Middle east politics are loved in the ceremony. This besides applies to revolutionary movements that want to spread the order of society built on patriarchal and spiritual principles. specified a movement has been since its foundation in 1978, the Kurdistan Workers' organization (PKK), which organized a symbolic ceremony in the vicinity of the Iraqi town of Sulejmanija on 11 July.
A group of 30 militants and militants folded AK-47 rifles together with ammunition that digested the fire. The participants then set themselves up against the background of the image of their historical leader, who had been in Turkish prison since 1999 Abdullah Öcalana, and Besa Hozat, a high-ranking guerrilla activist, read a message in which the symbolic demolition of the weapon was presented as an act of goodwill towards the Turkish government.
This is undoubtedly a spectacular event. The hope of a lasting solution was raised – at the end of July a parliamentary committee was to be set up, whose task would be to make further steps, and legendary dissident Leyla Zan stated that the following phase should be a revision of the infamous "Law on Combating Terrorism". It is an act-bore that has been in force since 1991, providing not only for combating political violence, but besides for pursuing “saying on behalf of a terrorist organization without being a associate of it”.
However, given the past of the government-PKK relationship, the unknown terms of the agreement between the parties and the current political climate, it will be reasonable to consider that this is only the beginning of a process whose finale is uncertain.
In the geopolitical eye of the cyclone
Things went fast. In October 2024, the leader of the Coalition organization of the Nationalist Movement (MHP) Devlet Bahçeli urged Öcalan to condemn panic and end the conflict that has been going on since 1984. A delegation of the organization of Democracy and Equality of Peoples (DEM), a legal Kurdish group, was launched to prison on the island of İmralı, where the leader of the PKK resides, a 3rd force in the Turkish parliament and de facto a civilian branch of PKK.
In late February 2025, DEM held a conference at which a Turkish and Kurdish call was read Apo ("Uncle", as called Öcalana), which called on the PKK to lay down arms and self-solvation and stated that the fight for the rights of the Kurdish number (20 percent of the population of Turkey) should now only take place in legal ways. The organization announced a unilateral truce after a month, and on 12 May, at a convention in the Iraqi Kandil Mountains, where it was pushed out – a decision on self-solution. The symbolic weapon demolition ceremony completed this phase of the process.
None of the failed peace processes to date have been at this pace. The last, concluded in 2013 and broken 2 years later the truce preceded the 5 years of secret negotiations.
This time it seems that PKK as an armed and political organization was placed against the wall. Following the fierce battles in the south-east of the country, launched by a brutal 2015 Turkish Armed Forces campaign, she was completely pushed to Kandil, where in fresh years she was fumbled by the military, armed with drones and utilizing increasingly better technologies to enable recognition.
Syrian branch of PKK – The Democratic Union organization (PYD), being the backbone of the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) and ruling northern Syria (Rozhava) for almost the full civilian war that lasted from 2011 to 2024, following the fall of Bashar Al-Assad's regime, initially agreed with the fresh government of erstwhile Al-Qaeda militant Ahmad Asz-Shara and agreed to include its units in the structure of the restored state. There is inactive the Iranian organization of the Free Life of Kurdistan (PJAK) – unlike the 2015 liquidated spurs in Iraq – but in fresh years it is limited only to narrow political activity.
The revolutionary Kurdish movement, driven by the imagination of “democratic Confederalism” – a task that in the thought of Öcalan replaced Marxism-Leninism, postulating extremist decentralization and surpassing capitalism and national state (which was rehearsed in Rozhava), was in the defensive.
The president has grown up to suit your situation. Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, triumphant after the collapse of the government in Syria, where its political clients took over. To all probability, he delegated Bahçel, a erstwhile leader of the erstwhile openly fascist MHP, to admit the field in a possibly unpopular case. Reis "The Leader," as Erdoğana calls it, repeats, "the gates for Turkey without panic have opened wide", but at the same time "the peace process cannot be the subject of a market."
Especially the second of these claims, given the deficiency of specifics about what was placed on the table, makes us think that the government will play hard and will not overcompensate. However, in both editions, civilian and armed, they responded to the calls of the power camp without murmuring. Were they then put in a dead end by Erdoğan?
The litmus paper of Turkish democracy...
Turkish political commentaries have for years been fond of saying that the Kurdish issue reflects the state of democracy in Turkey. In the hottest phases of the conflict between government forces and the PKK (especially in the 1990s and after 2015), authoritarianism intensified, and in the phases of the “moist” there were periods of “democratic opening” (in the first decade of the 21st century erstwhile partial education in Kurdish was allowed, expression of identity or broadcasting of tv and radio programmes in Kurmanji – a dialect utilized by most Turkish Kurdish).
The problem, however, is that the current peace process takes place at a time erstwhile a public dictatorship is strengthened and the gestures of the President's goodwill appear to be a calculated game, the aim of which is to yet concrete the system.
