After more than forty years of fighting the Turkish state, Abdullah Öcalan, founder of the Kurdish Workers Party (PKK), to put down his party members on Thursday. Possibly that is the start of a change in the history of the Kurds, Turkey and the rest of the region. What about that history? And is there announcement to Öcalan’s announcement? Four questions and answers in a row.
1Why is Öcalan evoking right now to dissolve the PKK?
The current PKK is no longer the PKK of the eighties and nineties, when it fought a guerrilla war against the Turkish state in the south and east of Turkey and managed to sow fear by committing attacks throughout the country. They demanded an independent state for the Kurds, which form just under 20 percent of the population.
Although the PKK attacks have never been completely stopped, the organization is a military wing lamb today. The Turkish army has managed to expel the militants from the southeast of the country in the last ten years.
Nowadays PKK leaders hide with a large part of their men in the Qandil Mountains in Northern Iraq. But they are also not safe for the Turkish drone attacks with which they are regularly bombarded.
Öcalan (75) has been stuck in the Turkish prison since 1999. At that time, his rhetoric seemed to get milder, although as a prisoner he could not always speak freely anymore. According to him, the PKK would no longer fight for its own state, but for more Kurdish autonomy and rights. “I want to see peace before I die,” Öcalan would also have said in 2013.
On the other hand, the Turkish government seemed to seek rapprochement in recent months. For example, the legal nationalist Devlet Bahceli, a political ally of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, hinted on a reduction in punishment for Öcalan if he would call on the PKK to lay down the weapons. Öcalan now seems to have responded.
Call from Kurdish leader Öcalan makes Hope revive at the end of armed struggle PKK
2Who are the Kurds?
Not only Turkey has a Kurdish population. With roughly forty million people-estimates vary-the Kurds in size are the fourth ethnic group in the Middle East (after the Arabs, Persians and Turks). The Kurdish people live throughout the region, mainly in Iraq, Iran, Syria and Turkey. They share their own culture and speak different dialects of the Kurdish language. Most Kurds are Sunni Muslims, but there are also Kurdish Shiites and Christians.
After the First World War, the Western powers promised the Kurds their own state. A promise that was broken with the Lausanne Treaty in 1923, which set the boundaries of present -day Turkey. Nothing was agreed with the Kurds, and it remained that way. In the past hundred years, Kurdish revolts took place in different countries. In vain: it never came from its own state, although the Iraqi Kurds acquired a great deal of autonomy. Instead, the Kurdish language and culture was often seen and suppressed as a threat.
3What does this mean for the Kurds in Syria?
The presence of the Kurds in the neighboring countries of Turkey was a common thread in Turkish foreign policy for a long time. Ankara feared that if Kurds in other countries would gain influence, that unrest among their own Kurdish population could further stir up.
In recent years, especially the Kurdish battle groups (SDF) in northeastern Syria were a thorn in the eye of Ankara. During the Syrian Civil War, those groups got more than a quarter of the country and also maintain close ties with the PKK. Turkey grabbed his chance by increasing the battle with the Syrian Kurds with air strikes and supporting hostile local militias after the fall of the Assad regime last December.
There was also Turkish troop structure on the Syrian border. Turkey “prepared to start a full war, but we asked them to give room for negotiations,” said the new Syrian leader Ahmed al-Sharaa in an interview of The Economist. Al-Sharaa wants the Kurdish battle groups to resign and join a National Syrian army.
“If peace comes in Turkey, there is no more excuse to keep attacking us in Syria,” SDF leader Mazloum Abdi told Reuters news agency on Thursday. The question is whether Ankara agrees.
4Is peace actually coming?
That is not certain. Previous negotiations between the Turkish state and the PKK ran Spaak in both 2011 and 2015. And although Öcalan enjoys a lot of prestige within the PKK, it is not clear whether the leadership in Northern Iraq agrees with its change of course. When Bahceli came up with his proposal for Öcalan last October in exchange for his call to the PKK to lay down the weapons, the next day a major attack by the PKK followed the headquarters of a military technology company near Ankara. Five people died.