When the guerrilla fighters of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) began their armed struggle back in 1984, the Cold War was in its death throes. Ronald Reagan was trying to roll back the Soviet “Evil Empire”, the USSR was chaotically transitioning toward Gorbachev, and the IRA had just narrowly failed to assassinate Margaret Thatcher.
Some of those Kurdish fighters have been in the mountains ever since, waging a seemingly endless campaign against Turkey. When they finally descended this week, to ceremonially destroy their weapons as part of a closely-watched disarmament process, they brought a symbolic end to the Cold War era of armed campaigns for national liberation. In his first video appearance for over 25 years, jailed Kurdish figurehead Abdullah Öcalan announced: “The PKK movement and its national liberation strategy… has had its day… I believe not in arms, but in the power of politics.”
With their traditional Kurdish clothes and battered Kalashnikovs, the guerrilla fighters certainly seem a world away from the hair gel, wrap-around sunglasses and slick suits of the media scrum, spooks and politicos awaiting them at the foot of the mountain. Öcalan made his historic video appearance sporting a Lacoste polo shirt, prompting ordinary Kurds to rush out and buy up the brand.
The present day is strange, but also familiar. Some headlines from 1984 could have been written just a few weeks ago — try “Nuclear Tensions Peak as TV Star Turned US President Jokes About Dropping The Bomb”. And amid our century’s New Cold War, the Kurds are grappling with contemporary versions of some age-old questions. When wars never really end but endlessly evolve into proxy and frozen conflicts, what does it actually mean to declare victory or defeat? And amid spiralling regional confrontations, what are the potential consequences of forging a pact with the devil, and allying with your own long-term oppressors?
As I fly into Iraqi Kurdistan to witness the closely-guarded ceremony first-hand, these questions immediately present themselves. The originally Turkish-based PKK has followed a very different path to the semi-autonomous Kurdistan Region of Iraq (KRI). While the former has relied on black-market weaponry to fight the Turkish Armed Forces in pursuit of a decentralised, autonomous federation based on direct democracy and women’s autonomy, the KRI has taken a more conventional approach. Following Saddam Hussein’s genocide of the Iraqi Kurds and their loyal backing of the USA’s 2003 invasion, the Iraqi Kurds have achieved quasi-statehood, underwritten by oil wealth and Western support. Some of the Iraqi Kurdish special forces guarding the ceremony, which takes place here on “neutral” soil, sport US flags on their multicam helmets.
To its Kurdish critics, the KRI has thus been transformed into a bargain-basement Dubai. The rule of law and living standards might be better here than elsewhere in Iraq, but a small coterie around Kurdish tribal leaders has grown rich in gated compounds, while the majority languish amid poverty and political ennui. “There is not a state here, but only ‘authorities’… Our democratic revolution could not be translated into true legitimacy,” says Haval Abubakir, the regional governor who is also a prominent domestic critic of the KRI.
Despite these shortcomings, the KRI is a world away from the remote tunnel networks where thousands of PKK fighters still shelter from Turkish air-strikes. With its mushrooming high-rises and untouchable political dynasties built on the reputations of one-time freedom fighters, the KRI offers an image of a path untraveled for Turkey’s own Kurdish population, many of whom are relieved at the end of hostilities even as they worry about downing arms without clear guarantees from the Turkish side.
The mood at the disarmament ceremony is accordingly pensive. Our phones and cameras taken away, we wind up the mountainside to the symbolic site — a cave which first sheltered a clandestine Kurdish printing press during a 1923 uprising against occupying British forces. In conversations among attendees, phrases like “bittersweet” and a “bitter pill to swallow” recur. Pride of place is given to representatives of Turkey’s Peace Mothers. Clad in white headscarves, these formidable women have all lost children in conflict with the Turkish army. In their 60s and 70s, they brave heavy prison sentences as they protest Turkey’s continued repression of the Kurdish cause. “It’s enough war, enough pain, enough blood,” one says. “We just want peace, then all will be well.” Despite these brave words, her face is grim. Other members of her delegation break down in tears during the ceremony.
The PKK fighters themselves are characteristically defiant, even as they acknowledge the difficulty of the step they are making. As is customary, the delegation is 50% women, and led by the PKK’s top female commander, Besê Hozat. “As you know, things did not come about with ease, at no cost, and without waging struggle,” she says in a prepared statement, her voice ringing from the precipitous mountain walls. “Quite the contrary — all gains came at heavy cost, through struggling tooth and claw.”
The event is a battle of narratives and jostling camera crews, with each side seeking to claim a victory. While Turkish TV broadcast images of twisted, blackened weapons and President Erdoğan boasts of a “terror-free Turkey”, on the Kurdish side the hope is that the PKK’s disarmament will pave the way for both domestic reforms in Turkey and a better future for all the region’s Kurds. Though security forces try to prevent it, audience members defy orders to rise, applaud and chant the Kurdish slogan “Woman, Life, Freedom”. Rather than handing their weapons over to Turkish authorities, the Kurds make a point of assembling the guns into a pyre and burning them. “We voluntarily destroy our weapons… as a step of goodwill and determination,” Hozat says.
What now? The path toward peace is difficult, but not unimaginable. The Irish, South African and Basque liberation movements, which have all supported the Kurdish cause, demonstrate the simultaneous possibility and limitations of the peace process. (In one meaningless but pleasing coincidence, an exiled Basque leader reportedly sparked controversy by wearing his own Lacoste-branded shirt during Eighties peace talks with Spain, sparking paranoid accusations of collusion with France.)
