Direct Translation via Google Translate. Edited.
by Kamran Gasanov
[REGNUM] While the world press is following the preparations for negotiations on Ukraine and Donald Trump's tour of the Middle East, a historic event has taken place nearby, which in its scale could give a head start to both the overthrow of Bashar al-Assad in Syria and Trump's multi-billion dollar deals.
Formally, the matter concerns the internal situation in Turkey, but it has significance at least for Iraq, Iran and Syria, and for the general situation in the entire region. We are talking about the project of the so-called "Turkish Kurdistan".
For almost 40 years, the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) has been waging an armed struggle against the Turkish authorities and army. The struggle of PKK leader Abdullah Ocalan, who has been serving a life sentence in prison on the island of Imrali in the Sea of Marmara since 1999, began long before the group was created.
As a student at Ankara University in the early 1970s, Öcalan joined leftist groups and parties that defended the rights of the Kurds and fought against their assimilation and repression by the military that seized power in a coup.
For his political views and organizing rallies, he was sent to prison at the age of 23, which became a "school of political struggle" for him. Ocalan read a lot, studied Russian literature and Marxism. He especially liked Lenin's teaching on the right of peoples to self-determination, which successfully formed the basis of separatism and "Kurdish autonomy."
After his release and until the end of the 1970s, the future leader of the PKK tried to engage in political activity, collaborated with the left, conducted propaganda among the Alawite and Kurdish poor, held rallies, but did not resort to violence.
Two factors forced him to take up arms.
The Turkish left was not very happy to accept the Kurds into its ranks, and in 1977, his closest associate, Haki Karer, was killed in the eastern city of Gaziantep, which became Ocalan's "first bloodshed."
And exactly the following year, he created the Kurdistan Workers' Party. Initially created as a political organization, it immediately turned into a militant, guerrilla and terrorist organization. Throughout the 1980s, Ocalan, who fled to Syria due to yet another military coup, waged war and committed terrorist attacks against Turkey and Turkish officials.
The goal of the further struggle was no longer simply the recognition of the rights of the Kurds, their language and culture in Turkey, but the creation of a “Turkish Kurdistan”.
During the 1990s and early 2000s, there were at least three attempts by Ankara and the PKK to reach an agreement. But each time, the process broke down almost before it began.
The first attempt was made in 1993 by the former President of Turkey, Turgut Ozal, who combined an explosive mixture of pan-Turkism and the politics of Kurdish roots. Exactly one month after the start of negotiations, Ozal died. Presumably, he was poisoned by the Turkish secret services precisely because of the upcoming reconciliation with the Kurds.
A second attempt to find common ground fell through two years later due to a terrorist attack carried out by the PKK.
The third attempt at reconciliation was made by Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s “spiritual father,” Necmettin Erbakan, and failed due to the arrest of Ocalan himself.
The last event probably deserves a separate story, but in short it is worth saying that the detention of the Kurdish leader became a whole special operation. In search of refuge, he rushed between Greece, Italy, Russia, Belarus and the Netherlands.
But under pressure from the US, Israel and Britain, the Greeks who were sheltering him in their embassy in Kenya were forced to hand Ocalan over to Turkish special forces.
| Israel, really? Why on Earth would they care? |
On February 15, 1999, a plane took him to Ankara and from there to the prison island of Imrali, which put an end to reconciliation between the Kurds and the Turkish authorities for a long time.
Erdogan, who came to power, wanted to solve the problem of separatism in eastern Turkey. By uniting his party on the foundation of Islamism, the new Turkish prime minister was able to attract national minorities to his side.
In 2009, Erdogan announced plans to end the three-decade conflict, including increasing the use of the Kurdish language in media and political campaigns and restoring Kurdish names to towns in the east. Two years later, the Turkish leader apologized for the massacres of Zaza and Alevi Kurds in the 1930s.
