If there were a military solution to the PKK rebellion, Turkey’s redoubtable army would have discovered that during the last 25 years of insurrection which has cost in excess of 40,000 lives. That there is not was recognized by Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan after his Justice and Development (AK) Party first came to power in 2002. He rolled back measures which had marginalized the ethnic identity of Turkey’s 12 million Turks.
Now in the face of increasing violence after a few years of relative calm, Erdogan is launching a full-blown peace initiative designed to persuade the PKK to abandon its armed struggle and turn to the ballot box. Two elements are critical to the success of this exercise. The first is the attitude of jailed PKK leader Abdullah Ocalan who is expected to announce through his lawyers his proposal for the peace process. Ocalan who in 2005 called for a unilateral cease-fire is reported to have accepted that the PKK cannot fight its way to victory so must compromise.
The second element, Turkish public opinion, is the far more difficult challenge. Though the AK party was re-elected in 2007 with an increased majority on a wide platform of economic, social and political reform, there remain many Turks who regard the very existence of the PKK as a danger to Turkish unity. These people have become increasingly uneasy at the increased recognition that has been given to Kurdish culture and identity in recent years. There are now Kurdish newspapers, broadcasters and political parties. The argument has been made that despite this relaxation of once draconian bans on anything Kurdish, even teaching the language in schools where Kurds are the majority, the PKK has seen fit to continue its bloody insurrection.
The anxiety has been heightened by the emergence of an autonomous Kurdish region in northern Iraq from which PKK fighters have been operating into Turkey. The suspicion is that even if negotiations lead to peace and the surrender of PKK weapons, there will remain arms and training camps in Iraqi Kurdistan from which the rebellion could be launched all over again by radical Kurds at some future time. For Turkey’s generals this is a major concern. Cross-border raids into Iraq targeting PKK camps and weapons dumps have risked, but not actually incurred, serious international condemnation. At the same time however they have failed to cripple the rebels.
It is unfortunate that even before the main negotiation proposals have been outlined by the government, some politicians are already refusing to join in what Erdogan hoped would be a cross-party initiative to give the peace talks greater authority. There simply has to be a general desire to explore negotiation, maybe similar to what the UK and Irish governments did in order to bring about peace in Northern Ireland. That was a long and difficult process but it succeeded because all sides recognized, as they should now in Turkey, that the violence and the killing were leading nowhere and that only compromise could bring peace.
