That is not Nature which dislikes emptiness but human societies. Take off from a world, a people, all its culture and its references : it won't stay a long time without structures. A rootless people without landmarks could not be assimilated to another society and would not be able to create another one. For a culture is never based on nothing, we can just remake one or add something. This people then becomes a easy pray for any kind of system - it could be totalitarian or mafioso - that is setting on the inversion or absence of values.

Then, Kurds in Turkey have seen their culture and their past distroyed by an oppressive regime and by the totalitarian dogmatism of the PKK. They are now going to be gangrened, hangered-on, get back by mafia. For millions of Kurds, their belonging to that people means nothing. Their culture was based on an tribal and peasants' organisation. But there are no more villages, no more farmers, only refugees who crowd in the shantytowns of Turkey or in European suburbs. Let watch in Istanbul or Ankara, the young shoe-blacks or the laces and handkerchief sellers : most of them are Kurds' children, and speak an awful volapük, mixed with Turkish and Kurdish words, of which they are unable to discern the origin. Their relatives ? Dead or in prison, or they beg themselves in the street, and because of their dramatic situation, they can't hand their values down, nor the ancestral peasant culture of which they are the last possessors. As for children, they are obviously future recruits for prostitution, sale of narcotics or any illegal - then profitable -activities, practiced by some circles not very scrupulous.

Can the refugees in Europa escape to that situation ? No more than they have escaped to war. When the PKK - who has lost most of its militants - can not racket too openly, mafia replaces it. In fact, they are the same people : some ex-militants who are redeployed in "trade". At least, honourable traffics and "taxes for revolution" could have a respectable aim : supporting the guerilla which tried to liberate the Kurds of their oppression. But now, though there is no more guerilla, and while the political offices get bogged down in their contradictions and their unability to get rid of an obsolete ideology, collect is still going on. 

Networks are fundamentally the same than those which have been set by the PKK, with the same frontier runner, the same trips, the same ransomed. They have only evolved to become more professional and react to the new necessities of the marcket : to the traffic of arms and drugs, they add some new products as children, prostitution and networks of frontier runner. Those who have been denounced by Öcalan himself as "war profiteers" don't need of war for prospering. Using the credulity of masses and the system set by the Party, they have just to pretend make politic AND trade. And under the mask of a politician, it is so easy to buy a shop, a newspaper, a restaurant... and an election which allows - with an excuse of representation - to do regularly and "legally" the great European tour between Istanbul, Köln, Bonn, Paris, Ankara... 

Recruiting some agents is less difficult than recruiting some militants who need to be convinced. It is a very easy and natural process, by a mutual assistance between the members of the Parti-mafia : "If you open a shop for selling in Paris some Turkish products that you'll buy for us in Turkey, the Party will support you" (translation : we wiil give you the money and all the help you need in exchange for a few percentage of your turnover and the possibility to clear their profits). If necessary, threatening and murder could submit the more recalcitrant.

Of course, the few pure and incorruptibles who are obstinate to make only politic are more and more surrounded in their own party, threatened, held in check, defeated and sometimes imprisonned by these new elected members, so fortuitously entered in politic or luckliy "elected" to directory functions after Öcalan's arrest and the cease-on-fire. The real leaders set their power on money and compromise : on the scene, kind HADEP "elected" in quiet representation in Europa ; behind the curtain, mafiosi setting the rule of the Underworld in the political offices. Even Abdulhah Öcalan, not very cooperative, and surrounded by lawyers in the pay of Turkish state or the Underworld - because he does not see his own interest in these traffics, is skillfully supplanted by his brother, not very charismatic but malleable, and with the great advantage to have the same name than his elder : after a certain time and a good propaganda, masses are going to confuse the speeches of both brothers.

As for the dissidents of the PKK, hunted by their ex-organisation, by European polices, extraditions, without meaning to live in Europa, they are of course recruited by their old friends who were redeployed before in "trades". But if the precedent fugitives of the PKK could have found a free shelter in their family or compatriots, mafia never give something for nothing. They are lodged, payed, "protected" against the Party, but the condition is to never go out of the Underworld, to work in it, to get married in it, then to marry Mafia, to promise it fidelity and assistance, and this kind of marriage can not be annulable by any divorce. It is only death - sometime very opportune when one of the marrieds shows many willings of independance - that could cancel it.

Then the Kurds are still to learn else values than the old rules of feodalism, that have been so criticized. Fear and submission replace courage and militantism, murder under the veil of "honour crimes", threatening "in the aim of the cause", constant watching for preventing revelations (let's try to meet alone real politicians, for example), the interdiction to leave the "Underworld" or to have relations out of it... and "trading" recovered by politic. The PKK has had for aims to destroy the ancient Kurdish system of tribalism. Soonly, the Kurds won't belong to any tribes, but will be all the members of the Great Family - at least those who are originated to the Turkish and European diasporas- if they are on the "good" side. At the contrary they will be just victims of a system that is not very scrupulous for people.

Sandrine Alexie & Roxane