Turkey and the PKK: Peace at last?

Turkey and the PKK

Peace at last?

The Turkish government is holding talks with the Kurdish leader

Jan 12th 2013 | ISTANBUL | from the print edition

MIGHT 2013 herald lasting peace between Turkey and its restive Kurds? The question has consumed the country ever since Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Turkey’s prime minister, confirmed that his national spy chief, Hakan Fidan, had been holding talks with Abdullah Ocalan, the Kurdish leader, on the prison island off Istanbul where he has been held in solitary confinement ever since his capture in 1999.

Soon afterwards a pair of pro-Kurdish deputies were also granted their long-running wish to meet Mr Ocalan. The goal, Mr Erdogan declared, was to persuade the PKK to disarm; but under exactly what conditions continues to be a matter of frenzied speculation.

Mr Erdogan is clearly staking his political future on fixing Turkey’s stickiest problem. The move to go public about the talks has confounded his fans and critics alike. Mr Erdogan has spent much of the past year horrifying liberal supporters with threats to revive the death penalty, raining insults on the “corpse loving” BDP (a pro-Kurdish party), vowing to crush the rebels through military might, and imprisoning hundreds of Kurdish politicians and activists on the thinnest of charges. Mr Erdogan’s hawkish outbursts coincided with the collapse in 2011 of an earlier round of negotiations, with each side blaming the other for their demise. Either way, the accepted wisdom was that Mr Erdogan, who is serving a third and (under internal party rules) final term as prime minister, was courting nationalist votes in order to get himself elected president when the incumbent steps down in 2014.

So what prompted his volte-face? Cynics think that Mr Erdogan wants to run his presidential bid unhampered by violence and that, once elected, he will revert to his hawkish self. Yet Mr Erdogan is taking a risk with his U-turn. As he has warned, saboteurs will try to derail any peace talks through renewed violence and other provocations, which would allow the opposition to pile blame upon the government.

The stakes are higher than ever before. Mr Erdogan knows that, unless he strikes a deal soon, the solution to the Kurdish problem could slip out of Turkey’s hands. Developments in Syria, where President Bashar Assad gave control last June of a string of Kurdish towns to a PKK ally, known as the PYD, have prompted somewhat overblown fears that the PYD will point its guns at Turkey.

Not surprisingly, getting the PYD and fellow Kurdish groups to join the Syrian opposition is said to be part of the agreement being hammered out with Mr Ocalan. Other conditions are said to include the withdrawal of the PKK to bases in northern Iraq and getting fighters to lay down their arms. The government claims Mr Ocalan has disavowed previous calls for regional autonomy for the Kurds, including the right to their own militia army. In exchange the government would pass legal reforms that free thousands of Kurdish prisoners, give amnesty to PKK fighters untainted by violence, boost the power of local government and scrap articles in the constitution that prohibit education in the Kurdish language. Another concession is improving Mr Ocalan’s conditions of internment. A mutually observed ceasefire would pave the way. A May deadline has reportedly been set.

The big question is whether, given the PKK’s growing regional clout, Mr Ocalan can get its leaders on board. He is an icon for PKK members and the glue that makes the PKK’s global network stick. The government relies on him to deliver peace. But the success of this latest stab at peace is far from assured.

via Turkey and the PKK: Peace at last? | The Economist.