Support for DEM is needed by Erdoğan to get a constitutional majority in the Grand National Assembly, where his Justice and improvement organization (ACP), together with the coalition MHP, has 325 mandates. With 63 DEM sabers, a 3/5-vote majority in 600 Members of the home would be achieved. This, in turn, would open the way for a change of constitution, including zeroing the word counter for the president (it already holds the 3rd term, with erstwhile the word counter has already reset in 2018).
The fresh constitution is presented as "democratic" (in opposition to the current 1 – dictated by the military junta ruling from 1980 to 1983). According to the best traditions of Turkish nationalism, the basic law states that Turkey is simply a unitary state, that all citizen of Turkey is Turkish, and that the primary rule of the existence of a republic is "the indivisible unity of the state and nation". All these axioms over the past decades have been the basis for the eradication of even the most shy demands of Kurdish emancipation. The Turkish State (until the 1980s declaring the Kurds to be ‘Mountain Turks’) has always reacted hysterically.
In the current situation, DEM and the dissolved PKK have clearly recognised that erstwhile the anticipation of establishing a fresh constitution that would guarantee cultural autonomy is drawn up, it has guaranteed designation of the Kurdish identity and the anticipation of school education in Kurmanji, as well as the creation of media in that language without hindrance, the game may be worth a candle.
It is besides actual that a large part of the Kurdish population, surviving in the south-east of the country, where panic has been raging for the last forty years (the 1 in the PKK edition, but besides the state counter-terrorism in the release of the loyal Kurdish “rural guards” and uniformed services) present has had a hearty adequate conflict. parent militants would like to yet see their own sons, others visit the graves of fallen guerrillas, and a large part of the population would never see bulldozers scattering their cities again.
The full problem, however, is that the promise of a more democratic constitution could mean a pact with the devil for DEM. Analyst Galip Dalay stated in a fresh conversation with Al-Jazira that the PKK solution would strengthen the legitimacy of DEM as a force no longer associated with the group considered terrorist by Turkey (and the European Union and the USA). But it doesn't seem that simple.
DEM and its earlier incarnation – the Democratic People's organization (HDP), may be tempted by the imagination of removing the constantly hanging threat of illegalisation (because there will be no more force for the links with which specified an accusation can be formulated). However, the full legitimization of the legal Kurdish movement so far was due to the fact that it was an island of democratic socialism on the Turkish political scene. As a organization of the “new left” it attracted large urban progressive circles, the LGBT community, as well as another cultural and spiritual minorities (e.g. traditionally left-wing Alewits, combated as Shiic heretics, even during the Republican period). In this regard, it was more credible than the ideologically tabulated Republican People's organization (CHP), founded by the first president of the Republic of Kemal Atatürk, long incapable to decide whether to go towards modern left-wingness, to stay by the social democratic "third way" or to return to the Kemalist, nationalistic roots.
...or a unusual defeat?
While CHP has late dealt partially with its dilemmas, leader Özgür Özel declares himself a democratic socialist in a good old style, while Arrested in March, the Mayor of Istanbul Ekram İmamoğlu in his office since 2018, he presented himself as a politician of the modern left, advocating the green transformation of the city and the improvement of public services. At the same time, he remained a believing Muslim, in effect referring to legendary leader Bülent Ecevit, who as 1 of the fewer could cross the border between secular and religious.
In the same spirit, the CHP did bows towards DEM, inviting her to cooperate and disowning dogmatic nationalism, alternatively speaking of inclusive Turkey. However, erstwhile İmamoğlu was arrested, the politicians of the procurdian party, already actively engaged in talks with the government and inadvertently overturned them, behaved temperably against the top wave of outrage over the Turkish cities in respective years.
In fresh weeks, repression against opposition has intensified. There is no 1 week before any arrest of local CHP policy on corruption charges or “participation in a criminal organization”. Erdoğan's power gradually tightens the screw.
In the face of the ongoing peace process, DEM is under a temporary protective umbrella, although it has already experienced repression – hundreds of thousands of Kurds, surviving present in cities where there are no democratically elected authorities, as those selected from the DEM letter were removed for “terror relations” and replaced by commissioners. The erstwhile leaders of the HDP party, erstwhile very popular – Selahattin Demirtaş and Figen Yüksekdağ, are inactive in prison.
The Kurdish issue in Turkey was so in a peculiar phase, with a unusual truce. The PKK has self-solved and started laying down weapons, which is expected to take respective months (the frequently cited example of the IRA shows that specified processes like to lengthen, as Irish militants stalled with flooding their arsenal with concrete for 5 years after the 1998 Large Friday Agreement). Erdoğan does not foresee "tenders", and DEM – so far the island of democracy in Turkish politics – cooperates closely with the government erstwhile it seems to be authoritarian as never. The next fewer months will show whether this unusual truce will prove to be a unusual defeat for the Turkish Kurds.
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Mateusz Chudziak – Doctor of Humanities in History. He deals with the latest past of Turkey. He worked at the Department of the mediate East and Central Asia of the Warsaw School of Economics (2023-2025) and at the Center for east Studies (2015-2021).