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Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan said the country had “turned . . . a new page in history” as Kurdish militants began to hand over their weapons in the latest step to end a four-decade insurgency that has claimed tens of thousands of lives.
A group of 30 fighters from the Kurdistan Workers party (PKK) gathered near their base in northern Iraq on Friday and burned their rifles in a symbolic first step towards disarmament.
The move comes after their jailed leader Abdullah Öcalan, who is serving a life sentence in a Turkish prison, ordered them to disband earlier this year.
“The scourge of terrorism has begun the process of ending,” Erdoğan told members of his party in a televised speech on Saturday. “Today a new page in history has been turned. The doors to a great and strong Turkey, to the Turkish century, have been flung wide open.”
It was Erdogan’s most public expression of support yet for the effort to end the conflict with the PKK, which Turkey, the EU and US list as a terrorist organisation.
He acknowledged “mistakes” the Turkish state had made in battling the PKK, including extrajudicial killings, torture in prisons and restrictions on the Kurdish language, and said the conflict had cost the Turkish economy $2tn since the PKK took up arms in 1984.
Erdoğan also said that ending the conflict with the PKK would bring “peace and security” to Kurds in neighbouring countries, including Syria where US-backed fighters affiliated with the PKK run a large swath of the country beyond the control of the government in Damascus.
Turkey has launched several military operations against the Syrian Kurdish group since 2016 and now wants it to integrate with Syrian security forces following the fall of Bashar al-Assad last year.
Erdoğan’s last attempt to end hostilities with the PKK collapsed in 2015, unleashing the deadliest fighting in the conflict and a government crackdown on the legal Kurdish political movement. Thousands of activists remain in prison.
Erdoğan did not offer any concrete measures in his speech on Saturday, but said he hoped a planned parliamentary commission to consider legal changes would have broad support. He signalled that the pro-Kurdish Peoples’ Equality and Democracy party, or Dem, would work with his rightwing governing alliance to see through reforms.
Dem, which is leftwing and the Turkish parliament’s third-biggest party, has called for the release of political prisoners and constitutional protections for Kurdish cultural rights.
The PKK on Friday reiterated its call for Öcalan’s freedom. He was convicted in 1999 for treason.
The Turkish government has not formally agreed to any of the demands, and Erdoğan said in his speech that the peace process has not involved negotiation or bargaining.
Erdoğan needs Dem lawmakers’ votes if he is to change the constitution to abolish term limits or to call snap elections, should he decide to run for president again in 2028.
