A prominent Kurdish leader has added a new wrinkle to Turkey’s tense election campaign from his prison cell, suggesting the defeat of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan could open the door to a resolution of the nation’s decades-old struggle against a Kurdish militant group. By Mahmut Bozarslan and Ezel Sahinkaya in Voice of America on April 22, 2023.
Selahattin Demirtas, the former co-leader of Turkey’s pro-Kurdish Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP), is pledging to use his influence to get the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) to give up its armed resistance to Turkish rule if a new administration takes office in Ankara after parliamentary and presidential elections on May 14.
“As a promise to our people, we will do everything we can to ensure that the PKK will lay down arms in Turkey after the Erdogan regime that feeds on conflict,” Demirtas said in a tweet thread posted via his lawyers last week.
Demirtas has been held in Edirne Prison since 2016 on terror charges. Last week, a Turkish prosecutor asked for an aggravated life sentence for him in a case related to what is known as the Kobani protests in 2014 in Turkey’s Kurdish-populated southeast.
In his tweets, Demirtas said a peaceful resolution to the conflict between the PKK and Turkey would come from “the Turkish parliament within the framework of the law” and added that this could have been done earlier.
“However, Erdogan imprisoned those who wanted peace, put them in prisons, tried to shut down their parties, appointed trustees to their municipalities, and tried to scare the people to gain votes through the discourse of terror by fueling the conflict with provocations,” Demirtas said, referring to the cases against the HDP.
Erdogan accuses the HDP, the third-largest party in the Turkish parliament, of having links to the militant PKK, which has been designated as a terrorist organization by the United States, the European Union and Turkey. The HDP denies any links to terrorism.
Disarmament
Demirtas’ statements have resonated with some experts who argue that conditions are suitable for the PKK to disarm and leave it for civilian politicians to defend Kurdish rights in Turkey.
“I don’t think it is difficult for the PKK to lay down its arms in Turkey. The conditions are favorable for this,” said Reha Ruhavioglu, director of the Diyarbakir-based Kurdish Studies Center.
« Our research shows that [Kurdish people] want to see civilian actors like the HDP and Demirtas as the bearer of the Kurdish issue in Turkey,” Ruhavioglu told VOA. “In other words, the Kurdish people in Turkey also prioritize disarmament and say that the problems should be discussed through civilian politics, not weapons.”
Long conflict
Founded by Abdullah Ocalan in 1978, the PKK aims to establish a confederation of semiautonomous Kurdish regions spanning parts of Iran, Iraq, Syria and Turkey.
The almost four-decade conflict ceased once with a peace process between the PKK and Turkey in 2013, but violence resumed in July 2015. According to data collected by the International Crisis Group, at least 6,561 people, including 611 civilians, have died in clashes or terror attacks from July 2015 until the end of last month.
In a report last year, Human Rights Watch stated that clashes between the military and the PKK have greatly decreased in rural areas of Turkey’s eastern and southeastern regions.
But it said, “Turkey has concentrated its military campaign against the PKK, including with drone strikes in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq where PKK bases are located, and increasingly in northeast Syria against the Kurdish-led, U.S.- and U.K.-backed Syrian Democratic Forces.”
The PKK announced a suspension of militant activity shortly after the 7.8 and 7.6 magnitude earthquakes that jolted southern Turkey in February and later extended the pause until after next month’s Turkish elections.
The PKK has not publicly responded to Demirtas’ promise to press it to disarm.
In a written interview with VOA Turkish from his prison cell, Demirtas acknowledged the limits of his influence over the group.
“The issue is not whether the [PKK] listens to me or not, » he wrote. « If I make a call, they will not pay attention, it is obvious. But if some steps are taken for a possible solution in the parliament within an open, transparent and legal framework, of course, the actors will have to take this into account.”
Demirtas told VOA in messages relayed by his lawyers that he is proposing to work on creating the political, legal and social basis of a solution to the long-running conflict.
“And of course, we will do this, » he wrote. « We will create the appropriate environment and create the process where the weapons will be laid down. I want to emphasize that this is not difficult or impossible.”
By Mahmut Bozarslan and Ezel Sahinkaya in Voice of America on April 22, 2023.