Tag: Ocalan

Analysis: Turkish PM Erdogan may find his fate tied with Kurdish leader’s ability to change course and reign in violence

Brooklyn Middleton

In recent weeks, dialogue efforts between the Turkish government and Abdullah Ocalan, a prominent imprisoned Kurdish separatist leader have intensified, with the stated aim of disarming the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) after three decades of conflict and over 40,000 deaths. On January 8, Turkish media outlets published reports which cautiously indicated that negotiations with Ocalan had yielded a potential four-point roadmap for PKK disarmament in exchange for minority rights and amnesty for thousands of Kurdish prisoners in Turkish jails. Notably, calls for Kurdish autonomy in Turkey were not mentioned as part of Ocalan’s demands.

While the both sides have refused to verify reports of an agreement, the Erdogan administration did concede that pro-Kurdish Peace and Democracy Party (BDP) deputy Ayla Akat Ata and Kurdish politician Ahmet Turk met with Ocalan on December 29 on Imrali Island, where he has been imprisoned since 1999. Until that visit, the infamous PKK founder had only been permitted to speak with Turkish military and intelligence officials. Ocalan, long considered the godfather of terrorism in Turkey, reportedly told the Kurdish lawmakers that the time for armed struggle has ended.

The year 2012 was reported as the deadliest year of PKK-related violence in over a decade with a noticeable uptick in civilian casualties. While the PKK has traditionally focused its attacks on Turkish security installations and personnel, the recent spike in attacks targeting civilians suggests more radical offshoots such as the Kurdistan Freedom Falcons (TAK) are gaining influence.

With that being said, Ankara’s renewed efforts to formulate a ceasefire are likely an attempt to quell the increased radicalism within the Kurdish separatist camp while also attempting to discontinue the perpetuation of the Turkish-Kurdish conflict over the long term.

Concerns over regional instability have also likely increased the willingness of the Turkish government to negotiate an end to the insurgency. Instability in Syria has severed previously strong economic and diplomatic ties between Ankara and Damascus, and increased concerns that Kurdish militants in northeastern Syria could join the PKK insurgency in Turkey’s southeastern provinces.

The close relations in the 1990s between the Assad regime and the PKK, then under the command of Abdullah Ocalan, serve as a precedent and have raised concerns in Turkey over Assad’s attempts to create instability inside Turkey in response to Ankara’s meddling inside Syria.

The deployment of NATO Patriot missiles in Turkey further signals the Erdogan Administration’s increased involvement in the Syrian conflict. Turkey’s continued role as host for the Syrian opposition is already said to have motivated the Assad regime to withdraw from Kurdish areas of the country, while possibly encouraging Syrian Kurds to stage attacks inside Turkey as a reprisal. As such, the recent talks with Ocalan may be an attempt to mitigate an internal Kurdish threat before Syrian Kurds become more emboldened to join the conflict.

Defining moment. PM Erdogan (Photo: AFP)

The notably absent criticism of the Ocalan talks from Turkish media and hawkish political elements highlights the growing fatigue amongst large swathes of Turkish society regarding a continuation of fighting. Since the collapse of a long-standing ceasefire in 2011, hundreds of PKK militants and Turkish soldiers have been killed in hostilities in the southeast, while Turkey has been forced to devote additional economic resources toward protecting key energy pipelines in the region from attack.

As such, the unprecedented permitting of Kurdish politicians to hold talks with Ocalan is likely part of a Turkish government effort to strengthen moderate Kurdish elements, while allowing Ocalan himself to gain political influence in exchange for other concessions.

Ocalan’s influence over the bulk of the PKK militant network remains strong, despite his imprisonment and disconnect with operational fighting units. In November 2012, Ocalan instructed PKK prisoners to end a 68-day hunger strike, bringing about and end to a potentially destabilizing crisis.

Ocalan’s statements are unlikely to bring about a comprehensive end to the PKK’s current insurgency campaign without the agreement of militant leaders in northern Iraq and southeastern Turkey. Following the meeting between Ocalan and Kurdish politicians, the PKK’s military leadership in northern Iraq’s Qandil Mountains stated that the negotiation process had become more credible, but warned that a new settlement process had not yet begun. The aforementioned reaction from the PKK military leadership in northern Iraq highlights the group’s willingness to re-enter a ceasefire with Turkey, pending certain demands are met.

