Do we like them?

Do we like Abdullah Öcalan?

Our score: 3 out of 10. Human Rights Watch documented killings of civilians under his PKK leadership, and his 2025 call to disarm is real good set against it.

Born in 1949 to a rural family in Turkey, Öcalan studied at Ankara University, where he picked up leftist politics. Turkish authorities jailed him for seven months in 1972. In 1978 he founded the Marxist PKK, and he left Turkey in 1980 to run the campaign from exile.

He then led a guerrilla war against the Turkish state that, by AFP's count, killed at least 50,000 people on both sides. In 1998 Human Rights Watch said the PKK under his leadership was believed to have carried out at least 768 extrajudicial executions between 1992 and 1995. It also documented 25 massacres of civilians that killed 360 people, including 39 women and 76 children, and called them PKK official policy. HRW's Holly Cartner said he “must be held accountable for the wanton killing of innocent civilians.” No court has tested those findings against him personally.

Turkish commandos seized him in Kenya in February 1999, after Italy refused him asylum. A state security court on İmralı island sentenced him to death that June, and the sentence was commuted to life in prison in 2002. The European Court of Human Rights ruled in 2005 that his trial violated his right to a fair trial. So he was convicted, but the process was found to be unfair.

On the harm test, the sources we read don't show him campaigning against LGBTQ+ people, women, migrants or climate action, and we can't state what he believes beyond his own words. The harm in his record is violence: what HRW reported about civilian killings under PKK command. That is why it comes out as mixed rather than a pass.

The turn came in February 2025, when he called on the PKK to hold a congress and decide to lay down its arms and dissolve. Erdoğan, the UN and the German foreign ministry all welcomed the call, and the PKK later decided to disband. By July 2025, 30 members had burned weapons. In February 2026 he said a “new political era” was opening, and in March he said “The period of armed struggle is over. There is no going back.”

Progress has since stalled. The government wants disarmament verified before more legal steps, while Kurdish representatives want legal guarantees and better prison conditions for him. In June 2026, 82 Nobel laureates urged Turkey to implement a 2014 European Court ruling on life prisoners. Where you land depends on whether you read him mainly as the architect of a long, deadly war or as the man who ended it, and both readings have evidence behind them.