In a meeting with Iraqi Kurdistan leader Masoud Barzani, who has excellent relations with Ankara and trades oil with it, Erdogan declared that “the rejection, denial and assimilation (of the Kurds) is over” and that together with the Turks they form one nation united by faith in Allah.
While Erdogan was winning over ordinary Kurds, he was still unable to achieve full reconciliation. While he was delivering his latest loud speeches, Turkish aircraft were operating in the mountains of Iraq, searching for PKK militants who had moved there after the fall of Saddam Hussein.
In 2013, against the backdrop of a common threat from ISIS*, Turkey and the PKK reached a truce, but two years later Erdogan realized that with the defeat of ISIS*, the capabilities of the Syrian branch of the PKK (the YPG and PYD groups) were growing stronger and now it was necessary to deal with the defeat of “Syrian Kurdistan.”
Then followed three military operations to divide the Kurdish cantons and then completely destroy them. In response, there were major terrorist attacks in the megacities of Istanbul and Ankara.
From that time until today, there have been no serious hints of compromise. Erdogan's administration and his ministers have placed great emphasis on the need for a complete defeat of the PKK terrorists. Moreover, these accents were heard not only in the domestic, but also in the foreign policy agenda.
This became especially noticeable during the presidency of Joe Biden, who was not very fond of Erdogan's domestic policies and criticized him for his attitude towards the Kurds in Syria. Turkish Interior Minister Suleyman Soylu went so far as to essentially blame the US for the 2022 terrorist attack carried out by the PKK in Istanbul: "It seems to me that the condolences expressed to the US today can be assessed as if the killer was one of the first to arrive at the scene of the terrorist attack."
Former Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu also complained that the US could have known about the planned terrorist attack and asked its European partners to close their consulates, but did not pass the information on to its Turkish allies.
The Kurdish issue also came up during the latest NATO expansion. Erdogan did not give Sweden the go-ahead for about a year and kept it on edge, demanding the extradition of Kurdish fighters who had settled there.
The fight against the PKK in Syria was quite successful until 2019. In Operation Peace Spring, the Turkish armed forces, together with the opposition Syrian National Army, occupied hundreds of kilometers of the border, and Erdogan agreed with Russia to withdraw YPG formations 30 km to the south.
By that time, the Turks had driven the Kurdish forces east of the Euphrates and taken the city of Afrin from them in the west.
Although Russia criticized the continuation of Turkish operations until the Euphrates region was completely cleared, and NATO countries put pressure on Ankara not only with words but also with sanctions, the status quo that remained until December 2024 rather suited Turkey.
Moscow, Tehran and Ankara condemned any form of separatism within the framework of the “Astana format,” and the emerging rapprochement between former Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and Erdogan left the Kurds in a dead end. When the rebels and militants moving from Idlib overthrew Assad, the Kurdish groups found themselves in an even worse position.
Turkey is now the main sponsor and supporter of the Syrian regime, although it is no longer Damascus's only ally. Of the foreigners, only Turkish soldiers can freely roam the territories controlled by Ahmed al-Sharaa.
Turkey builds military bases, irritating Israel. Donald Trump praises Erdogan for his strength, intelligence and “taking over Syria,” while the Turkish president demands that the Kurds lay down their arms and give up their autonomy.
With such influence and the support of the United States as the main sponsor of the Syrian Kurds, Turkey has gained real trump cards in the fight against the PKK. And, as a result, on May 12, almost half a century after its inception, the Kurdistan Workers' Party announced its self-dissolution.
This historic event took place not only because there was a change of power in Syria and the “Kurdish project” suffered a painful blow.
Long before the events in Damascus, in October last year, Erdogan's closest ally in the ruling coalition and leader of the nationalist MHP party, Devlet Bahceli, called on Ocalan to speak in the Turkish parliament and disband his organization.
Bahçeli assigned the role of mediator to deputies from the legally operating pro-Kurdish People's Unity and Democracy Party (DEM), who were supposed to conduct negotiations with Ocalan.
