The end of PKK’s armed struggle?
Rashed Rahman
Thirty fighters of the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) burned their weapons at the mouth of a cave in northern Iraq on July 11, 2025 rather than surrender them to Turkish authorities in a symbolic step towards ending a decades-long insurgency. Half the fighters were women, including their commander Bese Hozat, who read out a statement declaring the group’s decision to disarm. The PKK ranks are a reflection of its success in mobilising women for the armed struggle and giving them command responsibilities. Further handovers (burning?) of weapons is expected, but there is no confirmation when and where so far. After the burning ceremony, the fighters were to return to the mountains. The symbolic surrender process was expected to unfold throughout the summer. The PKK, on its incarcerated and kept in solitary confinement since 1999 leader Abdullah Ocalan’s call, decided in May 2025 to dissolve itself and switch to open parliamentary politics. Thus seems to have come to a close the PKK’s armed struggle since 1978 for, at a minimum, Kurdish linguistic, cultural and political rights (autonomy) within Turkiye, and at a maximum, secession and an independent Kurdish state. The conflict cost over 40,000 lives, burdened the economy and engendered deep social and political divisions. PKK’s ideology was originally a fusion of revolutionary socialism, Marxism-Leninism and Kurdish nationalism. Turkiye over the years has consistently carried out military suppression campaigns, banned PKK in 1984, abducted Abdullah Ocalan from abroad in 1999 and kept him in solitary confinement since in an island prison in the Sea of Marmara. Of late, indirect negotiations between the Turkish authorities and Ocalan finally yielded the disarmament/dissolution decision by PKK.
Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan welcomed the development, hoping it would lead to peace and security in the country. Despite his optimism, the road ahead appears uncertain, since there is little or no news about what the PKK has been offered in return for its decision to disarm/dissolve. PKK’s demands include the release of Abdullah Ocalan. The portents are not good if the statement of Turkish officials engaged in the negotiations are taken note of. They display no intention to offer any concessions on even the minimum Kurdish demands such as linguistic, cultural and political rights. What then, it may be asked, will the Kurds get in exchange for disarming? It seems obvious that the (long standing) failure to offer even autonomy carries the seeds of renewed conflict.
For as long as the Turkish post-Kemalist state has been in existence, the Kurds were denied use of their own language, culture, identity and autonomy in the name of the supposed advantages of a unified, centralised state. (The Kurds were disparagingly referred to as ‘Mountain Turks’.) Erdogan’s long stint in power yielded some cultural concessions, but these proved insufficient to quell Kurdish alienation. Military campaigns against the Kurds in southeastern Turkey led to PKK fighters seeking and obtaining safe havens in northern Iraq, a semi-autonomous Kurd region within that country. PKK controls hundreds of villages in Iraqi Kurdistan. Turkey’s forays across the border to attack the PKK safe havens intensified in recent years with Ankara establishing outposts across the border and frequently attacking PKK positions. This produced tensions between Iraqi Kurds and the PKK, blamed for bringing the war to the doorstep of the former. It was after the shift in Iraq’s posture in April 2024, when it banned the PKK following high level security meetings between Iraqi and Turkish officials that the PKK’s safe havens were rendered no longer safe. The combination of military difficulties in this situation and the indirect negotiations between the Turkish authorities and Ocalan finally produced the current turnaround. With the PKK weakened and the Kurdish people exhausted, and no end in sight to the seemingly endless war, Ocalan’s PKK finally swallowed the bitter pill. This was reflected in the crowds attending the surrendered arms burning, with both cheering and weeping in evidence.
The Kurds, divided between four countries, Turkey, Syria, Iraq and Iran, have suffered an unfortunate history. Mullah Mustafa Barzani’s armed struggle for autonomy or independence for Iraqi Kurdistan in the 1960s was eventually defeated and he sought sanctuary in the Soviet Union. (His son currently heads the Iraqi Kurdistan semi-autonomous region.) Iran’s Kurds’ uprising after the 1979 Iranian revolution was brutally crushed. The Syrian Kurds joined hands with the US to combat Islamic State and other extremist religious groups in the country’s civil war. Now the Turkish Kurds, having given up the armed struggle without any evident reward in return, contemplate an uncertain future, given Turkey’s past record and current disposition.
The lesson to be learnt is that any multi-ethnic, multi-national state not prepared to concede autonomy reflected in linguistic, cultural, economic and political rights to its minority nationalities, more often than not ends up with long and seemingly unending avoidable conflict to its own cost. Such conflicts, as they drag on, radically escalate from the demand for autonomy to breakaway independence, successful in this endeavour or not.
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