• The PKK's de facto leader, Abdullah Öcalan, has said it is time for a democratic process on the Kurdish cause.
• The PKK's governing committee has proclaimed a ceasefire and announced the laying down of arms.
• The end of hostilities with Turkey, after nearly 50 years and 40,000 deaths, is an opportunity for the Erdogan regime.

On 27 February Abdullah Öcalan, founder of the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK), issued an appeal for an end to armed struggle in Turkey. Öcalan is one of the founders of the PKK, a political and paramilitary group of Marxist inspiration that has been engaged in a war against the Turkish state since the late 1970s — first for the creation of an independent Kurdish state, then for greater autonomy and rights for the minority.

The Kurdish question is one of the unresolved issues dating back to the end of World War One. The Kurds had been promised a state that never materialised, and this, combined with the deep discrimination they suffered over the decades, fuelled the rise of armed independence movements such as the PKK. Its bombings and suicide attacks on one side, and Turkey's brutal military operations on the other, have caused around 40,000 deaths over the years, punctuated by periods of relative calm and failed peace negotiations. Now the appeal for an end to armed struggle made by leader Öcalan, who has been in prison since 1999, could change the state of affairs. The PKK's governing committee has indeed accepted his demands, and a peace agreement with Ankara appears to be within reach.

What is the PKK?

The Kurds are an ethnic group, predominantly Sunni Muslim, numbering around 40 million people. With the end of World War One and the break-up of the Ottoman Empire, the Allies, through the Treaty of Sèvres of 1920, had promised the creation of a Kurdish state — one that never came into being. The Kurdish people thus found themselves divided among Turkey, Syria, Iraq and Iran, and especially in Turkey, where they make up 15 per cent of the population, their demands for recognition were brutally suppressed and accompanied by forced assimilation policies that went as far as denying the very existence of the Kurds as a people.

In this context of discrimination, assimilation and non-recognition, in 1978 a group of students from the Faculty of Political Science in Ankara, led by Abdullah Öcalan, founded the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK), shaped by a Marxist ideology and with the primary objective of creating an independent Kurdish state. From the outset, the PKK chose the path of armed struggle to pursue its goals, and after several years of attacks and small-scale guerrilla operations, from 1984 onwards it launched a larger-scale offensive against Turkish forces in the south-east of the country, where the Kurdish people are in the majority. The Turkish army's response was brutal, and the war between the two factions has never stopped since, with periods of relative calm interspersed with escalations of the conflict.

Turkish repression has been directed not only against the PKK — which over the years added suicide bombings to its attacks and guerrilla actions, and was placed on the list of terrorist organisations by the European Union and the United States — but against the Kurdish people as a whole. Dozens of Kurdish villages, especially during the 1990s, were destroyed and set ablaze, every form of solidarity with the Kurdish cause was punished, and more broadly the Turkish authorities implemented forms of suppression of Kurdish identity, culture and politics.

Öcalan's leadership

In the 1990s Abdullah Öcalan gave the PKK a new direction. He abandoned the goal of creating an independent state, focusing instead on demands for greater autonomy and rights for Kurds within the Turkish state. He then put forward his first peace plans, which led to a period of ceasefire.

In the meantime, the PKK leader, for security reasons, had left Turkey. He first continued to exercise his leadership of the party from Syria, then, due to pressure from the Turkish government on that country, in 1998 he moved to Europe, passing through Italy as well. There he was arrested on an international arrest warrant upon arriving at Fiumicino airport, triggering a major mobilisation of civil society. Because of the death penalty in Turkey, the Italian government was unable to extradite Öcalan, who had in the meantime applied for asylum in Italy itself. Even before the matter could be resolved by the courts, the PKK leader was ordered to leave the country and sought refuge elsewhere — first in the Netherlands, then in Greece, and finally in Kenya, where in 1999 he was captured by Turkish secret agents.

Since 1999 Öcalan has been imprisoned in the Turkish prison of Imrali, located on an island where for a long time he was the sole detainee. He received a death sentence, which was later commuted to life imprisonment after Turkey abolished the death penalty in 2002. Over more than 25 years of captivity, Öcalan has continued to play a key role in the PKK, shaping its strategies and objectives while adopting an increasingly pragmatic stance. On several occasions his pressure led the PKK to make new overtures to peace, as in the round of negotiations in 2011 when the Turkish authorities met with Öcalan himself in prison. Turkey, since the early 2000s, has accepted some minor Kurdish demands, but the conflict has continued with its ups and downs and in various forms — on the Turkish side through repression, mass arrests and military operations, on the PKK's side through attacks such as last October's strike against the headquarters of Turkey's defence industries in Ankara.

End of the war?

On 27 February, in a message from prison, Abdullah Öcalan issued an appeal to the PKK for an end to armed struggle and for the dissolution of the group, after nearly 50 years of fighting. In the text delivered to the pro-Kurdish party Dem, Öcalan stressed that the time had come to find a democratic solution to the conflict and to usher in a new era of peace and brotherhood between Kurds and Turks.

The PKK swiftly accepted the demands of its de facto leader. The Kurdish organisation's governing committee proclaimed a ceasefire and announced the laying down of arms, unless it were forced to respond to direct military attacks by Turkey. The PKK added that it would convene the assembly for its dissolution, which will however only take place once the Turkish authorities offer security guarantees, including the release of Öcalan himself from the prison where he has been held for 26 years.

The two sides have never been this close to ending the war between Turkey and the PKK, and it is no coincidence that this is happening now, at a time when the Kurdish organisation is going through a highly vulnerable phase in its history. In recent years, Turkish military operations have drastically reduced the PKK's strength, and whereas its fighters once numbered up to 10,000, today their numbers are far lower. In Syria too, where Kurdish forces played a decisive role in the last decade by fighting alongside Bashar al-Assad against the Islamic State — to the point of being supported by the United States — the situation has now changed dramatically. The Assad regime has fallen and the country is now led by the group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), which is close to Turkey. This has placed the Kurdish forces — aligned with the PKK and entrenched in the north of the country — in an increasingly vulnerable position, ever more exposed to attacks by the Ankara army.

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The PKK's weakness at both the international and domestic level has in recent years led some of its members to open up to negotiations with the Turkish authorities, and last October one of the politicians closest to President Recep Erdogan did the same. Ankara's crackdown on the PKK and on individuals considered close to the Kurdish cause — including journalists and politicians linked to the Dem party — has not let up in recent months, yet this has gone hand in hand with certain concessions to the Kurdish cause. President Erdogan welcomed Öcalan's appeal and the PKK's ceasefire announcement. An end to hostilities represents an opportunity for his regime in terms of image: the president could see his approval ratings rise, even among Kurds themselves should constitutional concessions be granted. But peace with the PKK also carries strategic value for the Turkish regime, as it would free the army from the heavy burden of anti-Kurdish operations in Turkey, Syria and Iraq, allowing it to concentrate its efforts elsewhere — such as on the African continent, where Ankara is seeking to expand its influence.