July marked one year since the Kurdish militant group known as the PKK, which is listed as a terrorist organization by several countries, symbolically burned its weapons.
Last May, the PKK, or Kurdistan Workers’ Party, announced it would cease “its work in the name of the PKK,” a decades-long armed insurgency between the Turkish state and those fighting for Kurdish rights or independence inside Turkey that has left an estimated 40,000 people dead.
Later, on 11 July, a group of about 30 PKK fighters in northern Iraq burned their weapons in a symbolic disarmament ceremony.
This year, on the same date, human rights activists, academics and politicians gathered in Diyarbakir, the largest city in Turkey’s Kurdish-dominated southeast, to assess progress in the ongoing peace process between the Turkish government and the PKK.
The conference was organized by the Diyarbakir administration and the Human Rights Association, or IHD.
Lawyer Cihan Aydın, one of the co-chairs of the IHD, has proposed making 11 July the official day of remembrance. He argued that a vibrant culture of remembrance contributes to coming to terms with the past and prevents future conflicts. Aydın also called for legal redress for all those affected by the peace process, including PKK leader Abdullah Ocalan, who has been jailed by Turkey since 1999.
For decades, Ocalan was considered a terrorist in Türkiye. Today the 77-year-old is the focal point of the current peace process. It was he who called on the PKK to lay down their arms in February 2025, to which the members responded.
Türkiye-PKK peace process
Subsequently, the Turkish Parliament established a committee that heard testimony from approximately 140 representatives of politics and civil society, including human rights activists and relatives of soldiers, veterans, and prisoners. The committee then recommended a series of reforms to advance the peace process, including reintegrating PKK members who have renounced violence into society, as well as verification by state security institutions that the PKK has indeed given up its weapons.
The talks have focused on rules for the return or possible prosecution of PKK members, as well as their possible integration into civil and political life. The Kurds want to see Ocalan released from jail along with other political prisoners.
The Turkish government is not ready for a general amnesty, only a partial one, and has not yet made any concrete commitments regarding Ocalan. However, recently the country’s ruling party, the AKP, has been taking a more moderate tone.
This leads Eret Demirci, head of the Istanbul office of Germany’s Friedrich Naumann Foundation, to believe that progress in the talks should be viewed as “cautiously positive”.
He says the fact that the PKK symbolically burned its weapons is a “historic turning point”. “And unlike previous peace initiatives, the process has not collapsed in the early stages.”
But, Demirci cautions, the central political questions have so far been mostly ignored. The Turkish government is pushing for the complete disarmament of the PKK while the Kurdish side wants political and legal guarantees before that can happen. “The parties’ differing expectations are likely to be the biggest challenge in the coming months,” Demirci says.
After meeting Ocalan and others in prison on Monday this week, the pro-Kurdish political party DEM issued a statement in which Ocalan reiterated his call for a legal framework to advance the peace process. “The Kurdish-Turkish alliance is the cornerstone of Anatolia’s shared future,” Ocalan stressed in the statement.
The PKK’s own leadership also appears optimistic. Duran Kalkan, one of the PKK’s co-founders, said in an interview this weekend that the peace process will not fail because the situation in the region is very different this time.
Changing security situation for Türkiye
Many observers agree with Kalkan’s opinion. Conflicts have recently intensified in the Middle East, particularly due to tensions between Israel, Iran, and the United States. The changes in Syria are also important.
Turkey is facing a completely different security situation than it was 10 years ago, when informal talks between Turkish intelligence agencies and the PKK that began in 2009 turned into negotiations between 2013 and 2015. In March 2013, Ocalan also announced a ceasefire, although this did not last.
But Demirci believes that geopolitical changes are forcing negotiations between the PKK and Turkey to move forward.
The new government plays an important role in Syria. Having better relations with the Kurds inside Turkey gives the Turkish government more leverage in relation to the Syrian Kurds and Iraqi Kurds. The picture has also changed for the PKK and its allies.
Turkey is concerned that PKK members could join Iranian-Kurdish fighters across the border. And earlier, during the Syrian civil war, Syrian Kurdish groups, allegedly linked to the PKK and backed by the US, were semi-independent and controlled a large area almost directly on the Turkish border. Turkish security agencies are also extremely worried about this. But now Syria’s Kurds have had to find accommodation with the new Syrian government and are no longer in full charge of the region.
Demirci told DW that how successful the peace process is in the long term will not depend solely on the cessation of violence. It also depends on whether a political dialogue emerges that includes democratic reforms, the rule of law, and more general questions about Kurdish identity in Turkey.
An end to the armed conflict alone will not bring real, lasting peace as long as opposition politicians are arrested, Kurdish mayors removed from office and political freedoms restricted.
“This dilemma is currently shaping the debate in Türkiye and making this process historic and extremely delicate,” he says.
The lack of transparency is also problematic. “There is hardly any public information about what agreements have actually been reached and what steps are planned,” Demirci added. “That makes it difficult to build public trust.”
With additional reporting by Gulsan Solekar.
This story was originally published in German.