Cease-fire deal registers gains for Kurds

in Turkey, opening for toilers of region



(front page)

The Kurds are an oppressed nationality of some 25 to 30 million people concentrated in eastern Turkey, northwest Iran, northern Iraq and northern Syria. About half live in Turkey, where they face the highest rates of illiteracy and poverty in the country.

On March 21, after months of negotiations with the Turkish government of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, jailed PKK leader Abdullah Ocalan called for a cease-fire and the withdrawal of all combatants from Turkish soil. The announcement was confirmed two days later from Iraq by PKK’s field commander, Murat Karayilan. No date has been set for the troops’ withdrawal.

In 1984 the PKK, a political party of Maoist origins, opened armed struggle against the Turkish government, which unleashed brutal repression against the Kurdish population. Tens of thousands were killed over the following decades.

In 1999 Ocalan was captured and imprisoned by the Turkish government, which until now has rebuffed offers to negotiate with the PKK. Much of the PKK retreated to northern Iraq following Washington’s overthrow of the Iraqi government of Saddam Hussein in 2003. The end of Hussein’s reign of genocidal terror against the Kurds, the establishment of the semi-autonomous Kurdish Regional Government in northern Iraq, and new openings for the Kurdish struggle were among the unintended consequences of the U.S. war.

Ocalan’s call was made public at a rally of hundreds of thousands of Kurds in the town of Diyarbakir in southern Turkey, on the occasion of Nawroz, a spring holiday opening the first day of the Persian calendar. Pro-Kurdish legislators read his statement in both Kurdish and Turkish amid what the Financial Times described as “scenes of mass jubilation.”

“Let the guns go silent, let ideas speak,” reads the statement. “This does not mean giving up this struggle. It means starting a new phase.”

“I see the statement as a positive development,” Erdogan commented from the Netherlands, where he was on a state visit. “Implementation, however, is much more important.”

Erdogan’s ruling Justice and Development Party in 2009 began easing some of its onerous restrictions on use of the Kurdish language and names in what his government dubbed a “democratic opening,” aimed at establishing more political stability in the Kurdish region and ending a protracted armed conflict increasingly at odds with the interests of the Turkish rulers.

The Kurds have a long history of struggle against subjugation and for their own country—Kurdistan. Conquered by ruling empires of the past, the Kurds’ fight for self-determination was suppressed by British and French imperialism that came to dominate the region, as well as by succeeding bourgeois regimes within the borders carved out by the imperialist powers.

Negotiations between Ocalan and the Erdogan government reportedly started in earnest last November, after Ocalan called off a 67-day hunger strike by hundreds of Kurdish prisoners in what was seen as a demonstration of his lasting leadership of the Kurdish struggle.

The hunger strikers demanded the right to defend themselves in court in Kurdish, the right of their children to be educated in Kurdish and the right for Ocalan to see his counsel, which he had been denied for 15 months.

On Jan. 17 the burial in Diyarbakir of three women members of the PKK, murdered in Paris the week before, became a massive demonstration of support for the peace talks. While no one claimed the killings, they were widely seen as an attempt to derail negotiations. Sakine Cansiz, one of the women, was a founding leader of the PKK and a close ally of Ocalan.

Demands for Kurdish autonomy

The Times reported March 21 that “the ruling party and the pro-Kurdish forces in parliament are discussing a new constitution that could meet a long standing Kurdish demand by separating the definition of Turkish citizenship from ethnicity.”

The prospect of bringing an end to three decades of bloody war with Ankara’s restive Kurdish population reflects the Turkish rulers’ broader regional concerns.

The Turkish border with war-ravaged Syria is Kurdish land. “Ankara is painfully aware that a PKK affiliate has established a strong presence in the border lands of Syria,” the Times said March 19.

The same article reported that Ankara has been negotiating with the Kurdistan Regional Government for “a large-scale deal in which state-owned companies could take big stakes in the oil and gas fields in the region, despite furious objections by Baghdad and warnings by Washington.” According to the paper, about one out of every two foreign businesses in the north of Iraq is Turkish-owned.

“We not only support and welcome this call by Mr. Ocalan, we believe that this is the right course of action and a vindication of our long-standing policy that the Kurdish question is a political issue and that this question cannot be resolved through armed or military means,” said Kurdistan Regional President Masoud Barzani in a March 24 statement.

Both Barzani’s Kurdish Democratic Party and the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, the other main bourgeois political party in Iraqi Kurdistan, have sought to end the armed struggle with Turkey and marginalize the PKK’s influence.





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