Charity or Cover? The case of a PKK-affiliated non-profit in Canada
Anatolia Cultural Foundation
Hello Insight Monitor subscribers, and welcome to another week of financial intelligence, threat financing, and international security news and analysis. Late last year, UK Counterterrorism police arrested six people on terrorism charges relating to the PKK. This week, we’re looking at a Canadian charitable organization that had its charitable status revoked for financing the PKK, and yet continues to operate in Canada. We’ll explore how this happened, what the organization is accused of, and what needs to be done in Canada to make our financial system more resilient against terrorist financing. Have a read, and share it with a friend!
The PKK
The Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or PKK, was formally established in 1978 in Türkiye by Abdullah Öcalan and is a Marxist-Lenist group whose mission is to ignite a communist revolution through guerilla warfare and create a separate Kurdish state.1 The group formally began operations in Türkiye in 1983, but these activities have not been contained to the country.2 The PKK has been responsible for 29% of all terrorism-related deaths in OECD countries between 2009 and 2014, and the group has launched thousands of terrorist attacks.3
The PKK was initially sponsored by states such as Syria and received support from the Soviet Union, Cyprus, Greece, Armenia, Libya, Iran, Iraq, Bulgaria and Cuba. Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, the PKK needed to find new sources of funds, so they expanded into criminal activities, relying heavily on the drug trade but also on support campaigns, publication sales, grants, and subscriptions, as well as funds from legitimate businesses diverted to the group.4
Today, the PKK has an elaborate network of fundraising activities, ranging from extortion and taxation to robbery, drug trafficking and arms smuggling. They also engage in money laundering, kidnapping for ransom, and counterfeiting, among other activities.5
Despite being a proscribed terrorist group in the UK, EU, and Canada, the PKK has managed to maintain its organizational financing activities. Part of the reason for this is the lack of interest in the issue from proscribing states: it becomes a simple matter for states to ignore the activity so long as the PKK establishes a plausible front or avoids using known PKK operatives as the point people on charitable or commercial activities.
Lack of international cooperation to counter the PKK, combined with lukewarm efforts domestically, means that the group operates and finances itself with relative domestic and international impunity. One of the countries it exploits to do so is Canada; while not as important as the European drugs market, the group's support from international donor networks is likely an important part of its financing operations.