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The jailed leader of Turkey’s Kurdish insurgency renewed calls for his fighters to disarm in a rare video, days before a ceremony is due to mark the militant group’s first concrete step towards peace.
In his first public appearance since his trial over two decades ago, the Kurdistan Workers’ party (PKK) leader Abdullah Ocalan said that the peace initiative had reached a stage that now required specific measures.
“A voluntary transition from armed struggle to democratic politics and law . . . should be considered a historic achievement, not a loss,” Ocalan said in the seven-minute video message from prison, which was released on Wednesday. “Details of the disarmament will be determined and implemented swiftly.”
The PKK, which is designated as a terrorist group by Turkey, the EU and the US, decided in May that it would disband after an initial appeal made by Ocalan in February. The move is seen as bringing closer to an end the four-decade conflict that has claimed more than 40,000 lives, mostly Kurdish.
Ocalan’s message, although dated June 19, appeared to be directed at PKK militants who might be hesitant about abandoning armed struggle.
The release of the video message comes days before a symbolic ceremony where around 30 PKK fighters are expected to lay down their light weapons in Sulaymaniyah in northern Iraq.
In the broadcast, which was released by the pro-PKK Firat News Agency, Ocalan sat in a beige polo shirt behind a table with a glass of water, flanked by six fellow prison inmates.
Ocalan asked the fighters to publicly ensure disarmament in a way that ‘‘alleviates public doubts, and fulfils our commitments.
“I believe in the power of politics and social peace, not weapons. I call on you to put this principle into practice.”
The disarmament ceremony, which after several false starts is now expected to take place on Friday, will be the PKK’s first formal gesture towards disarmament. The group has long maintained bases in the mountains of northern Iraq, where it has faced persistent air strikes and other attacks by Turkish forces, which have established bases inside the border.
The government has heralded the peace process as a key step towards establishing what it calls a “terror-free Turkey”, with ramifications for the whole region. An estimated 2,000 PKK fighters are in Iraq. PKK-affiliated groups have also been linked with US-backed Kurdish forces in Syria.
“Once the wall of terror is demolished, God willing, everything will be different,” President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan told lawmakers in his ruling Justice and Development party on Wednesday. “The winners . . . will be the whole of Turkey, followed by our entire region,” he said.
However, analysts have cautioned that the process — which has been likened to “a zipper”, where each step by the PKK is supposedly followed by reciprocal moves by the government — is likely to be long and halting.
Among the first steps that PKK leaders have demanded are an improvement in Ocalan’s prison conditions. Although that only requires the stroke of an executive pen, it will be a harder task to establish legislation to rehabilitate PKK militants including the possibility of pardons.
Harder still will be to enshrine Kurdish cultural rights in the Turkish constitution. That will require participation of the pro-Kurdish DEM party, Turkey’s third largest party, a process that analysts say Erdoğan could also use to modify the constitution so he can run for a third term beyond the two that are currently allowed.
Ocalan has been imprisoned on the island of İmralı near Istanbul since 1999. According to one recent poll, almost two third of Turks support the peace process but 42 per cent doubt that it will reach a successful conclusion and that the PKK will lay down its arms after four decades of fighting.
