From Foreign Policy
In a carefully choreographed ceremony on July 11 in Sulaimaniyah, Iraq, 30 members of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) symbolically burned their weapons. This unprecedented act was a signal of goodwill toward Ankara amid ongoing peace talks that both sides hope will end Turkey’s decade-long Kurdish conflict.
For years, liberal observers and peace advocates have imagined a resolution to this conflict as a key step in Turkey’s democratization, one that would be accompanied by full civil rights for Turkey’s Kurdish community. The current peace process, by contrast, appears squarely aimed not at liberalization but at consolidating Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s power.
The question now is whether Erdogan and the PKK can succeed in resetting Turkey’s state-society relations and reshaping the parameters of political inclusion, all without any meaningful steps toward democracy. Put differently, can Erdogan succeed in giving the country’s authoritarianism a multicultural veneer?
Turkey’s relationship with its Kurdish population has historically been shaped by the country’s nationalist and centralized ideology that suppressed ethnic diversity in favor of a singular Turkish identity. The full-scale armed conflict between the Turkish state and the PKK, which began in 1984, has claimed tens of thousands of lives, displaced communities, and imposed severe political and economic costs. Despite attempts at political solutions since the 1990s, none have gotten this far.
A peace process initiated by the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) between 2013 and 2015 collapsed into renewed violence—some of the most intense in the conflict’s history—leaving urban centers in the southeast heavily damaged. Since 2016, Ankara has also conducted military operations in northern Iraq to target PKK bases and in northern Syria to curb the influence of the Kurdish-led autonomous administration. Domestically, this period coincided with intensified anti-Kurdish nationalism, sweeping legal repression of Kurdish politicians, and the erosion of democratic space for Kurdish representation.
The current initiative for dialogue was publicly launched by Devlet Bahceli, the ultranationalist leader of the Nationalist Action Party (MHP), which governs in alliance with the AKP. Bahceli has long been among the most vehement opponents of a political resolution of the Kurdish conflict. In October 2024, however, he took the country by surprise when he formally invited Abdullah Ocalan, the PKK’s jailed founder, to call for the PKK’s disarmament and dissolution on the floor of the Turkish parliament. The pro-Kurdish Peoples’ Equality and Democracy Party (DEM Party) has since then played a central role in facilitating communications between Ocalan and Ankara while also engaging with the opposition, the public, and regional Kurdish actors.
Ocalan’s public message to the PKK, delivered via a letter in late February, was unambiguous: “integrate with the [Turkish] state and society voluntarily.” Rejecting autonomy, federalism, an independent state, or even the expansion of cultural rights as viable solutions, Ocalan argued that the historical conditions that gave rise to the PKK no longer existed. The Cold War had ended, Turkey no longer denied the Kurds’ existence, and freedom of expression had advanced, the guerrilla organization’s much-revered leader noted.
“Integration” has lately become a cornerstone in the lexicon of Kurdish political elites. Selahattin Demirtas, the jailed former co-chair of the DEM Party’s predecessor, also advocates reconciliation through Kurdish integration into the Turkish polity. For Demirtas, coexistence is not just desirable but inevitable: “Kurds are already integrated into Turkey—they are everywhere.” Veteran Kurdish politician Ahmet Turk echoes this vision, stating, “Kurds can only pursue a just life and emancipate themselves alongside the Turks.”
Yet what integration would actually entail remains unclear. Bahceli has proposed symbolic representation—such as appointing one Kurdish and one Alevi deputy president—arguably as a gesture of inclusivity. Where he might once have insisted that this kind of arrangement was dangerously divisive, Bahceli now claims it affirms national unity: “Kurds and Alevis belong to us [the Turkish nation].”
For Bahceli and Erdogan, peace with the Kurds is about more than domestic reconciliation. It’s part of a broader strategy to fortify Turkey by building a cohesive “domestic front” against what they describe as foreign threats—chief among them Israel. Pro-government commentators and former hard-liners have even suggested that the PKK could be repurposed into a pro-Turkish fighting force.
To serve this strategic goal, Erdogan has revitalized a historical narrative that extols a “thousand years of Turkish-Kurdish fraternity.” Speaking at a party meeting on July 12, Erdogan hailed the PKK’s symbolic disarmament as a step toward peaceful coexistence among Turks, Kurds, and Arabs. He then invoked the Battle of Manzikert in 1071, the siege of Jerusalem in 1187, and the Turkish War of Independence between 1919 and 1922 as the three most crucial demonstrations of victory, prosperity, and glory achieved when Turks and Kurds stood together.
Sinem Adar is an associate at the Centre for Applied Turkey Studies at the German Institute for International and Security Affairs.
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