The Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) is withdrawing all its fighters from Turkey, seemingly putting a definitive end to the armed uprising of the Kurds that began in 1984 and claimed more than 40,000 lives. The PKK announced this on Sunday morning through a Kurdish news agency, reports the French news agency AFP.
The news follows a call that PKK leader Abdullah Öcalan made from a prison near Istanbul at the beginning of this year. Öcalan called on PKK fighters to lay down their weapons and continue the fight for Kurdish rights and autonomy peacefully from now on. Not much later, the movement decided at a conference to dismantle it. In return, the Turkish government would release a number of Kurdish political prisoners, the Kurds would receive more cultural rights, such as education in their own language, and the 76-year-old Öcalan would receive a reduced sentence.
According to Öcalan, the Kurds’ “historic mission” had been accomplished. He is highly respected within the Kurdish resistance, but has not appeared in public since 1999 and appears to have mellowed in captivity. Shortly after it became known at the beginning of this year that the Turkish government had reopened negotiations, the PKK committed another attack in Ankara. Five people were killed. The BBC spoke in the spring in the mountains of northern Iraq, a commander of the Kurdish movement said that disarmament is not an option.
No figures are known about the number of PKK fighters still in Turkey. The remainder are now moving to Northern Iraq, where many Kurds live. The first twenty-five PKK fighters are said to have already arrived there.
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