Eurasia Press & News
The Kurdish militant group is laying down its weapons. President Recep Tayyip Erdogan is considering expanding minority rights. But some people say they cannot forgive and forget…
It had been five years since Dilber Oyunlu had seen her daughter, Sinda. Then one day in July, she appeared on television. Ms Oyunlu, 51, left the bread she had been making, ran to the screen, and cried.
“I was shocked to see her on TV, but happy to know that she is alive,” the mother of six told The National at the family home in Birlik, a remote village tucked deep in the gentle green mountains of Diyarbakir province in south-eastern Turkey. “I didn’t know if she was alive or not.”
Sinda, 21, was filmed taking part in a ceremony held by the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) to burn some of the separatist group’s weapons, across the border in northern Iraq’s semi-autonomous Kurdistan Region.
Sinda was a spirited girl who liked fishing and tending to the family’s livestock, said her mother. “She was always saying, ‘don’t you look after the animals, I will do it’,” said Ms Oyunlu.
The youngest in the family, she was just 16 years old when she left Birlik to join the PKK.
“It was her choice, her decision,” said her sister Tugba, 34, who described Sinda as more of a friend than a sibling.
The conflict between the militant Kurdish group and the Turkish state is one of the region’s longest-running schisms – one that has killed 40,000 people on both sides and reverberated across the Middle East. Founded by Abdullah Ocalan in the 1970s, the PKK began an armed insurgency in the 1980s, in an attempt to secure rights for Turkey’s Kurdish ethnic minority. At one time, the PKK called for an independent Kurdish state, threatening Turkey’s territorial integrity. Kurds make up 15 to 20 per cent of the country’s 86 million population.
While some hold senior government positions, others have long accused the Turkish state of discrimination against them, including suppression of cultural identity, language and political activity. In the 1990s, military operations against the PKK in south-eastern Turkey emptied entire villages and displaced hundreds of thousands of people, according to a Human Rights Watch report from 2004.
Among many in Turkey, there is no love lost for the PKK. The group has carried out deadly armed assaults on both military and civilian targets in cities across the country, including car bombings and suicide attacks. It is designated as a terrorist organisation by Ankara, the EU and the US. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and his ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) often define threats from the group as the country’s number one national security concern. Loathing of the PKK is one factor that unites many of Turkey’s political parties, which otherwise have very different ideas about how the country should be governed.
Now there is a chance for the four-decades long conflict to end. In October 2024, a key ally of Mr Erdogan, ultranationalist politician Devlet Bahceli, called for Ocalan to disband the PKK. Ocalan has been in jail since 1999, after being captured by Turkish commandos in Nairobi. His death sentence for treason and separatism and leading an armed terrorist organisation was commuted to life imprisonment in 2002, when Turkey abolished capital punishment. In exchange for dissolving the militant group, Ocalan would be allowed to address the Turkish parliament. Legal changes could eventually be made to allow Ocalan the right to apply for parole, Mr Bahceli suggested, although Turkey’s Justice Minister Yilmaz Tunc later dismissed that idea.
The following February, Ocalan ordered the PKK’s dissolution – not in parliament, but in a message written from his island prison, and read out by lawmakers from Turkey’s pro-Kurdish political party, the Peoples’ Equality and Democracy Party (Dem). PKK militants agreed to the proposal a few months later.
In September, when Ocalan’s lawyers were allowed to visit him for the first time in six years, the jailed leader, “insisted on coexistence within the framework of a democratic nation”, according to a statement released by his legal team.
Mr Erdogan, who has ruled Turkey for more than two decades, has repeatedly said that the issue is not with Kurds and their identity, but with separatist militancy. The PKK’s original aim was to form a Kurdish state, although it later shifted its focus to fighting for improved rights and autonomy for the community within Turkey.
Turkey will defy attempts to divide its people along ethnic and sectarian lines, Mr Erdogan said in a speech in September. “We will hold on to one another, embrace one another, trust one another, and speak to one another in the language of tolerance and empathy,” to reach the goal of a “terror-free Turkey”, he said.
Why now?
Why did Ocalan order the PKK’s dissolution now? Different observers give varying reasons.
Vahap Coskun is a professor at Dicle University’s law faculty in Diyarbakir, a Kurdish-majority city that has been at the heart of the Turkey-PKK conflict. For Mr Coskun, times have changed. Bolstered by advances in its domestic defence industry, the Turkish military has carried out heavy blows against the PKK, not only in Turkey but also in neighbouring Syria and in Iraq, where its fighters live in the rugged mountains of the semi-autonomous Kurdistan Region.