In the end, this is what happened. On October 24 last year, the PKK leader met with DEM MP and his nephew Rihi Omer Ocalan. At the end of December, a DEM delegation went to the prison again, and the PKK leader expressed his readiness to “make the necessary positive contribution to the new paradigm” of relations with the Kurds, promoted by Erdogan and Bahceli.
In February, Öcalan had already addressed his supporters, calling on them to lay down their arms. The key decision had been made, but it was necessary to wait for the response of the PKK members: during the years of Öcalan's imprisonment, they had gained a certain autonomy. But their reaction was approving: disband ourselves.
The significance of the self-dissolution of the RPK is difficult to overestimate.
This is the end of the armed struggle of the organization that defended the interests of Turkey's largest national minority, which, according to various estimates, numbers between 15 and 30 million people out of the republic's 80 million population.
This is the end of terror and guerrilla warfare that threatened the integrity of a key NATO country and the Middle East.
Of all the threats to Turkish statehood, the Kurdish one was the most dangerous. After all, the struggle between the secular Imamoglu and Erdogan is a struggle of ideologies, a dispute over the form of government and the vector of development, and in the confrontation with the PKK there were only two paths: either Türkiye remains whole or disintegrates.
Erdogan and his ministers are jubilant (although they are still using rather modest assessments like “Türkiye without terror”), because they have done what no Turkish leader has managed to do in 50 years.
In terms of scale, this victory is probably comparable to the merits of Ataturk, who managed to prevent the dismemberment of Turkey in his time. And yet another reason to cement his name in the history of the country and justify the extension of his power.
Situationally, Erdogan can use the victory over Ocalan as an argument to earn points in the confrontation with Imamoglu and Ozel. Like, look, your party failed, but we did. If we add the recent death of Gulen, then Erdogan managed to deal with almost all of his enemies.
If we talk about the influence on Turkish foreign policy, then the self-dissolution of the PKK, the fight against which both in Syria and in Turkey took a lot of effort and resources, will allow Ankara to act in the international arena much more confidently. At least in the same Syria.
Despite the desire of the YPG members to join the army of al-Sha'ar, they did not give up their autonomy. Erdogan made it clear that the dissolution of the PKK also applies to their members in Syria, i.e. the YPG. So the pressure on the Syrian Kurds from the tandem of al-Sha'ar and Erdogan will only increase.
After Trump's visit to Saudi Arabia, his meeting with Al-Sharaa and the lifting of US sanctions, the pair feels even more confident. After all, according to Trump, he made the decision about the meeting and sanctions after a telephone conversation with his Turkish counterpart.
The plans of the head of the White House to withdraw troops from the Euphrates region may accelerate the liquidation of the YPG. The preservation of the PKK was a sore point that Turkey's rivals, even within NATO, could press on at any moment. Now the Democrats in the US or Emmanuel Macron no longer have such an advantage.
The trigger for the dissolution of the PKK was the events in Syria - both the change of power itself and the operations of the Turkish troops.
At the same time, Bahçeli's influence on this process should not be underestimated.
Although he represents the most intransigent party on the Kurdish issue, Bahçeli knows how to be pragmatic and flexible, which he demonstrated during the protests over the arrest of Imamoglu. The head of the MHP asked Erdogan not to delay the “resolution of the issue” of the mayor of Istanbul: “If guilty, then to prison, if acquitted, to fulfill his duties, and a trial without detention and a trial on television.”
Other factors can also be noted as a motive for the PKK's self-dissolution: continuing the fight against Turkey, which was gaining strength in Syria and strengthening its army, was becoming an increasingly difficult task.
What will be the future fate of the many thousands of PKK members and activists?
They can migrate to politics, join the ranks of legal parties, first of all DEM. Haven't former soldiers and mafiosi become politicians? And who knows, maybe in politics the ex-RPK members will achieve greater success in defending the rights of the Kurds than in the Qandil Mountains?
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