Hülya Oran

Besê Hozat (born Hülya Oran on 12 November 1978 in Hozat, Tunceli) is a leader in the Kurdistan Workers' Party (Partiya Karkerên Kurdistanê, PKK) and is the co-chair of the Kurdistan Communities Union (Koma Civakên Kurdistan, KCK) alongside Cemil Bayik. She is the sixth member of the General Presidential Council, the highest authoritative body in the PKK.

Early life

Born in 1978 in Tunceli Province, Hozat was the seventh of nine children. She attended primary school in Tanêr and secondary school in Kayseri, where she experienced discrimination as a Kurdish Alevi. According to Hozat, Alevism and Dersimilik were viewed with scorn and marginalization. To escape this treatment, she joined radical left organizations affiliated with Abdullah Ocalan.

Bese Hozat's family was a victim in the 1938 Dersim rebellion, which she called a "genocide." replacing Murat Karayılan. The KCK is an umbrella organization that includes the PKK. Bese Hozat's election as the first woman in a leadership position in the KCK was seen as strengthening the women's movement within it.

She says that the PKK is a woman's party and that Abdullah Öcalan had made PKK ideology so that it was against gender inequality. After the Kurdish Women's Movement's sixth General Assembly, they concluded that women need to be in leadership roles in democratic institutions and that for too long men have dominated leadership positions.

She continues saying that "A Kurdish state will never be a solution to the Kurdish question. It would deepen the fight with our neighbors and bring decades of war against the Arab as well as chaos and suffering", She said that the AKP soon realized that the Kurdish movement was gaining strength in Rojava and that they were gaining international attention for their fight against the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant and the rescue of thousands of Yazidis after the Sinjar massacre. The AKP was further incentivized not to work with the Kurds after the Turkey's Peoples' Democratic Party (HDP), a party which emphasises Kurdish rights, received 13% of the votes in the June 2015 general election.

Views of Europe and NATO

Hozat says that the European Union (EU) are hypocrites. She says that the EU knows what Turkey is doing to the Kurdish people, but that they do nothing to intervene. Hozat sees European Union–Turkey relations as pragmatic and that they are not doing enough for Kurds in Turkey. Hozat claims that Turkey is "blackmailing Brussels by playing the 'refugee crisis card'" When Erdogan arrested 13 Kurdish oppositions members of the Turkish parliament after the failed 2016 Turkish coup d'état attempt, Hozat says that Europe has been silent about the 2016–present purges in Turkey. She says that "Europe is responsible for the rise of fascism in Turkey because this silence and indifference are indirect support for Turkish policies."

Hozat has also been critical of NATO because of their backing of Turkey. She claims that since the 1980s and 1990s, the Turkish state's strategy for warfare against the Kurds has changed, that it is no longer using as many ground troops and instead are using the Turkish Air Force and other sophisticated weapons against the PKK. Hozat says that now the Kurds are experiencing the most intense kind of warfare from the Turkish government and that NATO is not speaking out.

Hozat has accused NATO and Turkey of being responsible for the murder of Sakine Cansiz (co-founder of the PKK), Fidan Doğan (member of the Kurdistan National Congress), and Leyla Söylemez (member of the Kurdish youth movement) in Paris. Hozat says that the reason why no light has been shed on these murders is that NATO was involved and that Turkey has been using this incident to intimidate Kurdish women.

When Bese Hozat discussed with the New Internationalist what she thought of the United States and Russian relations with the Kurds, she said that "the interest of these two powers is rooted in their regional interests and their plans to redesign the region. They want to minimize the power of traditional region states which are too dogmatic in their positions - because they are an obstacle for global capital."

She says a big reason for why Russia and the United States have started to support the Kurds is because of the Rojava-Islamist conflict. Hozat denies that weapons that the U.S. give to the People's Protection Units (YPG) are going to the PKK in Turkey. Hozat explains that the PKK has never had trouble getting weapons and that the Turkish government is attempting to smear the YPG.

Bese Hozat has claimed that Al Qaeda and the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant are "instruments created by the capitalist system." Hozat blames the Baathists, the United States, Israel, and the UK for empowering radical fanatic Sunni Islamic groups in order to control the dominant Shia majority in the region after the fall of Saddam Hussein in Iraq. Hozat also blames Turkey, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia for allowing radical Sunni groups to flourish. Along with this, Hozat accused the AKP of collaboration with ISIL and criticised it for trying to dismantle secularism in Turkey.

Views on Turkish constitutional referendum

When Recep Erdogan held a referendum in 2017 that proposed to change Turkey from a parliamentary system to an executive system, Bese Hozat condemned the Constitutional referendum as a power grab by Erdogan and the far-right Nationalist Movement Party (MHP). Bese Hozat said in an interview with Haaretz that changing Turkey to an executive system would embolden the far-right and nationalists in Turkey and incentivize them to do border-crossings in Iraq and Syria. Hozat says that Erdogan is promising stability and an end to terrorism at the cost of more authoritarianism.

Bese Hozat sees the PKK as an influence both regionally and internationally. She says that Democratic Confederalism can be an alternative to the statist government systems.