991.

"I establish a thousand relationships every day and destroy a thousand political, organizational, emotional and ideological relationships. No one is indispensable for me. Especially if there is anyone who eyes the chairmanship of the PKK. I will not hesitate to eradicate them. I will not hesitate in doing away with people," he is quoted as saying.

Following Turkey's arrest of Ocalan, Kurdish supporters protested in several European cities to draw international attention to their cause

And yet, for PKK members and many of their supporters, both inside and outside Turkey, Ocalan is a hero: a determined leader who has been struggling against the cultural, economic and political deprivations imposed on the Kurdish people by Ankara.

"The name of Apo has been identified with the Kurdish people who have risen and are fighting for independence," a pro-Kurdish publication says of Ocalan, in line with many similar statements broadcast by the London-based Kurdish Med-TV station.