Attention was turned to İmralı with Abdullah Öcalan's call for disarmament and dissolution in February 2025. However, what kind of solution does Öcalan, the key figure in the process, want? It is not yet clear how the process will develop.
It has undoubtedly been a matter of curiosity who Öcalan was most influenced by during the Imrali days, which books he read, and in which direction he wanted Kurdish politics to develop.
An answer that may come to mind is that the leader of the PKK, which was founded as a Marxist-Leninist organization, was probably influenced by 'Russia or the leader of a left-wing terrorist organization'.
However, Öcalan's 'father of ideas' is a name from the USA.
The PKK leader has a 'father of ideas' in the USA, with whom he exchanges letters inspired by his ideas and even introduces himself as his 'student'.
His name is Murray Bookchin.
In April 2004, Bookchin receives an unexpected letter from an intermediary on behalf of Öcalan.
A German translator named Reimar Heider was the intermediary for Öcalan's letter. In the letter Öcalan wrote to Bookchin in 2004, Heider states that 'Öcalan read Turkish translations of Bookchin's books in prison in İmralı and described himself as a 'good student'.
The correspondence continued until Bookchin died in 2006.
MURRAY BOOKCHIN
He is the child of a Russian Jewish immigrant family. Born in New York-Bronx in 1921, Murray Bookchin was introduced to Marxist ideology in his childhood. After the signing of the Hitler-Stalin Pact in the late 1930s, he left the Communist Party and became first a Trotskyist and then an anarchist.
In the 1950s, he helped found the 'Libertarians Union' in New York, and remained an anarchist between the 1960s and 1990s.
He eventually discards the term, too, arguing that anarchism too easily turns into a politics focused on the exercise of personal freedom at the expense of the hard work required to build political institutions that can create lasting social change.
DEBBIE BOOKCHIN
His daughter Debbie Bookchin, who was influenced by her father and became a Kurdish activist, has written articles and conducted interviews about the impact of her father's ideas on the PKK and the Kurdish Movement.
Debbie Bookchin wrote that Heider said:
'Öcalan rebuilt his political strategy around the vision of a 'democratic-ecological-society' and developed a model for building a civil society in Kurdistan and the Middle East. He recommended Bookchin's books to all mayors in all Kurdish cities and asked everyone to read them.'
His daughter states that 'Murray Bookchin, who was 83 years old and ill at the time, was unable to give comprehensive answers to the letters.'
He wrote that his father conveyed his good wishes to Öcalan and hoped that the Kurdish people would establish a free society.
In an article describing how the 'Democratic Confederalism' model implemented in Rojava influenced the 'Democratic Confederalism' model implemented in 2018, Debbie Bookchin wrote that her father's ideas 'helped the Kurds to create a new democracy'.
It is understood that the 'KCK' structure emerged by taking advantage of Murrey Bookchin's philosophy.
His journalist-writer daughter Debbie later followed in her father's footsteps and instead of writing letters directly to the PKK, she wrote, gave interviews and lobbied on issues related to the adoption of her father Bookchin's ideas by Öcalan and the wider Kurdish Movement. The works seem to focus particularly on the impact of his father's ideas on 'democratic confederalism, social ecology and women's freedom' on the Kurdish movement. He says his father's ideas 'helped the Kurds create a new democracy'.
'If my father had seen his ideas implemented in Rojava and southeastern Türkiye, it would have deeply touched him to know that his revolutionary spirit was revived among a generation of Kurdish people. He would be encouraged by the fact that in Rojava there was a historical example of the desire for freedom that he felt deeply and to which he devoted his life.'
Meanwhile, historian and environmental activist Vincent Gerber, in his interview with Medya News, said that 'Abdullah Öcalan's model of democratic confederalism, whose basic principle is social ecology, was inspired by Murray Bookchin's political ideas'.
Debbie served as press advisor to Socialist Senator Bernie Sanders. He called on President Obama to remove PKK from the list of terrorist organizations, and published an extensive article explaining that "YPG and PYD Kurdish groups are fighting against ISIS in Syria."
DEM Party Co-Chair Tuncer Bakırhan had a meeting with Debbie Bookchin, who attended a symposium in London in June last year.