In the coming days and weeks, cross-border attacks by Kurdish militants from Iraq into southern Turkey will indicate the group’s unwillingness to cooperate with the negotiations between Ocalan and the Turkish government. Meanwhile, the winter season generally witnesses a drop in militant activity, meaning that intentions to commit to a lull will be difficult to gauge until the spring and summer months.

Any ceasefire agreement between the Turkish government and the PKK will likely be challenged by radical Kurdish offshoots inside Turkey, in addition to those based in Iran and Syria. In Turkey, the Kurdistan Freedom Falcons (TAK) has claimed responsibility for numerous attacks, including bombings, of civilians in recent years in major cities. Meanwhile, reports indicate that Kurdish militant factions based in Iran and Syria have increased their operations in Turkish border areas with the backing of those respective governments.

The Turkish government has continuously alleged that Iranian operatives had been apprehended in its territory, while asserting that Iran had begun to use its own Kurdish militant groups as proxies to deter Turkey from continuing involvement in Syria. As such, in the event that talks with Ocalan reach a breakthrough, these elements may stage attacks in an attempt to force Turkish military reprisals and collapse the negotiation process.

With the clock ticking down to Erdogan’s first bid for the presidency in 2014, Prime Minister Erdogan may find his fate tied with Ocalan’s ability to change course and reign in violence. Erdogan likely knows that his ability to solve the Kurdish problem without enflaming hawks within his AKP faction as well as within Turkey’s nationalistic opposition may just be the defining moment of his political career.

The authors, Brooklyn Middleton and Daniel Nisman, are intelligence analysts at Max Security Solutions, a global geo-political risk consulting firm

Turkey’s intelligence services have held talks with jailed Kurdish PKK leader Abdullah Ocalan. Direct negotiations may lead to a solution to the Kurdish conflict and could end decades of fighting.

Abdullah Ocalan is back in the political limelight. Almost 14 years after his arrest and imprisonment in February 1999, the founder and head of the insurgent Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) has assumed the role he has always coveted: that of a key figure in the search for a peaceful solution to a Kurdish conflict that has raged since 1984 and claimed more than 40,000 lives. Last month, senior officials of Turkey’s MIT intelligence service visited Ocalan in prison on the island of Imrali near Istanbul and discussed disarming his outlawed movement.

Ocalan dpa Ocalan has been in prison since 1999

Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan and his government want to work out a scheme with Ocalan that would allow Kurdish rebels to lay down their weapons. News reports have leaked that PKK leaders in northern Iraq’s Qandil mountains would not be brought to trial but would instead be given the opportunity to seek exile elsewhere. Regular PKK fighters would be reintegrated into society.

Good timing

It is a favorable moment to start negotiations: low temperatures and winter weather have forced both sides to put the fighting on hold. The likelihood of talks being sabotaged by fresh skirmishes is smaller than during other seasons. Recently, Ocalan successfully urged Kurdish prisoners to give up a hunger strike – once again proving to the PKK and the Turkish leadership how influential he still is.

Imrali island from above. dpa Talks are taking place on the prison island of Imrali

Timing is important for yet another reason: Turkey faces a string of local, parliamentary and presidential elections over the next two years. “Erdogan is intent on making this work because of the upcoming elections,” says Istanbul political scientist Sahin Alpay. The population is tired of the conflict – a peaceful solution, Alpay says, would be a big bonus for the government.

Ankarastresses credibility

Besir Atalay, Turkey’s deputy Prime Minister and coordinator of Kurdish policies in the cabinet, says the talks are aimed at a final renunciation of violence by the PKK. In an effort to give the negotiation process more credibility, authorities last week allowed a group of Kurdish politicians to visit Ocalan on Imrali island for the first time. Erdogan has said talks between the MIT and Ocalan will continue and indicated the possibility of talks with additional members of the PKK leadership.

Previous negotiations between Ankara and the PKK were discontinued in 2011 after Kurdish rebels killed 13 Turkish soldiers in an attack in southeastern Anatolia. The Turkish government accused the PKK then of sabotaging the negotiation process.

