On 12 May, news agencies reported that the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) had decided to disarm and disband. The announcement sparked hopes of an end to the war that has been ongoing for over four decades between the Turkish state and the PKK.
Ismail Küpeli researches and writes primarily on nationalism, racism, and anti -Semitism in Germany and Turkey.
This development, which would have been unthinkable before last year, stems from a rather opaque process that started in the winter of 2024–2025. Since then, both sides have released a large number of sometimes contradictory statements, thus making an assessment significantly more difficult. In order to gauge whether this is truly a peace process, it is necessary to look at the prior failed negotiations first.
The 2013–2015 “Peace Process”
When Turkey’s ruling AKP party came to power in 2002, it raised hopes by lifting both the state of emergency in the Kurdish regions and the ban on public use of the Kurdish language. Suddenly, a ceasefire and even a peace treaty seemed conceivable.
In the years that followed, the war in the Kurdish regions of Turkey did not come to end, but the intensity of the fighting did noticeably decrease; in many areas, people were able to live in relative peace. Vested with a sense of superiority — which was by no means unfounded, given the weakness of the opposition parties and the broad popular support that the AKP enjoyed — the ruling party operated from the assumption that the Kurdish side would do everything it could to avoid returning to open warfare. After all, the Kurdish civilian population had suffered immensely during the dirty war of the 1990s.
Initiated by the Turkish secret service known as the MIT, unofficial negotiations with the PKK began in 2009. At the same time, however, the government continued its repression of the Kurdish movement and civil society. It initially seemed as if the PKK would not accept this “peace offer”. Between 2009 and 2013, there were recurring and at times intense battles between the Turkish army and the PKK, resulting in numerous casualties on both sides. It was only with the beginning of direct negotiations with the PKK’s imprisoned leader Abdullah Öcalan in 2012 that progress was made. After the AKP government promised recognition of the Kurdish population, legal equality, and the right to political participation, the PKK partially withdrew its fighters from Turkey to Northern Iraq in 2013. As a result, there was a significant decline in military clashes.
Since 2017, the war has shifted from the cities to the rural regions, where the Turkish army has faced much greater resistance from PKK fighters with more military experience.
Nevertheless, there was no true peace process. One fundamental problem was that the AKP government demanded that the PKK hand over its weapons before negotiations could officially commence. But if the PKK had agreed to do so, it would have been tantamount to capitulation, something that the party was not prepared to do. Another major obstacle was Ankara’s policy towards the autonomous region of Rojava in northern Syria, where Kurdish forces close to the PKK hold sway. Ever since they established self-governing structures in 2012, Turkey has attempted to dismantle or at least weaken these structures via a border blockade and by supporting Islamist and jihadist forces.
Still, peace in Turkey had never been as close as it was between 2013 and 2015, even though the Turkish government neither succeeded in weakening the PKK to the point where it would capitulate to the AKP’s conditions, nor was the AKP truly prepared to agree to a just peace agreement with the PKK.
One final serious attempt to revive the peace process came during Newroz, the Kurdish New Year, celebration on 21 March 2015, when Öcalan delivered a message. The imprisoned PKK leader outlined a peace process in which the PKK would cease its armed struggle but would not lay down its weapons. In return, the Turkish government was to initiate official peace talks with the approval of parliament, in which a fundamental transformation of the Turkish Republic would also be negotiated.
Ankara, however, continued to explicitly refrain from referring to the talks between the Turkish government and Kurdish representatives as peace negotiations, since doing so would have implied recognition of the PKK as a negotiating partner. For the AKP government, Öcalan’s two demands — recognizing the PKK as a negotiating partner and transforming the state as part of the peace process — were unacceptable, which is why it simply ignored his proposal. This resulted in a de facto ceasefire that was rather fragile.
Consequences of the AKP’s Electoral Defeat
As the talks reached a deadlock, parliamentary elections were held in 2015, resulting in unforeseen consequences for the peace process. The ruling AKP party received only 41 percent of the vote, a decline of nine percent, which meant losing its parliamentary majority. Remaining in power would have required forming a coalition. This potential loss of power was largely due to the fact that the leftist HDP passed the ten percent electoral threshold for the first time and entered parliament with 13 percent of the vote. The results also showed that, despite its fragility, the peace process had encouraged Kurds to take up political campaigning to fight for their rights in civil society and parliament. The HDP, which many Kurds perceived as their voice in parliament, obviously benefited from this spirit.