“We are no longer in the 1970s. We are not in the 1990s. Guerrilla warfare, armed struggle against states, is not an effective method,” Mr Coskun told The National.
More important yet, he believes, is that society has grown tired of a war that has done little good for anyone.
“The vast majority of people no longer want armed struggle, conflict, or war,” Mr Coskun said. “There has been conflict for 41 years, but people have seen that it has not produced any results.”
Unlike in a previous years-long attempt at peace that broke down a decade ago, there is generally a political consensus that backs the process, he added. “In 2012-2015, there were very serious objections within the state,” said Mr Coskun. Now, there is “an agreement within the bureaucracy”.
The fall of the regime of Bashar Al Assad in neighbouring Syria also influenced Ocalan’s call, experts say. Faced with a new government in Damascus heavily backed by Ankara, pressure has mounted on PKK-linked Kurdish militias in north-eastern Syria to disarm and join a new army directed from the Syrian capital. The ousting of Mr Assad also indicated that time was running out for the myriad non-state actors of varying ideologies that proliferated under his rule – from Iran-backed Lebanese Hezbollah to the PKK.
For Mr Erdogan’s government, the time was also right. Some observers believe that political longevity is the motivation: the Turkish President needs the backing of Kurdish lawmakers to make changes to the constitution that would allow him to run for another term in office. To get their support, he needs to ease the grievances that many Kurds in Turkey report.
Other motives are more regional in scope. In recent years, Ankara has pursued a foreign policy in which it casts itself as a mediator of conflicts, striving for calm in a region surrounded by the ongoing war in Ukraine and between Israel and countries across the Middle East following the Hamas-led attacks of October 7, 2023. Solving Turkey’s own longest-running modern conflict would be a major boost to that reputation. It would also be a boon for Iraq-Turkey relations: the PKK’s presence in the country’s north has been a stumbling block to building out major transport routes that could connect Turkey to the Gulf, through Iraq.
After so many years of fighting the PKK military, Mr Erdogan’s government wants “a political perspective” to end the conflict, according to Murat Yesiltas, foreign policy director at Seta, a think tank close to the Turkish government. For the Turkish president, he believes, the aim is to, “establish strong unity inside Turkey, to respond to the regional changes and international uncertainties,” he told The National.
Hard road to peace
But ending the conflict with the PKK is complex. The process means many different things to different people, complicating the path to defining its contours.
“Our expectations from this process, and our approach towards this process, are very different from AKP’s expectations from and approach to the process,” admits Serhat Eren, a Dem MP for Diyarbakir, in an interview with The National at the party’s city offices.
Mindful of widespread scepticism over engagement with a group whose actions have killed and injured so many civilians, the Turkish government insists that it is not negotiating quid pro quos with the PKK in exchange for its disarmament. Authorities are trying to codify the group’s dissolution in law. The 51-member National Solidarity, Brotherhood and Democracy Committee in parliament is tasked with creating a legal framework for the PKK’s dissolution process.
Meanwhile, Dem party politicians are framing the process as an opportunity for better rights for Kurds, achieved through peaceful means. They are asking that the PKK’s dissolution should lead to guarantees that would secure their political, social and cultural freedoms. Such demands include the release of political prisoners and an end to the replacement of elected mayors with state-appointed trustees in Kurdish-majority areas. They also want rights to Kurdish language education – Turkish is currently the country’s only official language and is used for all interactions with the state. For them, critical too is that provisions are written into Turkish law that would essentially allow an amnesty for PKK fighters currently abroad in Iraq, Syria, or elsewhere. The exact number of people involved is unclear.
“Members of the PKK should be integrated into social, political, and democratic life,” Mr Eren said. “There should be legal grounds for them to adapt in this way.” While symbolic, the weapons burning in Iraqi Kurdistan – the ceremony in which Sinda Oyunlu participated – was a concrete sign that the PKK “want to be part of democratic life in Turkey”, he said.
One thing that most people can agree on is that they want an end to the bloodshed.
In Diyarbakir, two of Menice Yeni’s sons joined the PKK, both when they were 17, without her knowledge or permission. The first, Zindan, told her he was attending a wedding with a friend, before joining the PKK across the border in Syria, where Kurdish-majority populations were under attack from ISIS. He was killed back in Turkey in a military operation in 2021, she said. His remains were returned in a basket by authorities nine months later, she said, pointing to a picture of a pile of bones on her phone. Her account is consistent with media interviews she gave at the time.
