Abdullah Ocalan’s message follows four decades of guerrilla warfare. Abdullah Ocalan, the jailed leader of the Kurdish separatist PKK has called on his movement to lay down its arms and dissolve itself – in a move that could end its 40-year conflict with Turkey and have significant implications for the security of the wider region.
Ocalan, 75, issued the order to disarm from an island prison south of Istanbul, where he has been kept in isolation after being captured in Kenya in 1999 by Turkish special forces. The PKK is banned as a terrorist group in Turkey, the EU, UK and US. If the PKK's leadership heeds its founder's appeal, which is not guaranteed, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan would gain a historic opportunity to pacify and develop southern Turkey, where violence has killed thousands of people and devastated the regional economy. More than 40,000 people have been killed since the PKK launched its armed campaign in 1984 for an ethnic Kurdish homeland in southeastern Turkey. It has since moved away from its separatist goals and instead sought more autonomy for southeast Turkey and greater Kurdish rights.
“I am making a call for the laying down of arms, and I take on the historical responsibility of this call,” Ocalan said in a letter made public by Turkey's pro-Kurdish DEM Party members. The politicians held three recent meetings with the PKK leader at his island prison just four months after the idea was first raised by a political ally of Erdogan.
Ocalan wants the PKK to hold a congress and to formally agree to dissolve itself, the politicians quoted him as saying. In the first reaction to Ocalan's appeal from Erdogan's ruling AK Party, its deputy chairman Efkan Ala said Turkey would be "free of its shackles” if the PKK truly laid down its weapons and disbanded.
There was no immediate response from the PKK commanders' headquarters in the mountains of northern Iraq. But Ocalan’s message is likely to ripple across factions of Kurdish armed groups spread across northern Iraq and Syria. A new central government in Iraq that is more willing to work with Turkey has already put them in a more vulnerable position.
In Syria, where the ouster of Bashar Al-Assad in December has led to the establishment of a strongly pro-Turkey leadership in Damascus, Ocalan's call could prompt the Kurdish Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) in northeastern Syria to expel members of the PKK-aligned People's Protection Units (YPG), as Ankara has demanded.
