After announcing a “historic declaration” on Thursday, Abdullah Ocalan, the jailed leader of the separatist Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) , called upon the militant group to lay down its arms and dissolve itself.
This would mark the end of decades of violence between the PKK and the Turkish state. Here’s what you need to know.
The PKK: A brief history
The PKK was founded in 1978 with the goal of establishing an independent, socialist-orientated Kurdish state in the Middle East. Later, it softened this goal and instead called for the recognition of Kurdish identity, as well as political and cultural autonomy in areas predominantly settled by Kurds.
There are an estimated 30 million Kurds living worldwide, which makes them the largest ethnic group without a state of their own. Kurdish minorities primarily live in southeastern Turkey, northern Iraq, Iran, and northern Syria.
As a militant organization, the PKK launched an armed campaign against Turkey in 1984 from northern Iraq. Turkey, the European Union (EU) and the United States consider the PKK to be a terrorist organization. In Germany, the group has been banned since 1993.
Germany is home to a large Kurdish diaspora, with about 14,500 PKK supporters according to German security officials.
It’s estimated that the armed conflict between the PKK and the Turkish state has killed over 40,000 individuals, many of them civilians. In the past 10 years, most PKK fighters have retreated from Turkey, but have continued to launch attacks on Turkish territory from positions in Iraq and Syria.
Who is Abdullah Ocalan?
Abdullah Ocalan, also known as Apo, helped found the PKK and to this day is recognized as the group’s head. In 1979, he fled to Syria where he began to prepare the Kurdish war for independence.
He established the first PKK headquarters in the Lebanese Bekaa Valley, then under Syrian control. After the 1980 military coup in Turkey, many activists joined him there.
In 1998, Ocalan was pressured to leave Syria and spent the following months requesting political asylum in a number of countries. Finally, in 1999, the Turkish secret service abducted him in Nairobi, Kenya.
Extradited to Turkey, Ocalan was charged with treason, the formation of an armed organization, and separatism, and sentenced to death. His death sentence was later commuted to a life term. Since then, he has been held in solitary confinement in Imrali prison off the coast of istanbul.
Even his family and lawyers have restricted access to him.
Will the PKK follow Ocalan’s call to lay down arms?
Despite having largely been out of the public eye for decades, Vahap Coskun from the Diyarbakir Institute for Political and Social Research still believes that Ocalan is considered to be the PKK’s central authority.
The political researcher identified four key actors in the question of Kurdish autonomy: the PKK’s military leadership based in Iraq’s Qandil mountains, the confederation of European Kurdish associations in Brussels, the Kurdish-led self-administration in Syria’s Rojava region, and the pro-Kurdish People’s Equality and Democracy (DEM) party in Turkey. In past weeks, all four of these actors have indicated that they would back Ocalan should be decide to end the violent conflict.
Previous peace processes
The first steps toward peace between the PKK and the Turkish government began in 2009. The following years, Hakan Fidan, then the director of national intelligence, held talks with PKK representatives in Norway’s capital, Oslo.
The negotiations failed. They were followed several years later by a second attempt at peace talks in which Ocalan and the People’s Democratic Party (HDP) — the predecessor to the DEM party — played central roles.
During this time, the pro-Kurdish HDP party gained followers and supported the peace process, while demanding than then-Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan strengthened basic rights for Kurds and oppositionists.
In the 2015 parliamentary election, the HDP gathered over 13% of the popular vote, thereby depriving Erdogan’s Justice and Development Party (AKP) of its absolute majority. Erdogan ended the peace process shortly after.
The director of the Diyarbakir Institute, Coskun, pointed out that the situation in Syria at the time also played a role in this. Throughout the course of the civil war, the Syrian government had lost control over northern Syrian territories which fell to local Kurdish forces aligned with the PKK. This was a dangerous development in the eyes of the Turkish government, that followed the end of the second peace process with repressions that targeted Kurds, among others, the expert explained.
What role does the crisis in the Middle East play now?
“The dynamic situation in the Middle East is both a great threat and a great opportunity for Turkey,” Coskun said, especially following the toppling of Bashar Assad’s regime in Syria.
Turkey’s current engagement is aimed at preventing the PKK and Kurdish forces from gathering strength, said the expert. There is also a chance that Turkey might become the strongest political and economic power in the region, given Iran’s current weakness. Both goals would require ending the armed conflict with the PKK, Coskun explained.
Several days ago, a delegation of the DEM party arrived in the semi-autonomous Kurdish region of northern Iraq to speak with the prime minister of the regional government, Masrour Barzani. He, too, is willing to support a peaceful settlement.
But despite all current peace efforts, the Turkish government has intensified its crackdown on Kurds and critics of late. In just one week, the state arrested 340 politicians, lawyers, human rights activists and journalists on terrorism charges. And following the last local elections, numerous elected officials belonging to the DEM party, as well as those belonging to the main opposition party CHP, were deposed and arrested.
This article was translated from German.
