Cuma Çiçek on PKK disarmament and the future of Turkey's Kurdish issue

Cuma Cicek, author of “The Kurds of Turkey: National, Religious and Economic Identities” (IB Tauris), on Turkey's latest push to put an end to over four decades of the PKK's insurgency

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Were you surprised by the start of this new process?

Personally I wasn't surprised. Because the first contact to solve the Kurdish issue by peaceful means started at the beginning of the 1990s. In fact, the first time Abdullah Öcalan said they were open for an internal solution was I think 1989. That was in an interview with the famous journalist Mehmet Ali Birand. It was the first time an interview with Öcalan was published in a mainstream newspaper, in Milliyet in 1989. From the start of the 1990s there was a crisis within the PKK at the ideological level, in terms of strategy and political goals. Because after the collapse of the Soviet Union a debate started within the PKK about this ideological, strategic and political crisis. The first peace process, or dialogue process, was between 1999 and 2004. The most recent one was between 2013 and 2015. From other experiences in Ireland, Indonesia, Philippines and Colombia, you know that these kinds of processes are generally not linear; it's generally not possible to find a solution during the first attempts.

There has also been a remarkable change in the position of mainstream Kurdish politics after the general election in 2023. Because after the collapse of the 2015 peace process the leading Kurdish movement invested a lot into the loss of Erdogan. But after the May 2023 election there was a remarkable change and they started to invest in “third way” politics, which has been based on finding an alternative in Turkish politics between the ruling bloc and the opposition. So the relationship between the leading Kurdish movement and the main opposition Republican People's Party (CHP) changed. We now know that the first contact started between Kurdish politics with the Justice and Development Party (AK Party) after the 2023 election. So in fact it wasn't surprising when I heard about the latest process.

Ocalan's 27 February statement calling on the PKK to disarm and dissolve itself appeared to abandon previous demands about federalism, local autonomy and democratisation. It even seemed to downplay cultural and language demands. Some commentators suggest it amounted to a complete capitulation. Do you agree?

I do not agree. Because I think the main quality of this call was not its content but its aim. Basically the aim of the call is to put an end to the PKK's armed struggle and dissolve the PKK. When we look at the text, it was just one-and-a-half pages. In it Öcalan discusses the 20th century, the first century of the Republic, and the politics of Turkey in the 1980s and 90s.

So the main aim of Öcalan's call is to respond to the Turkish state. Basically, Öcalan was speaking to the Turkish state, not the PKK or Kurdish society. That is the first thing. The second thing to underline is the fact that when we analyse the text we need to remember some characteristics of Öcalan. Firstly, we know that Öcalan is a minimalist person. When we look at the first peace process between 1999 and 2004, and then the Oslo process between 2007 and 2011, we see that generally Öcalan has a minimalist perspective. He first tries to build a framework for dialogue. I think that is a strategy to guarantee a negotiation and to form the basis for dialogue. So when I look at this minimalist perspective, I see a continuity since the first dialogue process in 1999.

The second thing is that Öcalan left behind political demands based on territory in 1999. So this is not the first time that Öcalan has excluded solutions based on territory. In 1999, Öcalan's basic proposal was a democratic republic. He suggested that a general democratisation process within the EU accession process and the recognition of linguistic and cultural rights would be enough to find a solution for the Kurdish issue. During the Oslo process, the main idea was “democratic autonomy”. Democratic autonomy suggested a regional decentralisation based on the geography of the region, not on ethnic or national region. So a federal Kurdistan or autonomous Kurdish region was not part of the Oslo process discussion. A

Lastly, in the 2013-15 peace process, Öcalan started with the democratic autonomy project, as a continuation of the Oslo project. But during the last year, in 2015, Ocalan acknowledged that the concept of autonomy was not welcomed by the state. So he suggested using “local democracy” instead of democratic autonomy.

So when we look at the main frameworks that Öcalan has recommended to solve the Kurdish issue since 1999, I see a continuity, not a rupture, in his discourse. But as I said at the beginning, the main objective of the latest call is to calm the state, to convince the state that he's ready for a new process, an ultimate solution, to end PKK violence. That's why I think the main actor that Öcalan addressed is not the Kurdish population or the Kurdish people, but the Turkish state.