PKK remains wary

[Members of a pro-Kurdish party sit on the ground ADEM ALTAN/AFP/Getty Images) Ocalan showed his power when he called off a PKK hunger strike

The PKK is hesitant. Senior PKK commander Murat Karayilan has called for the state to make even more of an effort to prove its desire for peace, including an upgrade in prison conditions for Ocalan and a formal recognition of Kurdish identity in Turkey’s constitution.

Some observers in Turkey fear Karayilan’s fighters might interrupt the negotiation process because they feel left out. So far, all mediation efforts since fighting broke out in 1984 have failed. The most recent round of talks may have had an auspicious beginning – but that by no means guarantees success.

via Turkey reaches out to public enemy number one | Europe | DW.DE | 08.01.2013.

Turkey is holding talks with the jailed head of the PKK Kurdish militant group, Abdullah Ocalan, to push for its disarmament, officials say.

Ocalan, who has been found guilty of treason, is being held in solitary confinement on a remote island prison.

The Turkish prime minister’s top political adviser said the government would not be able to bring the conflict to an end by military means alone.

Last year saw a surge in violence in the three-decades-old insurgency.

Dialogue

Prime ministerial adviser Yalcin Akdogan said the intelligence services were holding discussions with Ocalan.

“The goal is the disarmament of the PKK (Kurdistan Workers’ Party),” he said in an interview with NTV television.

“The government supports any dialogue to this end that could result in a halt to violence.”

“You cannot get results and abolish an organisation only with armed struggle.”

He said Ocalan was the “main actor” in efforts to resolve the Kurdish conflict. However he questioned whether Ocalan fully controlled the more hawkish PKK militants operating from northern Iraq.

Turkey’s Hurriyet newspaper said officials from the National Intelligence Organisation held a four-hour meeting with Ocalan on 23 December.

Ocalan was sentenced to death in 1999, though that was later commuted to life imprisonment following the abolition of the death penalty in Turkey in 2002.

The PKK has waged a guerrilla campaign in south-east Turkey for more than 25 years, attempting to establish an ethnic homeland for the Kurdish people. Some 40,000 people, including civilians, have died in the conflict.

The conflict has reached its fiercest intensity in years during 2012, with the PKK stepping up its attacks on security forces. But the Hurriyet newspaper says the group has halted operations due to winter conditions.

The Kurdish minority are thought to make up more than 20% of the population of Turkey.

via BBC News – Turkey and PKK’s Ocalan in talks ‘on disarmament’.

The Second Career of Abdullah Ocalan

By ANDREW FINKEL

ISTANBUL — Over a decade ago, I was a witness to one of the most cathartic episodes in postwar Turkish history. This week I was a witness to one of the most puzzling.

In February 1999, Abdullah Ocalan, leader of the Kurdistan Workers Party (also known as the P.K.K.), was abducted from a hideout in Kenya and returned to Turkey. By the end of May, he was sitting in a bullet-proof glass box in a purpose-built courthouse on Imrali Island, opposite Istanbul. He was on trial to answer for waging a ruthless guerrilla in the name of Kurdish independence, which is estimated to have cost more than 30,000 lives since 1984 [pdf].

After 15 years of conflict, with Ocalan finally in custody, popular frustration was uncorked.

I had a rare ticket to attend the court proceedings, eight hearings spread over a month. Along with a handful of other journalists, diplomats and relatives of soldiers killed in action, I would go through retina scans and security checks before boarding a predawn hydrofoil to Imrali. Ocalan’s lawyers and family took another craft.

For the mothers with photos of their sons in uniform, the news anchors and the hordes of demonstrators waiting for our daily return to the mainland, the trial was the occasion for an outpouring of bitterness. After 15 years of conflict, with Ocalan finally in custody, popular frustration was uncorked.

And yet my clearest memory was just how unaffected by the drama unfolding around him the principal actor seemed to be. Ocalan once motioned in court his condolences to a woman whose husband, a police officer, had been shot before her eyes at a roadblock in 1995. But he made no great declarations about the Kurdish cause.

His general attitude toward the prosecutors seemed to be “Been there, done that.” He behaved less like a prisoner in the dock than a politician plotting his next move. Forget about the past; it’s time to move on.

Back then, he presented a simple choice to the court and to Turkey: he, Mandela-like, would get his supporters to cooperate with the authorities to end the fighting. After all, he claimed, he alone could bring Turkey’s Kurdish conflict to an end. And if the government turned him down and, more so still, if he ever were executed — there would be “one hundred years of bloodshed.”

