Turkey’s parliament approved a law yesterday that formalizes the peace process initiated with a prominent Kurdish militant group two years ago. Under the law, members of the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) who are serving prison sentences for nonviolent crimes would be eligible for pardon and release, while those outside the country (mainly in Iraq) would be allowed to return to Turkey. | Those steps would be contingent on Turkey’s National Security Council certifying that the PKK—which has been designated a terrorist group by Turkey, the EU and the U.S.—has followed through on its promise to disarm and demobilize its fighters, and dissolve as an entity. | The legislation marks the most significant step that Ankara has taken to advance the peace process with the PKK, which has fought for self-determination for Turkey’s ethnic Kurdish minority for four decades. The current efforts to resolve the conflict began two years ago, when the Turkish government engaged in secret talks with the PKK’s imprisoned charismatic leader, Abdullah Ocalan, who has been held in near-isolation since his conviction in 1999 for treason and separatism. | In February 2025, Ocalan called on his followers to surrender their weapons, saying it was time to put armed struggle behind them and seek to advance their agenda through peaceful political engagement. Weeks later, the PKK declared a ceasefire and in May 2025, and announced it had disbanded, though it conditioned any weapons handovers on Turkey’s guarantees of Kurdish rights and its treatment of PKK fighters and leaders. The law passed yesterday establishes how those processes will move forward. | Whether it will culminate in a resolution to the decadeslong conflict is another story. The Kurds are the largest stateless ethnic group in the world, with a population straddling the territories of Turkey, Iran, Iraq and Syria. Their grievances with the Turkish government include political and economic marginalization, as well as cultural restrictions, such as the prohibition on the use of the Kurdish language in public education. (Public use of the language was banned until 1991, as was its use in broadcasting until 2002.) | This is not the first attempt by Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan to reach a settlement with the PKK and Turkey’s Kurdish minority—estimated to comprise up to 20 percent of Turkey’s 88 million inhabitants—more broadly. In the early 2010s, the two sides agreed to a truce as the government similarly engaged Ocalan in negotiations to reach a deal. The talks culminated in Erdogan’s “democratic package” of reforms in 2013, which lowered the electoral threshold for participation in parliament, which had long forced pro-Kurdish parties to run their candidates as independents. But it otherwise failed to address the Kurds’ major demands, including a similar amnesty for nonviolent prisoners, while only legalizing Kurdish-language education in private schools. | Two years later, the major pro-Kurdish political party, the HDP, made significant gains in the 2015 parliamentary elections, drawing a post-election crackdown on its leaders. The PKK returned to its violent campaign of guerrilla attacks and terrorist strikes, and casualties spiked, though the violence has since subsided. | Nevertheless, the PKK and its allied Syrian faction known as the YPF have remained a central focus of Turkey’s military. As a result, peace with the group now serves Turkey’s interests at a time when regional developments have created more urgent priorities, including stabilizing post-Assad Syria, managing tense relations with an aggressive and expansionist Israel and navigating the fallout of the Iran war. It also removes obstacles to closer ties with Iraq, which has long objected to Turkey’s military incursions targeting PKK camps across the border. | But above all, and as with his previous abandonment of the 2013 peace process, the return to a conciliatory posture is driven by Erdogan’s domestic political needs—namely, holding onto power. Back then, the threat to his political survival came from Turkey’s nationalist parties, which opposed concessions to the Kurds. Today, having lost his absolute majority, Erdogan is allied with the nationalists, but under the revised constitution he pushed through parliament in 2017, he must call snap elections before 2028 to avoid its two-term limit for holding the presidency. And he needs the support of Kurdish lawmakers from the DEM party (the legal successor to the HDP) to do so. | The PKK and Turkey’s pro-Kurdish parties have already criticized the law passed yesterday, the terms of which would exclude Ocalan from an amnesty. Nor does it guarantee that Erdogan will ease off on his politically driven crackdowns of opposition leaders, which has more recently focused on the main opposition party, the CHP, but could just as easily shift its sights to the DEM once the Kurdish détente has served Erdogan’s purposes. | For his part, Ocalan applauded the law last week, calling it “the beginning of a democratization process that will be at least as significant as the founding of the Republic.” Given Erdogan’s penchant for democratization processes that don’t lead to democracy, and peace processes that don’t lead to peace, it may be more prudent to adopt a wait-and-see attitude. |
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