The first thing I will say is, “What peace process”? Maybe I am wrong. Indeed, I hope I am, but this so-called PKK peace process with Turkey seems more like a PKK surrender than some type of quid pro quo deal that provides for the PKK disarming and disbanding in return for Turkish guarantees of Kurdish political, social, and cultural rights.[1] Where are there any provisions in this so-called peace process for the PKK fighters, supporters, and leaders including Abdullah (Apo) Ocalan himself to be accepted in a suddenly democratized Turkey? Indeed, all this was already tried and failed as far back as 1993 when the PKK announced a unilateral ceasefire following contacts between Ocalan and then-Turkish president Turgut Ozal. Again in 1999 and subsequently, Ocalan attempted dialogue and another ceasefire following his capture by Turkish authorities only to be offered abject surrender and incarceration.
The most serious, but once again failed attempt to reach peace in the past, was the so-called Kurdish Opening in 2007-2011 and then even stronger attempt in 2013-2015.[2] All these earlier attempts failed because the two sides basically framed the issue in starkly different terms. The Turkish government saw the issue as one of terrorism, while the PKK viewed it as a much broader one of Kurdish rights. For the government the solution was one of disarmament and the end of PKK terrorism within the existing ultra-nationalist Turkish constitution which granted no rights for the Kurds as Kurds. All the government basically offered was Kurdish assimilation into the larger Turkish society and constitutional order. However, for the PKK and its many (but, of course, not all) ethnic Kurdish supporters, the demand was for a constitutionally guaranteed place for Turkey’s Kurds as Kurds.
The new so-called peace process offers little change to this continuing deadlock. Thus, unless there will be some positive movement for the Kurds (and all I see now is naïve hope), I think this so-called peace process may be dead on arrival. The PKK is not just going to go away after more than 40 years of struggle. What could Ocalan possibly be thinking? Historically, Turkish promises to the Kurds are worth little, but in this case, I do not even see any tantalizing promises, only a demand for surrender. After more than a quarter of a century of incarceration, often under conditions of long periods of total isolation, the 75-years old Reber (Leader) may have lost touch with reality or at least fallen under the influence of the Stockholm syndrome on the one hand, and the almost obsequious adoration of a cult of personality from his followers that leads him to think he can do no wrong.
Although Ocalan remains the titular leader of the PKK, I doubt that the current collective PKK leadership for more than a quarter of a century is going to accept readily his return to actual command if the Turkish government releases him as many Kurds hope under this new, so-called peace process. For that matter, if the PKK actually disbands, what would there be for Ocalan to command? Maybe what the Turkish government really wants to do is to release Ocalan and thus cause a rift in the PKK.
Of course, Ocalan’s thinking remains important because the PKK persists as an influential force in the Middle East, and Ocalan remains its symbolic leader. His books reveal both his surprisingly wide-ranging intellectualism and commitment to a political solution. As already mentioned, Ocalan also was instrumental in attempts to reach a peace settlement with the Turkish government through the so-called Kurdish Opening from 2007-2009 and an actual cease-fire from March 2013-July 2015. For these efforts the mainline U.S. weekly magazine Time, in its issue of April 29/May 6, 2013, named him as one of “the 100 most influential people in the world” and called him a “voice for peace.”[3] Previously, such praise would have been inconceivable.
In addition, Ocalan also played an important part in creating the pro-Kurdish Halklarin Demokratik Partisi (HDP) in 2014 as a party inclusive of non-Kurdish progressive elements. This broader-based party managed to become the first pro-Kurdish party to crack the then notoriously high 10 percent threshold to enter the Turkish parliament in the elections held on June 7, 2015. Unfortunately, renewed heavy fighting between the state and the PKK broke out the following month—largely because of the HDP challenge to the Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s AK Partisi (AKP)’s continuing majority in parliament—and has been continuing until the present so-called peace process announced in February 2025.Although Ocalan remains the theoretical or symbolic leader of the PKK, as mentioned above, a number of other leaders have emerged in practice since his capture in 1999.
According to the scholar Francis O’Connor, Ocalan “seems to genuinely believe that he possesses qualities beyond those of other members of the movement and Kurdish society.”[4] However, “the application of these strategies on the ground was necessarily far removed from Ocalan’s idealised plans whose complete lack of experience as a guerrilla fighter led him to impose unworkable demands upon his field commanders” (p. 121). Continuing, O’Connor argued, “In admittedly simplified terms, strategic developments which led to positive outcomes are attributed to Ocalan and other strategies which were less successful are blamed on others within the movement or on their incorrect implementation of his instructions” (p. 221).
Even before the PKK insurgency actually began, wrote O’Connor, “Ocalan was based in Syria while the PKK guerrillas were located inside the borders of Turkey, often in isolated rural areas” (p. 221). As O’Connor noted, “this emphasizes the distinction between how conflicts are idealised at the centre and realised in the periphery” (p. 126). The strategic implications of this on the PKK’s success since Ocalan’s capture in 1999 are important to consider. Indeed, one might make a strong case that the PKK has proven more successful with Ocalan just exercising in theory the Weberian role of charismatic authority,[5] but in practice removed to the role of only a titular leader. His everyday return might jeopardize actual continuing success now implemented!
Thus, the PKK’s continued persistence and relative success may ironically depend on Ocalan’s continuing incarceration. This seemingly counter intuitive supposition is in stark contrast to the long-running, worldwide PKK demand for Ocalan’s freedom as the best and maybe only way to solve the Kurdish problem that borders on being almost obsequiously suggestive of a cult of personality. If freed, would the current PKK leadership actually accept his renewed, daily leadership? Indeed, an imaginative, but manipulative Turkish state policy might be to free the titular PKK leader and cause a leadership rift in the party.
