Associations linked with the PKK in Western Europe (1994)
 

Since its founding, the PKK has had what it views as two equally important objectives, i.e., to implant the armed struggle in "Turkish Kurdistan," and to establish themselves in Western Europe. In 1984, the resumption of guerrilla warfare in "Turkish Kurdistan" was accompanied by a violent PKK offensive in Europe, including within its own ranks. It was then that the PKK undertook a ruthless campaign to restore discipline, intimidating or eliminating "collaborators" with Turkey and its own defectors. Because of this, since 1984, 18 PKK militants have been expelled from a Sweden that is otherwise generous in terms of political asylum. In Sweden, Switzerland, Germany, Denmark, and France, murder and arson claimed some twenty lives between 1985 and 1987(1)

(1) The "sentences" are handed down by the "People's Revolutionary Tribunal" of the PKK and carried out by a "Special Operations Group." The most recent of these known murders took place in 1993 in Germany and in 1991 in France. The PKK also engages in kidnapping and torture.