Basque political representative Igor Zulaika, who also attends the disarmament ceremony, sees his own party’s sense of “vertigo”, as they took necessarily “blind steps” along their own path from armed struggle to parliamentary participation, reflected in the Kurdish experience. “It was a historical moment, a moment of great hope. Of course, hesitation is part of every such moment, and that’s understandable.”
The ceremony is also attended by representatives of various peace-building NGOs, who share concerns the disarmament process is running in “reverse”, since Kurdish weapons are being downed before any concrete alternative has been established, and without any third party to oversee the PKK’s potential entry to Turkish political life. “The fact we had a strategy, the fact we were united and had the support of our people, meant the process went forward,” Zulaika recalls.
That said, the Kurds already have a political party in Turkey, which has survived a dozen successive bans and the continued detention of thousands of Kurdish mayors, MPs and other activists. Meanwhile, Kurdish representatives speak of handing responsibility from the PKK and its variously-initialled affiliates to a whole “alphabet” of civil-society and political bodies pursuing Öcalan’s federal vision. The systematic release of Kurdish political prisoners would demonstrate Turkey is minded to move the peace process forward: but until now, Erdoğan has responded only by setting up a new parliamentary commission to oversee the disarmament process. Prior Turkish-Kurdish peace processes have collapsed following domestic and geostrategic shifts, while Turkish airstrikes are currently continuing despite the supposed ceasefire.
Whatever happens next, the ceremony is a point of no return for the decades-old conflict — and thus also a key turning-point for the Middle East at large. While analysts tend to read Erdoğan’s detente with the Kurds as motivated by his unlikely pursuit of Kurdish support in Turkey’s Parliament, its outcome will affect not only Turkey but also several of the Middle East’s key current battlefields.
“Whatever happens next, the ceremony is a point of no return for the decades-old conflict — and thus also a key turning-point for the Middle East at large.”
In neighbouring Syrian Kurdistan, PKK affiliates have braved warfare against ISIS and Turkey to establish an embattled, unrecognised polity uniting millions on the basis of their federal vision. A functional transition to peace should help these embattled, Western-allied Kurds in their own, ongoing negotiations as they seek to preserve autonomy while reconciling with the Turkish-allied Islamist forces that recently took control of Damascus.
Here in Iraqi Kurdistan, Turkey has established over 100 military bases in a de facto occupation, suspended flights to the regional airport, and conducted thousands of consequence-free airstrikes, often killing civilians and journalists. Iraqi Kurdish journalist Rebin Bekir survived an airstrike which killed two of his colleagues. “We aren’t members of any armed organisation, but journalists, just like you,” he says, displaying his scars.
As well as potentially ending these violations and bringing stability to northern Iraq and Syria, a ceasefire could pave the way for broader geopolitical reset. Turkey, Iran, Iraq and the ruling Iraqi Kurdish party have long set aside other differences to coordinate against the PKK in various constellations. But in Ankara, that calculus may finally be shifting. To many Kurds, it’s significant that the peace deal is fronted not by Erdoğan but by the unlikely figure of hard-Right ultra-nationalist Devlet Bahçeli. Bahçeli is popularly perceived as a representative of Turkey’s so-called deep state, the military-intelligence complex ultimately concerned not with propping up Erdoğan but preserving Turkey’s regional status — in opposition to both Iran and Israel.
On the one hand, Ankara probably hopes that Öcalan’s principled, long-term opposition to Israel will neuter any potential Israeli sponsorship of Kurdish national ambitions. Notably, Turkey recently allowed documents to leak in which the jailed Kurdish leader warned against allowing Israel to “turn [Kurdistan] into another Gaza” by extending their influence through Kurdish regions in Syria and Iran.
On the other, Ankara is equally wary of what it views as a pragmatic marriage of convenience between Iran and the PKK, and simultaneously hopes to neuter the threat of the Kurds profiting from any future confrontation between Turkey and Iran. At the outside, given Ankara’s desire to curry favour in Washington by playing up its anti-Iranian credentials, Turkish and Kurdish interests could even directly align against the pariah state. If the PKK does down weapons altogether, many could end up in the hands of its Iranian affiliate PJAK, the most serious armed force on the ground capable of posing a threat to Tehran.
Whether the peace deal stands or falls, the Kurds’ strategic location means they’re poised to exert outsized pressure on what increasingly resembles a three-way confrontation between Turkey, Israel and Iran — with Iraq and Syria as key battlegrounds. “If the Kurds are allowed to be a part of stability, not a factor causing more pressure, it’s better for all concerned,” says Abubakir, the governor of Sulaymaniyah Province. Yet two days before we speak, explosive drones likely fired by Iranian-backed militias were shot down over his city. These realities bring to mind the sombre lines written three centuries ago by the great Kurdish poet Ehmedê Xanî: “Like a great wall the Kurds stand between the Turks and the Persians…/Both sides make the Kurdish clans/Targets of their poison-tipped arrows.”
Kurdish representatives optimistically present the disarmament ceremony as a turning-point, from their long 20th century of struggle and betrayal toward Öcalan’s vision of a peaceful 21st century movement pursuing bottom-up, grassroots change. As a symbolic gesture, the guerrilla fighters place their Kalashnikovs, one-by-one, onto a pyre, alongside a rocket launcher and light machine gun. They add wood and petrol, and set it alight.
The bonfire of weaponry is constructed to resemble the Kurds’ traditional New Year fire, which symbolises rebirth and renewal. But however optimistic the symbolism, the fact remains the guns are burned. As the guerrilla fighters return to their mountains, hands which have clutched weapons for decades now hang loosely at their sides.
