Türkiye and the political regime that has ruled it autocratically for over 23 years are facing a historic opportunity. This can positively influence both developments in the Middle East and Ankara's relationship with the European Union. Türkiye is about to become a democracy capable of including millions of Kurds in its institutional mechanisms, along with the other cultural minorities in the country. It can become such a more functional democracy, but only if it definitively closes the chapter on the fight against Kurdish militancy, after the terrorist organization PKK recently initiated its own disarmament and dissolution.
Following the call for the dissolution and disarmament of the Partiya Karkaren Kurdistane (PKK), launched from prison on February 27 by its former leader, Abdullah Öcalan, the terrorist organization held a congress in northern Iraq between May 5 and 7. The final decision of the congress was to respond positively to the call of the organization's leader, but also to reiterate the conditions from which the talks with Ankara began.
After more than four decades of fighting with the security forces of the Turkish state, resulting in tens of thousands of deaths, the terrorist organization will lay down its arms and dissolve itself if Ankara also accepts a political solution to the "Kurdish issue". However, such a political solution can only be one politically negotiated by both sides, that is, the opposite of the authoritarian national security policy adopted by Türkiye throughout the entire republican century against its own Kurdish citizens. Such a policy of force meant for the Kurds a century of denial and multiple campaigns to annihilate their identity.
The Kurdish population, numbering over 30 million in the Middle East, is today divided between Iran, Iraq, Syria and Türkiye .
In Iraq, the Kurds enjoy territorial autonomy within the Autonomous Region in the north of the country, where their language is used in the administration along with Arabic.
Minorities in Iran also have the constitutional right to use their own languages, including Kurdish, in publications and other forms of public activity, despite many injustices they suffer from the authorities.
In post-Assad Syria, president Ahmed al-Sharaa recently negotiated an agreement with the Kurdish leader of the north-east, Mazlum Abdi “Kobane”, which contains the recognition of Kurdish identity.
Türkiye continues to militarily threaten the Syrian Kurds led by Mazlum Abdi and remains the only one of the four countries that does not legally and explicitly recognize any ethno-linguistic minority on its territory. It allows the use of minority languages under certain conditions, even in parliament, but without explicitly naming them.
The Erdoğan-AKP tandem, in power since 2002, established an authoritarian presidential regime in which all state powers are subordinate to the head of state since January 2018. The presidential regime was established less than three years after the Turkish leader was on the verge of losing the government. His party failed to obtain a majority in the 2015 parliamentary elections, but Erdoğan remained in power through an alliance with the ultranationalists of the Milliyetci Hareket Partisi (Nationalist Movement Party, MHP).
2015 also marked the abandonment of the democratization efforts that Ankara had committed some years earlier. Closely linked to these was a peace process with the PKK – also abandoned in 2015 – which had to be accompanied by reforms regarding minority rights. Such reforms are essential for the Turkish state, currently classified by analysts as a tough authoritarian ethnocracy, to transform into an inclusive democracy, eligible to resume negotiations with the European Union.
After the alliance with the MHP, the Erdoğan-led government returned to the tradition of repressive policies, especially against the Kurds. The fight against the PKK was resumed, being attacked not only the positions of the terrorist organization in Türkiye and northern Iraq but also the positions of the Kurdish-led Syrian rebel forces in north-eastern Syria (Syrian Democratic Forces, SDF). The Erdoğan government thus treated the SDF as an entity organically linked to the PKK, although the Syrian Kurds successfully fought the Islamic State, defending the populations east of the Euphrates with the support of the Pentagon.
Such extraterritorial anti-Kurdish aggression by Türkiye has been counterproductive from the very beginning. It is well-known that US forces were forced to withdraw from the Turkish-Syrian border following a Turkish offensive against the Syrian Kurds in 2019, and the Russians present in the area captured the American bases, which was seen as a humiliation for Washington. With the coming to power of Ahmed al-Sharaa in Damascus and the inauguration of Trump’s second term in the White House, the risks of a collision between Ankara and Washington are increasing. Trump was very tough on his Turkish counterpart, especially in the last two years of his first term (2018-2019). There are premises for that treatment to continue in this term, especially if Erdoğan continues his military threats in northern Syria.
The condition set by the PKK was that Ankara must recognize the existence of the Kurdish minority. However, the power circles in Ankara and Erdoğan personally are now also facing a more serious domestic dilemma, perhaps even than they expected. The more than four-decade war with the PKK has led to the massive erosion of Türkiye's democratic institutions, especially those in the field of justice. Over time, a repressive legal regime has been established, which makes it extremely difficult for the Turkish state and society to accept cultural diversity and a legal form of recognition and protection of minorities. The hard-liners, the ultra-nationalist and explicitly anti-Kurdish hard-liners, represent a large proportion of the Turkish electorate, being the fruit of decades of indoctrination through education and the media.
On the other hand, PKK terrorism has done a lot of harm not only to Türkiye , but has also systematically undermined the Kurdish political movement. Instead of articulating itself around legitimate and achievable desiderata through peaceful means, the movement has fallen into the trap of securitization. It has thus allowed successive governments in Ankara to treat the Kurdish issue as a security issue and not in terms of political representation and minority rights.
For now, the government led by President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has not yet taken concrete steps to respond to the calls of Kurdish representatives. There is talk of legislative initiatives, even a new constitution, but no concrete measures have been taken.
However, the pressures for decisive and irreversible change are increasing, both from within and from the region. The US has just as much time to implement the transactional agenda that cannot be hindered by the bellicosity of some leaders in the region. And from the Turkish society, Erdoğan is also facing a gradual but apparently irreversible degradation of the economy, to which is added the obvious wear and tear of his restrictive political regime. The protests are ongoing after the arrest of his main political rival, the mayor of Istanbul Ekrem Imamoğlu, followed by many other arrests judged as political by an increasingly powerful opposition. The current leader of the main opposition party, Özgür Özel, even had the courage to proclaim in front of over two million participants at a protest rally in Izmir, on May 19, that the Turkish president is far from “a global leader, but a local dictator”, who will leave as he came. It remains to be seen whether the leader in Ankara will have the courage to face the opposition but also his own ultranationalist supporters to start a long and undoubtedly painful process, which will bring profound changes to the state and society. It is certainly a moment when one of the parties will have to give in, and it is worth watching to see whether the one who will give in will be Turkish society, or the political regime at the helm of the Republic of Türkiye .