The Foreign Service Journal, November 2007

David T. Jones is a retired senior FSO. His diplo- matic career of nearly 30 years focused on NATO and arms-control issues. From 1992 to 1996, he served as political minister-counselor at Embassy Ottawa. David Kilgour has served as a member of Parliament in both the Conservative and Liberal Parties during 26 years in Canadian federal politics. He was assistant secretary of state for Africa, the Caribbean and Latin America, sec- retary of state for Asia-Pacific, and deputy speaker of the House of Commons. Blood and Belief: The PKK and the Kurdish Fight for Independence Aliza Marcus, NYU Press, 2007, $35.00, hardcover, 368 pages. Reporting and scholarly re- search are combined in Blood and Belief to give the first in-depth account of the PKK, the Kurdistan Workers Party. A guerilla force found- ed in 1978 by a group of former Turkish university stu- dents, the PKK radicalized the Kurdish national movement in Turkey. The Kurds — who number some 25 million, more than half in Turkey and the rest in Iran, Iraq and Syria — have long demanded an independent state. Their struggle gained new momentum in 2003, when the U.S. invasion of Iraq laid the basis for Iraqi Kurds to establish a near- autonomous Kurdish land in the north of the country, giving a boost, in turn, to Kurdish nationals in Turkey. Author Aliza Marcus was one of the first Western reporters to meet with PKK rebels. She covered the PKK for more than eight years, first as a freelance reporter for the Christian Science Monitor and later as a staff writer for Reuters. She was put on trial in Turkey for her reporting and also received a National Press Club Award and a MacArthur Foundation grant for her work. This book is based on her interviews with PKK leaders and their supporters and opponents throughout the world — including Palestinians who trained them, intelligence services that tracked them and dissidents who tried to break them up. Formerly an international correspondent for the Boston Globe , Marcus lives in Washington, D.C., with her husband, retired FSO John Lister. N O V E M B E R 2 0 0 7 / F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L 21