Eurasia Press & News
The Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) announced on 12 May that it has officially ended its campaign of armed struggle and disbanded after four decades.
The move came in direct response to a call by the group’s imprisoned founder, Abdullah Ocalan, on 27 February.
This historic shift represents an opportunity to address the root causes of one of the longest-running conflicts in the Middle East and answer Kurdish political and cultural demands.
Yet, there are many questions about how this decision was reached and why the PKK decided to act now.
Following a congress held on 5-7 May in two locations inside Iraq’s Kurdistan Region, the PKK announced that it would “dissolve the PKK’s organisational structure and end the armed struggle”. It declared that the struggle for Kurdish rights in Turkey will now be carried out through other means.
The group argued that the “end [of] the method of armed struggle offers a strong basis for lasting peace and a democratic solution” and called on the Turkish government and all sections of civil society to “join the peace and democratic society process”.
Dr Dastan Jasim, as associate fellow at the German Institute for Global and Area Studies (GIGA), told The New Arab that “there are a lot of different dynamics that are influencing” the PKK’s decision to disband. Moreover, there are numerous practical considerations as well.
Turkey’s Kurds will wonder whether the Turkish state will loosen rules on Kurdish language use, allow Kurdish civil society and political parties to operate freely, and release imprisoned leaders, including Ocalan and former Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP) co-leader Selahattin Demirtaş.
Meanwhile, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s government will watch carefully to see whether the PKK actually disbands, and whether it gives up its weapons.
“This is not a transparent process,” Jasim said, explaining that the substantive talks are primarily taking place between Ocalan, a small group of people in the PKK leadership, and the Turkish intelligence and security services.
This means that the process is subject to a trade-off where decisions are protected from the spoiler influences of Turkish and Kurdish public opinion, but are not guided by them in a democratic way either. This makes it difficult to predict a trajectory.
Some people “want this peace process to be part of a legal framework that sets up certain stages for this process, [but] none of that has happened,” Jasim added.
Regardless of how the coming months play out, it is clear that the PKK has changed regional politics over the past four decades. While violence is a fundamental part of its legacy, the group also put Kurds and their political demands on the domestic and geopolitical map in a profound way.
“In the late 1970s and early 1980s, when the PKK was founded, Kurdishness was, in many senses, dying out” because of assimilation, political and cultural repression, and population movement, Jasim said. However, the PKK changed this by increasing the political consciousness of the Kurdish population in southeastern Turkey and across the Middle East, which in turn forced governments to take Kurdish demands seriously.
“Whole state systems were built on the denial of Kurds as a nation overall. And those days are long over,” she said.
In his February statement, Ocalan argued that the PKK armed struggle “was primarily inspired by the fact that the channels of democratic politics were closed”. However, this was no longer the case, and now “there is no alternative to democracy in the pursuit and realisation of a political system. Democratic consensus is the fundamental way”.
This sentiment was endorsed by the PKK in its congress.
There is understandable scepticism about whether the Turkish state will respond by relaxing restrictions on Kurdish free expression and political action. Recent crackdowns on non-Kurdish groups like the Republican People’s Party (CHP) add to that sense.
Yet it is also clear that the Turkish authorities are invested and involved in the process. Its seriousness was signalled by the involvement of Turkish nationalist hardliner Devlet Bahceli of the Nationalist Movement Party (MHP), who publicly endorsed talks with Ocalan in October 2024. This openness to dialogue was key in enabling the PKK to take the steps that it later undertook.
For President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, resolving the PKK issue addresses several domestic and geopolitical problems. As it exposes itself to increased political risk in Syria, the Turkish government wanted to lower the temperature in Kurdistan, which has been referred to as Turkey’s strategic “soft underbelly”.
In particular, developments in neighbouring Syria changed Turkey’s strategic calculus. Ankara has long opposed the Kurdish-led administration in northeastern Syria and accused its main party of links with the PKK. Turkey’s main proxy, the Syrian National Army (SNA), often clashes with the Kurdish-led military forces, known as the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF).
However, the collapse of the Assad regime and engagement between the transitional government in Damascus and the Kurdish-led administration changed the equation. Lowering the temperature on the Kurdish issue inside Turkey allows both Ankara and Kurdish groups to focus on the delicate situation in Syria.
Domestically, Erdogan’s term expires in 2028, and he hopes to change the Turkish constitution to allow him to stay in power longer. Addressing Kurdish cultural demands and loosening restrictions on their political activities may provide crucial votes for those changes.
However, there may be more personal reasons on both sides as well. Jasim argued that PKK and Turkish leaders are also looking to their legacies, calling it “the elephant in the room”. Ocalan is 74 years old and has been in prison since 1999, while Erdogan is 71 years old and has been in frontline politics since 1994 when he was elected as mayor of Istanbul.
In different ways, securing the end of the conflict between the PKK and the Turkish state – if that is what comes to pass – will be significant to how history regards them.
For now, however, it is unclear how the process of the PKK’s disbandment will play out and how much the Turkish state will change to allow more democratic rights for Kurds. If the moment is seized, it will bring significant changes inside Turkey and across the region.
“It is a generational switch that’s happening,” Jasim said. Kurds in Turkey, Syria, and Iraq are now all negotiating with the governments of those states. However, only time will tell whether these burgeoning relationships will bear fruit.
“Every [Kurdish] side does have these links and wants to leverage them, but at the same time, does not know how much it is going to help them…or how much they are actually going to be used,” she said.
