PKK to Disarm in Bid to End Decades-Long Turkish Conflict
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After 40 years of armed struggle against the Turkish state, the outlawed Kurdish PKK will hold a ceremony on Friday to mark a symbolic first step in laying down its arms.
The disarmament process will start under tight security in Iraqi Kurdistan and is expected to take all summer.
Turkey’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, has hailed the move as “totally ripping off and throwing away the bloody shackles that were put on our country’s legs”.
Some 40,000 people have been killed since the conflict began, and the PKK is listed as a terror group in Turkey, the US, EU and UK. Its disarmament will be felt not just in Turkey but in Iraq, Syria and Iran.
How and where will the PKK disarm?
A small group of PKK members will symbolically lay down their weapons in a ceremony near Suleymaniyah in Iraqi Kurdistan, before going back to their bases.
For security reasons, the exact location is not being revealed, although it’s thought members of Turkey’s pro-Kurdish opposition Dem party will be there, even if other major Turkish political parties will not.
Disarmament will then continue over the coming months at points set up with the involvement of the Turkish, Iraqi and Kurdistan regional governments, BBC Turkish has been told.
In a video, the PKK’s long-imprisoned leader, Abdullah Ocalan, said it was “a voluntary transition from the phase of armed conflict to the phase of democratic politics and law”. He has been in solitary confinement on the small prison island of Imrali, south-west of Istanbul, since he was captured in 1999.
This is not the first attempt at peace involving Turkey and the PKK, but this is the best hope so far that the armed struggle that began in 1984 will come to an end.
Originally a Marxist group, the Kurdistan Workers’ Party took up arms calling for an independent state inside Turkey.
In the 1990s, they called instead for greater autonomy for Kurds, who make up about 20% of the population.
Ocalan announced a ceasefire in 2013, and urged PKK forces to withdraw from Turkey. The 2015 Dolmabahce Agreement was supposed to bring democratic and language rights for Kurds, but the fragile truce collapsed amid devastating violence, especially in the Kurdish-dominated cities of the south-east, including Diyarbakir.
Turkey’s air force targeted PKK bases in the mountains of northern Iraq. Several military campaigns have also targeted Kurdish-led forces in Syria.
The government in Ankara ruled out further talks until the PKK laid down its arms. That is now on the verge of happening.