She does not know the whereabouts of her other son, Berxwedan. “I hope he is alive. I don’t know,” Ms Yeni, 47, told The National. “I have not spoken to him for six years. I wish I could speak with him.”
Neither relatives of Turkish state security forces killed fighting the PKK, nor the families of its fighters, should have to grieve any more losses, she believes. “I don’t want any more mothers to cry for their children,” she said. “It is a pity for young people to lose their lives. We are on the side of peace.”
For many families, the human cost of the conflict is apparent in the Istanbul military martyrs’ cemetery. It holds the resting places of 574 Turkish soldiers killed in counter-PKK operations, and there are many other similar cemeteries across the country. Decorated with multicoloured plastic windmills, elegant greenery and family photos, some of the graves bear death dates that suggest the soldiers were just 20 when they died. Verifying some of the names online produced more details: one was killed in a landmine laid by the PKK in Sirnak, on Turkey’s border with Iraq and Syria.
One local employee, who asked not to be identified, was optimistic about what he described as a “peace process” for “zero arms and zero terror”. But the release of or amnesty for former PKK fighters would upset many people, he said.
“If your child gets hurt, you would also feel pain,” he told The National. “When there is a funeral of an 18 or 20-year-old boy, the pain never leaves. They will never see this positively. If they [PKK members] get released, there will be big issues.”
Some Turks vehemently oppose moves that they see as concessions to the PKK forming part of the resolution process. They reject the idea of releasing prisoners sentenced on PKK-related charges, or an amnesty for its militants to enable their return to Turkey.
Onder Celik was left paralysed below his right knee when he was injured while serving in Turkish military counter-PKK operations in the eastern Turkish province of Bingol in 2007. He now heads the Istanbul branch of the War Disabled Veterans, Martyrs’ Widows and Orphans Association.
“We do not want them [PKK members] to be integrated into society. We do not want them to be included within the Republic of Turkey’s borders,” Mr Celik told The National from his office in central Istanbul.
The building is filled with pictures of hundreds of young men killed in conflict with the PKK, alongside glass cases holding their personal belongings – watches, wallets, dog tags. He repeatedly refers to Ocalan as the “Imrali monster” – a reference to the island on which he is imprisoned in the Sea of Marmara, south of Istanbul. The PKK leader should not be allowed the hope that he might one day be freed, and should serve the rest of his life sentence, Mr Celik believes.
In the veteran’s view, young people who joined the PKK have forfeited their rights in Turkey, even if, as he sees it, the militant group exploited poor economic circumstances in the country’s eastern provinces to encourage them to sign up.
“Even if they have gone to the mountains and been deceived, we do not believe that those children, who have for years shot at soldiers, police officers and the land within the Republic of Turkey’s territory, now have any rights here,” he said. “Going to the mountains” is often used as a euphemism for joining the PKK.
He also dismisses the idea that the use of Kurdish language should be formalised in schools and other public services in Turkey, lest it damage the country’s identity as a Turkish republic. Opening the door to the use of minority languages, “would cause confusion in Turkey”, he said.
Back in Diyarbakir, Ms Oyunlu said that her daughter Sinda should decide for herself if she was ever to come back to Turkey. “It’s up to her if she wants to come home; it’s her own decision,” she said.
Other relatives of PKK members are not certain that they would want to return to Turkey, even if guarantees were drawn into legislation.
Guler Seviktek, 47, lost two brothers who joined the PKK in 2015, around the time that an earlier peace process between the militants and the Turkish state collapsed.
A third brother, Firat Seviktek, is still alive and currently lives in north-eastern Syria, Ms Seviktek told The National. While she has no contact with him, she believes that bad memories of Turkey would keep him away, even if authorities committed not to pursue him.
“Even if there is peace, he will not be willing to come back to Turkey,” she said. “No matter where he is, we just want the armed conflict to stop.”
Benefits of peace
According to local officials, an end to the long-running conflict would be good for Diyarbakir. Swathes of the city were damaged and destroyed in clashes between the PKK and the Turkish military, before being rebuilt, when the previous peace process broke down over a decade ago.