What is more, even if there is more to this so-called PKK peace process than meets the eye, it seems to me that the Israeli, Hamas, Hezbollah, and Iran peace process and the ouster of the Assad regime in Syria, are much more important for the Middle East, including even the Kurds. This is because Syria now has a chance to end the divisions of its horrific civil war regardless of any so-called PKK peace process and thus temper Turkish ambitions based on Syrian ruins. In addition, Israel is now in a position to influence what happens to the Syrian Kurds, and, therefore, even the PKK, KRG in Iraq, and the Kurds in Iran.
On March 10, 2025, the new HTS Syrian government of interim president Ahmed al-Sharaa and Mazloum Abdi, the de facto Kurdish leader of the Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria (AANES) signed an agreement theoretically integrating the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) into the national Syrian army and government.[6] Of course, it remains to be seen if this agreement will actually be implemented. Even so, it dampens Turkish ambitions to eliminate the de facto Syrian Kurdish autonomy now legally recognized, theoretically incorporated and protected by Damascus on the southern Turkish border. Of course, all this is a stretch given Arab Syria’s historic animosity to Kurdish rights.
The Syrian Kurdish leader Mazloum Abdi, whom Turkey sees as an arm of the PKK, already has announced that the so-called PKK peace process with Turkey does not apply to his SDF and AANES. However, sudden heavy fighting in and around the Syrian coast near Latakia between the remnants of Assad’s forces and the new HTS Syrian government of Ahmed al-Sharaa questions the future of the new HTS government in Damascus. All of this reduces the seeming importance of the so-called PKK peace process in Turkey. As for the KRG and Iraqi Kurds, their prospects remain inextricably linked to the future of questionable Iraqi unity and the wider geopolitical restructuring of the Middle East following Israel’s recent successful wars against Hamas and Hezbollah and degrading of Iran’s defenses. The so-called PKK peace process in Turkey would seem at best a very secondary factor.
Even more, I doubt that the so-called PKK peace process, even if more successful than I think, will somehow help Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan gain an unconstitutional third term in office.[7] Indeed, he is already serving that unconstitutional third term through an imaginative interpretation of the Turkish constitution. True, he did win again unexpectedly in 2023, but his ruling AKP did poorly in the local elections just a year later in 2024. Too many stars would have to align correctly for the peace process to give him the pro-Kurdish DEM support he supposedly craves for the next presidential election. The Kurds already tried that road in the June 2015 elections but failed, which led to Erdogan ending the then Kurdish peace process known as the Kurdish Opening. In addition, would Erdogan’s questionable health permit yet another term?
In conclusion, although all wars do eventually come to an end, it seems that the current so-called PKK peace process is unlikely to produce this hoped for result.
Endnotes
[1]For earlier background, see Joost Jongerden and Ahmet Hamdi Akkaya, “Born from the Left: The Making of the PKK,” in Marlies Casier and Joost Jongerden, eds. Nationalisms and Politics in Turkey: Political Islam, Kemalism and the Kurdish Issue (London and New York: Routledge, 2011), pp. 123-142; Aliza Marcus, Blood and Belief: The PKK and the Kurdish Fight for Independence (New York and London, New York University Press, 2007); Ali Kemal Ozcan, Turkey’s Kurds: A Theoretical Analysis of the PKK and Abdullah Ocalan (London and New York: Routledge, 2005); Paul White, Primitive Rebels or Revolutionary Modernizers? The Kurdish National Movement in Turkey (London: Zed Books, 2000); Cengiz Gunes, The Kurdish National Movement in Turkey (London and New York: Routledge, 2012); Mehmet Gurses, Anatomy of a Civil War: Sociopolitical Impacts of the Kurdish Conflict in Turkey (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2018); and William Gourlay, The Kurds in Erdogan’s Turkey: Balancing Identity, Resistance and Citizenship (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2022). Also see Ismet G. Imset, The PKK: A Report on Separatist Violence in Turkey (1973-1992) (Istanbul: Turkish Daily News Publications, 1992); and Ismet G. Imset, “The PKK: Terrorists or Freedom Fighters?” International Journal of Kurdish Studies 10:1 & 2 (1996), pp. 45-100.
[2] For a good analysis, see Cengiz Candar, Turkey’s Mission Impossible: War and Peace with the Kurds (Lanham MD: Lexington Books, 2020).
[3] Time, April 29/May 6, 2013.
[4] Francis O’Connor, Understanding Insurgency: Popular Support for the PKK in Turkey (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2021), p. 119. The following citations from this book are listed in the text above.
[5] For background on Weber’s three different types of “legitimate authority”—traditional, legal-rational, and charismatic—see, Max Weber, The Theory of Social and Economic Organisation (New York and London: Free Press, 1947).
[6] On the Syrian Kurds, see Harriet Allsopp and Wladimir van Wilgenburg, The Kurds of Northern Syria: Governance, Diversity and Conflicts (London: I.B. Tauris, 2019); and Michael Knights and Wladimir van Wilgenburg, Accidental Allies: The U.S.-Syrian Democratic Forces Partnership against the Islamic State (London: I.B. Tauris, 2022).
[7] For recent background, see M. Hakan Yavuz, Erdogan: The Making of an Autocrat (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2021); and Michael M. Gunter, Erdogan’s Path to Authoritarianism: The Continuing Journey (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2024, among others.
