Abdullah Öcalan’s declaration paves way for end to 40-year conflict between militant Kurdish groups and Turkish state. The jailed leader of the Kurdistan Workers’ party (PKK) has called on the group to disarm and dissolve, a major development that paves the way towards ending the 40-year conflict between militant Kurdish groups and the Turkish state and has far-reaching implications for the rest of the Middle East.
“I am making a call for the laying down of arms and I take on the historical responsibility for this call,” Abdullah Öcalan was quoted as saying in a letter read out by political allies in Istanbul. “All groups must lay down their arms and the PKK must dissolve itself.”.
The declaration follows a surprise peace gesture to Öcalan from Devlet Bahçeli, a hardline nationalist ally of the Turkish president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, last October. When the Ottoman empire collapsed after the first world war, efforts to create an independent Kurdish state failed, turning Kurds into minority populations in Turkey, Iran, Iraq and Syria.
In Turkey, Kurdish rights were so heavily repressed that for decades the state denied the existence of the ethnic group altogether. The Kurdistan Workers’ party (PKK), a leftwing guerrilla movement, was founded in 1978 demanding that south-east Turkey become an independent Kurdistan.
At least 40,000 people have been killed and hundreds of thousands displaced in on-and-off fighting that has spilled into other parts of the region. In the 1990s, the PKK dropped its demand for independence, calling instead for greater autonomy inside Turkey’s borders. Today it is still considered a terrorist organisation by Turkey, the UK, the EU and the US.
Öcalan, now 76, is one of the founding members of the PKK. He was born in Şanlıurfa, in southern Turkey, and after the creation of the group he fled to Syria. After being forced to leave Damascus, he was arrested by Turkish intelligence agents in Kenya in 1999 and sentenced to life imprisonment on İmralı island, off the coast of Istanbul, where he has been held incommunicado for long periods of time.
Öcalan has advocated for a political solution to the conflict since 1993. He has continued to write books from prison and has been involved remotely in previous rounds of peace talks. The imprisoned PKK leader has received three visits from members of the pro-Kurdish Peoples’ Equality and Democracy (DEM) party since the olive branch from the Turkish government last autumn.
DEM’s co-chair Tuncer Bakırhan said earlier this month that Öcalan’s message would be “a roadmap for the democratic resolution of the Kurdish problem, taking it from an arena of violence to one of politics, law and democracy”. It is widely believed that Erdoğan is seeking to restart the peace process with the PKK because it is popular with voters. The Kurdish question is also linked to geopolitical tensions caused by the war in Gaza, the fall of Syria’s Bashar al-Assad, and rising hostility between Israel and Iran.
The last peace agreement between Erdoğan’s government and the PKK, in 2013, was enthusiastically received across the country, but hostilities restarted two years later. A major question that remains is how Öcalan’s message will be received by the leaders of the PKK’s military wing, mostly based in northern Iraq’s mountains. The area has been heavily bombed by the Turkish air force for several years.
In Syria, a PKK offshoot known as the YPG, or People’s Protection Units, forms the backbone of the US-backed Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF). The SDF controls the north-east of the country and has fought against the Turkish army and Turkish-backed Syrian Arab groups for years.
