It is a mixture of hope and questioning. The Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) approved, on Saturday, March 1, the call of its historic leader Abdullah Öcalan to stop hostilities with Turkey and to open discussions for its dissolution. “In order to open the way to the implementation of the APO call (uncle, in Kurd, editor’s note) to peace and a democratic society, we declare a cease-fire from today,” announced the PKK executive committee, based in the north of Iraq, thus responding to the historic call of its founder, imprisoned for twenty-six years.
This truce, if respected and leads to a peace agreement, would end four decades of guerrilla warfare which left at least 40,000 dead. In a long message published in Turkish by the ANF agency, close to the armed party, the PKK approves in capital letters the message of Öcalan, issued on Thursday in Istanbul: “We agree with the content of the call as it is, and we declare that we will respect and implement it”. “None of our forces will take armed action unless they are attacked,” he said.
At the end of four months of dialogue initiated by the Turkish authorities and led by the main pro-Kurdish party Dem, Abdullah Öcalan launched an appeal for “peace and a democratic society”, ordering the PKK to “lay down their arms” and to “dissolve”. For him, the era prevailing when he decreed the armed struggle in 1984, he was revolted insisted by affirming “assuming the historical responsibility of this call”. The management of the PKK claims freedom for its 75 -year -old founder, condemned for life and detained on an island off Istanbul: “The leader Abdullah Öcalan must be able to live and work in complete physical freedom and establish relations without hindrance with whom he wants, including his friends”.
“A new start”
Proof that despite the time, “APO” always inspires respect, the PKK calls it to lead the party congress in person which will be dissolved: “Only the practical leadership of the leader APO can allow the practical realization of questions such as the arms deposit. For the success of the Congress, the leader APO must direct him personally”, he underlines by proclaiming, again in capital letters, that ” is not the end but a new start “.
The Turkish authorities had initiated the dialogue in October via the main pro-Kurdish party represented in Parliament, the DEM, which went three times to the old leader of the PKK in his prison on the island of Imrali. In the aftermath of Öcalan’s call, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan praised an “historic opportunity to move towards the objective of destroying the wall of terror” and promised “to ensure that the initiated process was carried out”.
Such a reversal on both sides was hoped for by the Turkish population and the Kurdish minority, the largest in Turkey (around 20 % of the population), even if the Kurdish fighters evacuated Turkish territory after the last outbreak of violence in 2015-2016 to settle in the mountains of northern Iraq and in northeast of Syria. For Bayram Balci, researcher at Ceri-Sciences Po, a specialist in Turkey, the PKK concessions are explained in particular by a new regional deal: “The PKK no longer has the supports which it once had (with the fallen Syrian President) Bashar el-Assad”. “He may no longer have such strong support from Americans in northeast Syria”, where Washington still maintains-but for how long? – a thousand to two thousand men in the name of the fight against the jihadists of the Islamic State group.
But, recalls the historian Hamit Bozarslan, of the School of Advanced Studies in Social Sciences (EHESS) in Paris, “it is clear that the dissolution of the PKK does not mean the end of the Kurdish question: Öcalan insisted on the democratization of Turkey”. “It is not enough to lay down arms,” said one of the DEM party officials on Friday, Turcker Bakirhan. “The government must show political will and implement programs” accordingly.