This is a city that wears its Kurdish identity more proudly than perhaps any other in Turkey. Kermanji – the local dialect of the Kurdish language – is frequently heard on the streets, and some older residents speak little Turkish. Nick-nack shops sell scarves and other accessories in the floral yellow, red, green and white colourways symbolic among many Kurds. They are almost never seen in other parts of Turkey.
But Diyarbakir province has one of the lowest development scores in Turkey, according to government data released earlier this year that takes into account life expectancy, education and income. Amid the bountiful stalls selling the region’s famously sweet watermelons, there are persistent child beggars, hovel homes and unpaved alleyways. As Turkey struggles with double-digit inflation and squeezed living conditions, conflict has driven away tourists who would bring in much-needed foreign currency.
“Of course, when there is peace, tourists will come from all over Europe, locals and foreigners will come,” Fadli Sahin, a gift shop owner in Diyarbakir’s old city, told The National. “The people here will benefit. Everyone will benefit, the country will benefit.” His underground emporia is filled with pictures of Iraqi Kurdish leaders, although Ocalan’s face is absent.
A successful resolution to the conflict would also just make Diyarbakir a cheerier place, some believe. Citing research that claims Diyarbakir is the unhappiest city in Turkey, MP Serhat Eren believes that a resolution to the conflict could boost morale – both by allowing residents to communicate in Kurdish and by freeing up finances to spend on improving services.
“If economic resources that were allocated for the war were instead re-allocated to serve people’s interests, there would be a huge change,” he said.
The reputation of eastern Turkey is also improving among people from across the country. In Istanbul, the military martyrs’ cemetery employee said that everyone could now visit parts of the country that were previously off limits.
“Slowly things are improving, and there is oil exploration in the east,” he said. “These are all benefits of ending terrorism. In the past, whenever you wanted to build something, they [the PKK] would bomb it. That’s over now. Now you can move around easily and even employ people there, and by providing jobs in the area, people there can be integrated.”
Lack of trust
Whether they are focused on seeing fewer armed attacks by the PKK, or pursuing rights by more peaceful means, Turks and Kurds largely back the idea of the group’s dissolution, polls suggest. But on all sides, hope that the current opening will end the conflict is not accompanied by trust that it will. Many Kurdish voters do not trust the state to include the rights that they demand in the process. Meanwhile, many Turks do not trust the PKK to fully renounce armed insurgency.
According to an in-depth study released by the Ankara Institute think tank in July, just before the PKK’s symbolic weapons burning ceremony, a majority of Turks do not believe that the militants really will disarm.
Sceptics are not just from the AKP, or Devlet Bahceli’s Nationalist Movement Party (MHP), who may have more reason to support an initiative that their preferred leaders initiated. Per the Ankara Institute’s findings, more than 70 per cent of voters for Turkey’s main opposition party, the Republican People’s Party (CHP) do not have faith that the PKK will disarm.
Some criticise the Turkish government for continuing military operations against the PKK after the militants agreed to disarm. As Ms Seviktek speaks, at least three military jets fly low over Diyarbakir city, the noise of their engines booming through the sky. Although the planes’ mission was unclear, the general reminder of a military presence in south-eastern Turkey is enough to sow the seeds of doubt about the process for Ms Seviktek.
“On the one hand they are talking about peace, but on the other hand the jets are still flying,” she said, looking cautiously out of the window. “When we see them we get scared. Are they going to bomb? Did the process fail?”
Others believe that Turkey has the right to continue fighting PKK militants wherever it deems them a threat.
“From now on, we will move forward in the fight against terrorism with a more competent, more deterrent technique – not through negotiation, but fighting without making any concessions whatsoever,” veterans’ representative Mr Celik said.
Dem party would like to see the Turkish government take steps that it believes would build confidence among its constituents, to show that they will benefit from the process. Mayors in Kurdish-majority areas who have been replaced in recent years by state-appointed trustees should be reinstated, and 1,400 ill political prisoners in Turkey should be released, Mr Eren believes. “This is a small number but would build trust and would eliminate the lack of trust with AKP and the state,” he said.
But building trust in the process is a hard task.
“People support this process, but they don’t trust it,” said Mr Coskun of Dicle University. “That’s the fundamental problem.”
Regional issues
The PKK’s regional reach has also complicated trust in the process. For decades, the conflict has spilled beyond Turkey’s borders. The organisation has long had bases across Iraq’s Kurdistan Region, and affiliates have taken control of swathes of north-eastern Syria where they set up autonomous governance outside of Damascus’ reach. Turkey sees those groups, largely under an umbrella force known as the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), as a direct extension of the PKK. Long-standing US backing for them as a partner force in counter-ISIS operations has been a major wedge between Ankara and Washington.
