Report
The PKK is gone, having ‘fulfilled its historic mission’
The PKK has dissolved itself, but it leaves behind a renewed political vision the final communiqué calls “socialism of a democratic society”: anti-hierarchical, feminist, ecological and municipalist, rejecting both the nation-state and statist socialism.
“The PKK has fulfilled its historic mission” – with these words, and a final communique with the weight of a history-making turn, the Kurdistan Workers’ Party announced on Monday the dissolution of its organizational structure and the end of armed struggle. After over 40 years of conflict with the Turkish state, the party founded by Abdullah Ocalan marked the end of an era and decided to embark on a new kind of struggle, exclusively political, civil and democratic.
The 12th Congress – the final one in the PKK’s history – brought together 232 delegates “under secure conditions despite difficult circumstances, including incessant air- and ground-attacks, the encirclement of our areas and an ongoing embargo by the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP),” says the final communique of the congress.
Among the delegates, seated in the front row, were Cemil Bayik and Duran Kalkan, the only participants who had also attended the party’s founding congress in the village of Fis on November 27, 1978. At the opening session delegates learned of the deaths of two historic leaders, Ali Haydar Kaytan – himself one of the 22 founders – and Rıza Altun; the congress was dedicated to their memory.
The PKK has been one of the longest-lasting armed movements in the Middle East. Like almost all of the armed groups of its era, its birth as a military force took place in Bekaa Valley, in southern Lebanon, where militants found refuge after Turkey’s bloody 1980 military coup. When Israel launched its large-scale invasion of Lebanon in 1982, the daily Serxwebun bestowed on the Kurdish fighters the title of “heroes of Beaufort Castle” for their fierce last-ditch defence of the Crusader-era fort less than five kilometres from the Israeli border. Two years later, on August 15, 1984, the experience they had gained in the Bekaa was put to work in the PKK’s first armed action against the Turkish state, launching a conflict which has now come to an end with this congress – in theory, at least.
For more than a decade, the PKK challenged Ankara in a bid to lay the foundations of a socialist Kurdistan, surviving both the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the socialist bloc. In 1993, amid the conflict’s bloodiest phase, Öcalan floated a first peace proposal, accepted by President Turgut Özal and followed by a unilateral, unconditional PKK ceasefire. However, Özal’s death abruptly halted that fragile attempt at a political solution for the Kurdish question.
After Öcalan’s capture in 1999, while on a mission to try to secure the backing of a European ally for a new peace process, the movement entered a period of internal restructuring. Some leading figures departed, including Öcalan’s younger brother Osman, while the organization adopted a “paradigm shift”: from a guerrilla party aiming at founding a socialist state to a decentralised movement for regional democratisation based on Öcalan’s prison-conceived model of democratic confederalism.
A further turn came in 2013, when another appeal by Öcalan, quite similar to this year’s, prompted a withdrawal of the guerrilla forces from Turkey. Back then, the message came as a result of the “Oslo talks” begun in 2007. Although short-lived, the bilateral ceasefire allowed the PKK to concentrate its fighters against the Islamic State, culminating in the victory at Kobane and the rescue of the Yazidis trapped on Mount Sinjar in August 2014 – a military campaign that won the Kurds unprecedented international legitimacy, but came at the cost of thousands of lives, including veteran commanders.
Monday’s decision marks the final act of this long transition. The PKK has dissolved itself, but it leaves behind a renewed political vision the final communiqué calls “socialism of a democratic society”: anti-hierarchical, feminist, ecological and municipalist, rejecting both the nation-state and statist socialism. The central focus on the local territory, gender equality, ecological justice and local self-government are the four pillars guiding this new vision.
It is a concrete utopia, already tested in Kurdish municipalities in south-eastern Turkey and in north-eastern Syria, i.e. in northern and western Kurdistan. Among other effects, the dissolution of the PKK may open up a new opportunity for the Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria to negotiate its status in a post-Assad order, eliminating the chief pretext for Turkish military incursions.
“So far there has been no written or verbal agreement between the PKK and the Turkish state,” PKK spokesman Zagros Hiwa told BBC’s Jiyar Gol. “What has happened is a unilateral declaration of goodwill by the PKK, followed by concrete steps intended to pave the way for a democratic solution to the Kurdish question.”
The challenge now is to achieve a shift from President Erdoğan’s slogan of a “Turkey without terrorism” to a democratic Turkey. “Now it is time for the other parties involved, especially the Turkish state, to take the political and legal steps needed” for a peaceful and democratic solution, Hiwa added. “Leader Öcalan will oversee the practical implementation of this process. For him to do so, he must be released from prison and enabled to work freely in a safe environment.”
Originally published at https://ilmanifesto.it/il-pkk-ha-compiuto-la-sua-missione-fine-della-lotta-armata on 2025-05-13