This development posed a major problem for the AKP leadership. From their point of view, the peace process was supposed to eliminate the PKK as a threat and further consolidate their own power. Instead, it led to the AKP losing its grip on the government. This unexpected result prompted the party to take a new approach: now it wanted to eliminate the HDP in order to regain sole governing power. Their logic was that if the peace process had strengthened the HDP, then a return to war would favor the AKP.
The already fragile, frequently violated cease fire collapsed six weeks after the parliamentary elections with the attack in Suruç on 20 July 2015, which claimed the lives of 34 people and was attributed to the Islamic State (IS). Subsequently, the government used the murder of two police officers by PKK-affiliated forces to justify airstrikes on PKK-controlled areas in northern Iraq, which quickly escalated into a full-scale war.
When civil society councils emerged in some Kurdish cities and declared “their” respective cities to be autonomous, the AKP government responded with renewed military offensives. Human rights organizations reported arbitrary executions, torture, and other war crimes while these offensives were ongoing. It is estimated that several thousand people were killed and around 500,000 people were driven from their homes, becoming internally displaced persons. In total, around one and a half million people were harmed by the war.
Öcalan’s letter differs significantly from his Newroz address in 2015: this time, he was calling on the PKK to dissolve itself, arguing that the party’s political mission of gaining recognition for the Kurdish question had been historically fulfilled.
Militarily, the Turkish army was successful after months of fighting PKK-affiliated fighters in the cities. Yet this “success” came at the cost of massive destruction and the killing of thousands of Kurdish civilians. Since 2017, the war has shifted from the cities to the rural regions, where the Turkish army has faced much greater resistance from PKK fighters with more military experience.
After ten years of war, it is clear that a “military solution” to the conflict is impossible. In other words, the Turkish army cannot defeat the PKK, nor can the PKK defeat the Turkish army. As such, the number of clashes in the Kurdish regions of Turkey has once again declined in recent years. This stalemate is not fundamentally different from the situation in the 1990s, but there is one thing that is entirely new: whereas the Turkish army’s military failure in the 1990s led to political crises and the collapse of governing coalitions, now the AKP government is able to use the war politically for its own agenda.
Peace Talks Reloaded?
Because the government camp, made up of the AKP and the far-right MHP, was able to profit from the war, fundamental change in this situation seemed unlikely to come from their side. And yet this is exactly what happened: a somewhat cryptic statement by MHP leader Devlet Bahçeli in the Turkish parliament on 22 October 2024 became the starting signal for conversations between the government camp and the left-wing Kurdish opposition party DEM. After several rounds of talks between the MHP and DEM, Abdullah Öcalan was then brought into the conversations in spring 2025. On 27 March, his message to the PKK was presented to the public.
Öcalan’s letter differs significantly from his Newroz address in 2015: this time, he was calling on the PKK to dissolve itself, arguing that the party’s political mission of gaining recognition for the Kurdish question had been historically fulfilled.
In addition, his current comments no longer include demands for a fundamental transformation of Turkey’s political system or for specific rights for the Kurdish population. He merely stated that the process would require a political and legal framework, calling for the peace negotiations to take place in the Turkish parliament.
The Kurdish side interpreted this statement as meaning that there had to be peace negotiations between the Turkish government and the PKK before the PKK would dissolve itself. However, the government camp never mentioned peace negotiations with the PKK or even concessions to the Kurdish side. Instead, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and MHP head Bahçeli declared that the “war against terror” (i.e., the war against the PKK) had now come to a successful end.
This is the political context of the announcement in which the PKK declared it was disarming and dissolving. However, the PKK also indicated that the creation of a political and legal framework and the initiation of a dialogue process in the Turkish parliament were prerequisites for the actual implementation of this decision. As such, the situation resembles that of 2015, when negotiations failed and the war reignited. This is not a rosy prospect for Kurdistan.
Translated by Shane Anderson and Joseph Keady for Gegensatz Translation Collective.