The day after President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s governing ally raised the prospect of a deal to end the four-decade Kurdish insurgency last year, a man and woman armed with assault rifles and explosives entered one of Turkey’s biggest defence companies, killing seven people.
The October attack on the headquarters of Turkish Aerospace Industries was a stark reminder that the Kurdistan Workers’ party (PKK) still posed a deadly threat despite a relentless military campaign against the militants.
Now, after four decades of fighting and 40,000 lives lost, there is cautious hope that the conflict haunting Turkey could end. On Thursday, Abdullah Öcalan, who founded the PKK in 1978 and is serving a life sentence, called on his followers to lay down their guns and disband the group.
If Öcalan’s call is heeded by the PKK, it would deliver Erdoğan a political coup, potentially securing Turkey’s longest-serving leader vital support from pro-Kurdish lawmakers to pursue possible pathways to extending his rule into a third decade when his term expires in 2028.
The need to resolve the conflict has become more acute after Turkish-backed forces overthrew the Assad regime in Syria, where a powerful militant group dominated by Kurds could pose a threat to Erdoğan’s efforts to help stabilise the country.
Yet the endeavour is fraught with pitfalls. Erdoğan’s last attempt to negotiate a political solution with the PKK in 2015 collapsed into the worst fighting in decades.
The latest talks with Öcalan have taken place behind a wall of secrecy, and it is unknown what either side is willing to concede. The PKK has said it hopes for Öcalan’s release, and in the past sought a broad amnesty for fighters in its ranks.
Öcalan, 75, is viewed by many of Turkey’s 17mn ethnic Kurds as the iconic leader in a struggle for Kurdish rights. In his appeal, he said the PKK was established when “democratic politics” were closed off to Kurds, but now Turkey’s acceptance of a Kurdish identity and other improvements mean the PKK “has completed its lifespan and made its dissolution necessary”.
But Öcalan’s ability to sway the 5,000 or so PKK fighters, holed up mostly in the Qandil mountains of Iraq, and their affiliates in Syria will now be put to the test.
Just last week, a PKK commander, Duran Kalkan, warned that “no one should expect peace to happen immediately” and that a deal will require “a long process with a struggle”.
The last attempt to secure peace included discussions on boosting Kurdish cultural and political rights. It fell apart after a Kurdish political party won its largest-ever vote share and deprived Erdoğan’s government of single-party rule. The Turkish military responded with a ferocious offensive in the country’s predominantly Kurdish south-east, driving out a vastly diminished PKK.
A decade-long crackdown on the non-violent Kurdish political movement followed, with thousands of activists jailed and more than 150 elected mayors dismissed from their posts over the years. Kurdish politician Selahattin Demirtaş, who challenged Erdoğan for the presidency, has been in prison since 2016 for his political speeches, despite a European Court of Human Rights order that he be freed.
Focusing just on the disarmament of the PKK without addressing Kurdish grievances could doom this effort to secure long-term peace, said Cuma Çiçek, a researcher at the French Institute of Anatolian Studies in Istanbul.
“The Kurdish issue is bigger than just the PKK,” said Çiçek, who wrote a book on the Kurdish conflict and previous attempts to forge peace. “For a lasting solution, there has to be democratisation and elimination of the economic inequalities and discrimination Kurds face.”
Öcalan stopped short of making any demands from the government. But the Peoples’ Democracy and Equality Party, or Dem, parliament’s third-biggest grouping whose base is overwhelmingly Kurdish, has long pushed for education in the Kurdish language and the release of thousands of politicians and activists from prisons.
“Öcalan has now done what he can. This is a first step, and progress will come after we see what steps the government and state will take,” said Dem lawmaker Saruhan Oluç.
Analysts say Erdoğan may be compelled to meet some of Dem’s demands in order to win its support for either changing the constitution to abolish term limits or calling snap elections for him to run for president again.
Making peace with the PKK could also lead to a major advance in Erdogan’s mission to stabilise Syria under a friendly new government, as the biggest threat to those new rulers is the US-backed Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), which is dominated by Kurds and close to the PKK.
Success with the PKK “will pave the way for reconciliation” with Syria’s Kurds, said Reha Ruhavioğlu, director of the Kurdish Studies Centre in Diyarbakir, the largest city in Turkey’s south-east.
Getting the SDF to back down will not be easy either, however. Its commander Mazloum Abdi said on Thursday that while he welcomed Öcalan’s “historic” call, it “was not related to us in Syria”.
But Erdoğan probably hopes that peace at home could at least help persuade Washington to drop its support for the SDF. The Trump administration said it hoped that Öcalan’s call would ease Turkey’s concerns about the Syrian group.
Whether Erdogan’s gambit succeeded or ended in more violence, the Turkish president would end up “the biggest winner”, said Gönül Tol, director of the Middle East Institute’s Turkey programme in Washington.
“If he can say that he was the one to end this insurgency, it will boost his prospects in 2028,” she said. “And if things don’t go smoothly, he can still say he tried, then increase pressure on Kurds [and] have a more sympathetic international audience.”
But for Fatma, a 42-year-old textile worker whose brother died fighting for the PKK in south-east Turkey in 2016, Öcalan’s message offers the first ray of hope in a decade for “Kurds and Turks tired of war”.
“Just as my heart burns for my brother, then the families of soldiers ache for theirs. It’s time for the guns to be silent,” she said.