Turkish Kurds held a poster of jailed Kurdish rebel leader Abdullah Ocalan during a gathering to celebrate Noruz, the Kurdish New Year in Istanbul in 2011.Mustafa Ozer/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images Turkish Kurds held a poster of jailed Kurdish rebel leader Abdullah Ocalan during a gathering to celebrate Noruz, the Kurdish New Year in Istanbul in 2011.

Ocalan wasn’t executed. He was sentenced to death in 1999, but in keeping with its commitment the European Union as a candidate for membership, Turkey abolished capital punishment a few years later. So Ocalan is still in Imrali prison. And he is still a commanding figure outside it, even though the P.K.K., particularly its militant wing based in the mountains of northern Iraq, isn’t under his control.

Omerli, the village where he was born, is a place of pilgrimage; his birthday is celebrated there like a saint’s day. And his influence over Kurdish activists everywhere is still significant.

Over the course of this autumn, an estimated 1,700 Kurdish militants held in extended pretrial detention went on a hunger strike. Some of their supporters, including members of Parliament like Leyla Zana, joined in. The protesters were demanding the right to defend themselves in court in Kurdish (to this, the government says it is prepared to accede) and the right for their children to be educated in Kurdish (this, the government denies, apart from allowing a few elective courses in school).

They were also calling for Ocalan to be allowed to see his counsel: For the last 15 months Ocalan has been denied access to his lawyers on the pretext that the boat used to transport them to his island prison is in need of repair.

The government refused to negotiate — in public at least. Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan toyed with the idea of restoring the death penalty. Meanwhile, even after the strike had been going on for over two months — for the fasters, a medical tipping point toward death or irreparable brain damage – P.K.K. leaders were still saying it wasn’t up to them to call off the protest.

And so on Nov. 11, the 67th day of the strike, it was Ocalan who, communicating from prison through his brother, said it should end. He may have intended this as a humanitarian gesture, but it was also a demonstration of power.

There have been clandestine talks between the Turkish government and the P.K.K. before, but they have been called off upon becoming public knowledge. Now that the strike is over, the Justice Ministry has announced that, if necessary, negotiations could resume. With them, so it would appear, also resumes the career of Abdullah Ocalan.

Andrew Finkel has been a foreign correspondent in Istanbul for over 20 years, as well as a columnist for Turkish-language newspapers. He is the author of the book “Turkey: What Everyone Needs to Know.”

via Ocalan, Figurehead of Kurdish Independence in Turkey, calls the Shots From Prison – NYTimes.com.

ISTANBUL: The imprisoned leader of Turkey’s Kurdish rebels has called for an end to bloodshed after his troops cranked up their attacks against Turkish forces this summer, his brother told the daily Taraf.

“Not even a single policeman, troop or guerilla should die from now on, he told me in our last get together,” Mehmet Ocalan, brother of detained rebel chief Abdullah Ocalan, was quoted as saying by Taraf on Friday.

Mehmet Ocalan relayed his brother’s wish “for the bloodshed to stop, the problem to be solved,” but refrained from giving details on the date of their meeting at the island prison of Imrali, south of Istanbul.

According to the Hurriyet daily, the meeting took place last Friday.

Ocalan’s call for peace comes as intensified clashes between Turkish troops and his outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) rebels rage in the Kurdish-majority southeast.

Turkey’s Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan said Wednesday 144 members of the security forces and 239 rebels had been killed since the start of the year, marking one of the deadliest phases of the confrontation in more than a decade.

In all, about 45,000 people have been killed since the PKK, which is blacklisted as a terrorist organization by Turkey and much of the international community, took up arms for autonomy in the southeast in 1984.

Erdogan also signaled the possibility of resuming negotiations with the rebels, after clandestine talks between the sides, publicly known as “Oslo talks”, reached a dead end in 2011.

Mehmet Ocalan’s visit was, Erdogan said, a government initiative to put an end to speculations that the Kurdish leader might have been killed in jail, after he was placed under solitary confinement more than a year ago.

Abdullah Ocalan was captured by Turkish agents in Nairobi, brought back to Turkey and sentenced to death in 1999, but the sentence was commuted to life in prison.

via THE DAILY STAR :: News :: Middle East :: Imprisoned Kurdish rebel leader calls for peace: reports.