• In February, PKK leader Abdullah Öcalan had called for an end to the armed struggle.
• The party has now announced its dissolution and called on Turkey to take part in the peace process.
• The group described the decision as inevitable, also in light of recent developments in Syria.

The PKK, the Kurdistan Workers' Party, has announced its dissolution and the end of the armed struggle against Turkey. The decision was made during the party's 12th Congress and follows the guidance of historic leader Abdullah Öcalan, who in late February issued a call for peace from prison. In the coming weeks, Öcalan himself will oversee the process of dissolving the group.

The end of the PKK

In 1978, a group of students from the Faculty of Political Science in Ankara, led by Abdullah Öcalan, founded the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK), an organisation shaped by Marxist ideology with the primary goal of establishing an independent Kurdish state. From the outset, the PKK chose the path of armed struggle to pursue its objectives, and after several years of attacks and small-scale guerrilla operations, from 1984 onwards it launched a broader offensive against Turkish forces in the south-east of the country, where the Kurdish population is in the majority. The response of the Turkish army was brutal, and the war between the two sides never stopped from that point on, with periods of relative calm interspersed with escalations of the conflict.

During the 1990s, Abdullah Öcalan gave the PKK a new direction. He abandoned the goal of creating an independent state, focusing instead on a demand for greater autonomy and rights for Kurds within the Turkish state. He then put forward his first peace plans, but in 1999 he was arrested and imprisoned in the Turkish prison of Imrali, where he remains to this day. Over more than 25 years of imprisonment, Öcalan has continued to play a key role in the PKK, defining its strategies and objectives while adopting an increasingly pragmatic stance. On several occasions his pressure led the PKK to make new overtures towards peace, as in the round of negotiations in 2011 when Turkish authorities met with Öcalan himself in prison. Since the early 2000s, Turkey has accommodated 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, and on the PKK's side through attacks such as the most recent one last October against the headquarters of Turkey's defence industries in Ankara.

Is peace returning to Turkey?

On 27 February, in a message from prison, Abdullah Öcalan issued an appeal to the PKK to end the armed struggle and dissolve the group, after nearly 50 years of fighting. In the text handed 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. And now his call has become a reality.

During the 12th Congress, it was underlined that "the PKK's struggle has broken the policy of denial and annihilation of our people and has brought the Kurdish question to a point of resolution through democratic politics". It was therefore decided to "dissolve the PKK's organisational structure and bring the armed struggle to an end". The group described the decision as inevitable, also in light of recent developments in the Middle East. The reference is to Syria, where Kurdish forces played a key role in the fight against the Islamic State during the previous decade, with US backing, but now find themselves in a vulnerable position following the seizure of power by the group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), which is close to Turkey.

The PKK Congress made clear that the implementation of the dissolution process will be managed by Abdullah Öcalan, though no timeframes have been provided as yet. Turkey and its president Recep Erdogan were also called upon to take responsibility and play their part in the peace process. "We want this decision to be implemented without any delay or shortcoming. The dissolution must apply to the PKK and all its factions, without exception," were the first remarks made by Ömer Çelik, Erdogan's spokesperson.