Kurtuluş Tayiz
The Turkish original of this article was published as YDG-H: PKK’nın kara gömleklileri on 28th August 2015.
They wear black t-shirts and they cover their faces. They are all young. They are all armed. They are called the YDG-H (Patriotic Revolutionary Youth Movement). The decision to set them up was taken on Kandil in November 2012. They were organized as the PKK’s “urban militia.” Their founding proclamation came in Şırnak in June 2013. Benefiting from the Solution Process, the new organization quickly spread through the Southeast, and on 25th August 2014 it announced its mission as “building autonomy.”
The public first came to know of the YDG-H as the PKK’s masked “law and order units” that kept stopping vehicles to conduct identity checks in the Southeast. But it was really through the murders they committed in Diyarbakır during the 6-7 October [2014] incidents that they made their name. The methods they employed in killing Riyad Güneş, Maşallah Dakak and 16 year-old Yasin Börü carried their fame into banner headlines. All in all, fifty-two citizens were killed, and the whole rampage caused a wind of fear to blow over those Kurds in the southeast who till then had remained aloof of the PKK. After the 6-7 October events the people of the region began to feel the presence and authority of this armed gang more than that of the state. Of the population hitherto distant to the PKK, part moved to provinces further to the west, while part tried moving closer to the PKK/HDP in order to escape the YDG-H menace.
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In all settlement areas where it gained significant influence, the YDG-H then embarked upon a socio-political cleansing operation. Its mission of “building autonomy” was and is really a euphemism for the organization’s task of clearing the non-PKK population out of the Southeast. Coupled with the state’s weakness in preserving law and order and protecting citizens in the Southeast, the people of the region have been laid at the mercy of this armed urban gang. In the 1990s JİTEM’s hit-men had spread fear through the region. Today a comparable fear is being spread by the PKK through its YDG-H militia. In the Southeast, all individuals and political organizations other than the PKK are being targeted by this gang. The HDP’s 85-90 percent 7th June vote in fourteen Southeast provinces reflects the extent to which the PKK was able to erase, eliminate or subdue all other political identities after 6-7 October, and not the electoral success of the HDP.
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These days the Western press is showing a great deal of interest in simpatico images of masked and armed YDG-H militants clashing with the police. Western media are presenting this gang to their readers as “nice young freedom fighters.” But if they were to go back a bit into their own recent history, it would be only in Mussolini’s Italy and and Hitler’s Germany that they would be able to find examples of militaristic organizations like the YDG-H. In fact, the YDG-H happens to be a carbon copy of Mussolini’s Black Shirts. In Italy, too, the Black Shirts had been set up as “a militia force for imposing law and order.” Its objective was to intimidate all sections of society hostile to the National Fascist Party.
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It is not only in the Western media that we encounter such sympathy. In the Turkish media, too, there are not a few who have great admiration for the YDG-H. The brutal murders committed by the YDG-H over 6-7 October were either ignored the usual [Doğan] media groups or presented as “clashes between two sides.” Sadly, such media outlets are now continuing to treat the PKK’s fascistic street militia as “nice kids.” Despite all the terror that it has been wreaking on the Southeast, it is not possible to find any serious media critiques of the YDG-H. Instead, newspapers are presenting the YDG-H to their readers as the “Kurdish neighborhood’s version of the Gezi demonstrators.” This street gang that is trying to impose its authority on the region through a century-old fascist organizational model somehow continues to be shrouded in the 1970s’ revolutionary praise.
In order to see the PKK or the YDG-H as reflecting a yearning for freedom and democracy, or as “a youth movement revolting against authority,” you would have to be either blind or devoted to ulterior motives. The YDG-H is a fascistic street organization, similar to the Black Shirts, that the PKK is utilizing in the Southeast. It has been set up to intimidate non-PKK Kurds or else to clear them out of the region. It has no other purpose or meaning whatsoever!