The 1988 interview that brought Öcalan into view

By 1988, Öcalan had been directing the PKK from abroad for roughly nine years, since leaving Turkey in 1979 — first from Damascus, then from a camp in Lebanon's Bekaa Valley, tolerated by Syria amid the factions the Lebanese civil war had left behind. In much of Turkish official and public discourse the PKK was treated as a marginal outlaw group, and few Turkish journalists had spoken to its leader.

According to Birand's account, word reached him — then a Milliyet columnist and presenter of TRT's 32. Gün — that Öcalan was willing to talk. The journey meant flying to Damascus, then driving toward the Bekaa with a PKK-arranged escort: a driver named Halit, a white Mercedes, and a road past Syrian checkpoints. Birand later described the valley as a place where, in his words, “ten guns and ten men” were enough to form a group. Photographer Coşkun Aral went along.

By his account, they spent three days in the camp: hours of taped conversation with Öcalan in a stone house, a tour of the training grounds, and a live-fire demonstration. Getting out proved harder than getting in — on the return leg Syrian border officials refused them entry, and they had to reach Beirut's airport through a city still at war. What they brought back was the interview widely described as the first by a Turkish journalist with Öcalan.

Milliyet began publishing the interview on 16 June 1988. The following day's issue was stopped and copies were seized, and Birand and Milliyet's managing editor, Eren Güvener, were prosecuted before the Istanbul State Security Court. Birand went back in February 1991, as the Gulf War was reshaping the region, for a second interview in Damascus; according to the account in the book, Öcalan had recently been stopped by Syrian intelligence at a checkpoint. The interviews, Birand's account of arranging them, and background chapters were published as Apo ve PKK in 1992.