Before delving into a "PKK terror romance" – a case that has garnered attention both in Türkiye and abroad – let's examine German society as a representative example of today's European ruling political classes. Many of these individuals were involved in youth and student movements during the 1980s and 1990s. This sheds light on how established democracies often conflate domestic liberties with either knowingly or unwittingly supporting totalitarianism and anti-human rights tendencies abroad.
Rising from the ashes of World War II, Germany became a model not only for economic prosperity but also for democracy and freedom, including the freedom of expression. At the same time, center-left to extremely socialist-orientated university associations emerged. Young people were given the freedom to become politically active within the framework of international solidarity as West Germany intended to turn itself into a global role model in more than just the economic sense. Besides, nobody saw this as a threat to German society – actually it was the contrary.
However, many commentators back then and until today overlook(ed) the fact that after the devastating terrorist attacks and murders by the West German Baader-Meinhof gang, dubious associations and groups either from Türkiye or claiming to represent Turkish democracy also mushroomed in precisely this center-to-ultra-left environment. They eventually used the setting-up of the PKK in the 1980s in Türkiye as an instrument to – according to them – rightfully act against Türkiye from German soil. They claimed that Türkiye was against all Kurds and that Kurds were the true democrats. PKK sympathizers shamelessly exploited the German population’s willingness to embrace democracy in a very clever but also despicable way. Then the PKK started human trafficking, money laundering, etc.
Often Turkish entrepreneurs based abroad had to pay protection money to the PKK. The shocking reality: A current report on the protection of the constitution assumes that around 14,500 PKK sympathizers are active on German soil with around 300 criminal activities happening annually alongside mostly illegal manifestations. One wonders how they can ever take place if they are illegal.
To better underline how German and European individuals are misled by the romanticized image of "terrorists as freedom fighters," let's revisit the case of Semra Güzel, the Diyarbakır deputy of the Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP), currently known as the Peoples' Equality and Democracy Party (DEM Party).
At stake here: a past photo scandal dating from the year 2014, yet with a much deeper political background that had previously preoccupied Turkish politics and the entire Turkish electorate. It concerns Güzel, who had herself photographed with her deceased fiance Volkan Bora at a training camp of the banned PKK terrorist group in northern Iraq in 2014.
The couple had met and fallen in love while studying at the University of Harran near Şanlıurfa. Güzel opted for the Faculty of Medicine, Bora for communication sciences. After completing their studies, the two became engaged. Following a series of investigations and court inquiries, Bora left Türkiye in 2009. So even then he was not a blank sheet of romantic paper so to speak and his fiancee must have been aware of his dark connections to the terror scene.
The Daily Sabah commented on Jan. 10, 2022, and the Middle East Eye then specified the dates on Jan. 11, 2022, and confirmed that Güzel traveled to Bora in northern Iraq in 2014 and visited him there.
Bora was neutralized in 2017 along with three other terrorists. Güzel entered Parliament for the former HDP a year later.
Young people are confronted with many new things during their time at university. They experiment, fall in love, get engaged or even get married. But if your partner turns from a sleeper cell into an actively operating terrorist, you go from being a confidant to an accomplice.
The question of the integrity of privacy does not arise either. Anyone who knowingly allows themselves to be photographed on a mobile phone with a terrorist must assume that these images will accidentally or deliberately find their way into the public domain even if many years later, with social media in the spotlight. And exactly that happened: two of those published photos show Güzel with Bora in front of a waterfall (at least it is suggested to be a real waterfall) where she herself can be seen in civilian clothes and trainers. In other pictures, she is clearly wearing a PKK uniform. Güzel, according to Middle East Eye, said she had to put on the PKK uniform for security reasons.
Regardless of whether this individual PKK member was directly involved in murderous activities at the time, the fact remains that he lived in a training camp where other violent operatives were trained. This brings us back to the aforementioned complicity.
The HDP never distanced itself from the PKK; think imprisoned former co-Chair Selahattin Demirtaş who said previously while touring in the United States that the PKK is an "armed citizens group" and also called for an uprising of all people between the ages of 7 and 70, with devastating consequences and many innocent people, including young people, who lost their lives in the process.
Now let us return one more time to the psychological dimension of why, and how, German and European citizens so hastily bought (and buy) into this ill-fated romanticism of known PKK terror supporters.
First, there is the prison factor. Anyone who faces trouble with Turkish law must automatically be a good guy, by definition, because what the German (and European) public has been bombarded with for decades is that Türkiye is a non-democratic state. They might not come to the rescue of a bank robber or other villain should they hear about such a Turkish court case but anyone who is supposedly behind bars for political reasons is a saint. Demirtaş’s case is a perfect example of this strange affection.
No one supports the jurisdiction's rightfulness. As long as it is someone who supports the PKK or affiliated splinter groups, European civil society is up in arms, so to speak. How do they learn about these cases? PKK supporters and other terror group supporters such as the Gülenist Terror Group (FETÖ) on European territory, often with the blessing of their adopted homelands which issued them visas, are keen to portray modern Türkiye as a dictatorship. German and European media all too easily fall into this trap as this is what they have believed in for decades anyhow.
Second, and to maintain the image of a peaceful old men’s tea-drinking club, the PKK cleverly circulates images of "happy" PKK supporters hiding someplace in the mountains just south of the Turkish border. Recently ever more women feature in those publicity stunts, which may not necessarily be sent to German or European lawmakers but are discreetly inserted into diaspora and PKK-affiliated media and then picked up by mainstream media so as to guarantee publication. What could be better than a young innocent-looking woman side by side with her lover in front of a waterfall? These images are a tool to fool the European public into thinking, "How can they be bad guys, they are romantics?"
Third, and exactly this, whitewashing of PKK terrorists is the gist of the problem European democracies must overcome. The trick is to explain that a real hero as a freedom fighter – think Nelson Mandela – is in no way comparable to baby killers in the name of the PKK. The trouble is that former members of the above-introduced student and youth movements are now sitting solidly in government offices with many of them supposedly having learned nothing about the threats the PKK poses to their very own welfare. We remember debates about tolerating PKK activities on Swedish territory during the NATO accession process and only recently hearing acknowledgments that the Stockholm government actually knew that PKK supporters are active on Swedish soil.
It seems, however, that eventually awareness is created about that very PKK threat to European democracies. Türkiye has explained this to its NATO allies and to the EU headquarters in Brussels for a long time – will someone finally listen?
