According to INTERPOL, 42 tons and 442 kilos of heroin were seized during the decade from 1984 to 1993 in continental Europe (including Turkey, the Balkans, and the countries of the former Eastern Bloc, except the Soviet Union). Of this amount fourteen tons and 479 kilos were found on drug traffickers who were Turkish nationals, i.e., 34 percent of the total seized. The figures for 1994 are as follows:
 
 
 
 

One additional piece of information is that two-thirds of the heroin seized in the first half of 1994 by German police came from the Turkish Kurd connection.

According to the Turkish office of INTERPOL, which collects all data concerning Turkish nationals transmitted by the European offices of INTERPOL, during the decade between 1984 and 1993, 503 Turkish citizens, revolutionary militants and/or separatists, were initially implicated in drug trafficking. The details are as follows:

- The implication of 188 of these 503 individuals proved unfounded;

- Of the remaining 315, 166 were arrested in Germany, 82 in Turkey, 17 in the Netherlands, 12 in the Czech Republic, 9 each in France and Italy, 5 each in Belgium and Great Britain, 3 each in Spain and Switzerland, and 2 each in Denmark and Portugal;

- According to the reports of the various police forces involved, 298 of these individuals, i.e., 94.6 percent of the total, were either PKK militants or closely tied to that organization. The other 17 belonged to or had close ties with various other Turkish terrorist groups (TKP-ML [Turkiye Komunist Partisi - Marksist-Leninist - Turkish Marxist-Leninist Communist Party]: one; DEV SOL: two; THKP-C [Turkiye Halk Kurtulus ve Cephesi = Turkish People's Liberation Party or Front]: four; etc.);

- Of the 298 PKK members or sympathizers arrested, 154 of these arrests took place in Germany, 82 in Turkey, 17 in the Netherlands, 12 in the Czech Republic, 8 in France, 7 in Italy, 5 in Great Britain, 3 each in Belgium, Spain, and Switzerland, and 2 each in Denmark and Portugal.

For the sake of impartiality, let us put aside the 82 Turkish case files, and imagine that 20 percent of the individuals questioned in the rest of Europe were victims of gross judicial errors or anti-immigrant racism. That would still mean that nearly 55 percent of these drug trafficking cases followed by the police of 11 countries, including 10 EU, members involved individuals with close ties to the PKK.

This explains, at least in part, why the British NCIS estimates that in 1993, the annual budget of the PKK was approximately FF430 million, including approximately $ 38 millions (44 percent of the total) from drug trafficking. The German police, for their part, have calculated that heroin trafficking brings in more than $ 120 million a year for the Turkish Kurd crime families, politically minded and common criminals combined.

The PKK's drug trafficking exhibits the following features:

- It is based on contacts, again having both political and criminal dimensions, that the Kurdish separatists maintain among the Shiite clans of the Biqa Valley in Lebanon, or with insurgent tribes in Baluchistan (Iranian or Pakistani). PKK operatives in Iran play a key role in this process;

- Moving toward Syria and Lebanon, this trafficking takes on the form of a triangular barter arrangement, wherein luxury vehicles are stolen in Europe (especially Germany) and exchanged in the Middle East for heroin. The heroin, in turn, is exchanged for cash or weapons, according to needs. In July 1992, the German police took a confession from one Nurettin SE...., who described the inner workings of one such network, leading to further arrests in the Netherlands and Turkey. Similar trafficking implicating the PKK also takes place on the borderlands of Turkey, Naxçivan [Nakhichevan] (an Azerbaijani enclave), and Iran;

- In Turkey itself, as a precaution, no doubt, trafficking in drugs, the operation of laboratories to produce heroin, or the transporting of precursor chemicals such as acetic anhydride, more often involves the PKK's logistical networks (hide-outs, assisting the wounded, supply, collecting the "revolutionary tax," etc.) than guerrillas directly engaged in the armed struggle.