While Ocalan called on all parts of the PKK to disarm in February, the SDF maintains that it is a separate organisation, and therefore the order did not apply to them. Nonetheless, the post-Assad reality in Syria means that the SDF is under increasing pressure from the new government in Damascus and Ankara to dissolve. One view held fairly widely among officials in Turkey is that Israel is fuelling demands among Syrian Kurds to retain their autonomy, as a means of countering Ankara’s new-found power in its southern neighbour. Relations between Benjamin Netanyahu’s government and Turkey have nosedived since the start of the Gaza war, while both SDF and Israeli officials have spoken of a willingness to work together.
A March agreement between Syrian president Ahmad Al Shara and SDF leader Mazloum Abdi for the latter’s integration into a new army has not been implemented, amid political tussling over the contours of the Kurdish fighters’ role in Syria’s military.
Fatal violence in recent months against other minorities in Syria, including Alawite and Druze populations, has made Kurdish militias more reluctant to give up both their independent governance and weapons, according to Diyarbakir MP Mr Eren. “It might be an autonomous or federal structure, but without this, the Kurds will not give up their weapons there. It’s impossible,” he said.
That view is at sharp odds with how both Damascus and Ankara see the country’s governance. Mr Al Shara has ruled out the idea of federalism that would allow the Kurdish groups to retain the level of autonomy they built up over the past 14 years of civil war in Syria. Turkey has replaced Russia and Iran as one of the new government’s main foreign backers, and Mr Erdogan too rejects any room for what he sees as separatist ambitions on his country’s southern border.
“We have always supported the territorial integrity of Syria, and we oppose plans for its partition,” Mr Erdogan told MPs in Ankara on October 1. “To ensure the territorial integrity of Syria, and to prevent the formation of terror groups beyond our borders, we are using all political channels and dialogue.”
Kurds retaining any sort of autonomy in Syria is exactly the thing that diminishes trust in the process among many in Turkey, according to some observers.
“Of course, the ongoing uncertainty in Syria is also playing a critical role in terms of the lack of people’s trust towards the process,” Mr Yesiltas of Seta said. “People believe that, yes, PKK can lay down their weapons, but if they will have strategic gains in Syria with the continuation of this autonomous region, then this will not be peace.”
Turkey has carried out extensive cross border military operations in Syria against Kurdish militias, and has threatened further action if they do not dissolve themselves into a Syrian army run from Damascus. If the March agreement is not implemented, “military intervention will become inevitable through the joint will of Ankara and Damascus,” Mr Erdogan’s ally Devlet Bahceli said last month.
Ultimately, the SDF’s fate in Syria is key to that of the PKK’s dissolution more broadly, observers say. “Today, the most important problem facing the process still appears to be Syria,” said Mr Coskun. More military operations to counter this would not solve the issues at hand, he believes. Instead, Turkey could play a more active mediation role between the SDF and the Damascus government to reach an agreement over the Kurdish fighters’ army integration, he believes. “If the situation returns to conflict, for example, if another military operation is carried out, then there will be no possibility of resolving the problems in Syria,” he said.
What next?
The PKK’s dissolution is one of the most sensitive issues in Turkey, and the group’s reach means it has ramifications across the Middle East.
It remains unclear how the competing demands of Turks and Kurds – for and against PKK members’ reintegration, use of Kurdish language, and possible greater freedoms for Ocalan, can be reconciled by the parliamentary committee overseeing the process. Parliament reconvened after its summer recess on October 1, opening the path to a push for progress. The Turkish parliament’s media office did not respond to a request for comment from The National. Ultimately, the committee’s work would be a springboard for decisions that would have to be taken by parliament as a whole, Mr Yesiltas said.
“It is going to be not easy to establish a consensus, of course,” he said. “But one way or another, they have to agree on common points, because the success of this process is really critical, otherwise, the violence can return, and this is not good for all parties.”
Turkish officials speak of a new era of unity and brotherhood among all citizens, ethnic Turks and Kurds alike. For relatives of PKK members, and even for Kurds not directly linked to the group, its dissolution should result in broader rights for the minority community.
Ms Oyunlu was happy to know that her daughter Sinda is alive, having seen her in the PKK weapons burning ceremony on TV. On a footing that guarantees her community’s rights, she wants the conflict to end.
