Turkey: Is this the end of Kurdish separatism?

Peace with the Kurds is at hand, said Asli Aydintasbas in Milliyet. The Islamic spring festival of Nevruz will now always be a “historic day” for Turkey. For last week on that day, Abdullah Ocalan, the Kurdish separatist leader “who started a bloody armed conflict on this territory 30 years ago,” declared the war at an end. He called on the Kurdistan Workers Party, the guerrillas known as the PKK, to lay down their arms, withdraw to their bases in Iraq, and accept autonomy within Turkey. “Rather than an era of armed struggle,” he said from his jail cell, “it is now an era of democratic politics which has started.”

This is huge, said Murat Yetkin in Hurriyet. The international press is reporting this story simply as a cease-fire, but it is much, much more than that. Ocalan spoke of “a new Turkey, a new Middle East, and a new future.” Notice “anything missing?” He did not mention Kurdistan. The PKK has effectively given up its aim of establishing an independent state—at least on Turkish territory, if not in Iraq, Iran, and Syria as well. That is a massive win for Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s Islamist government, which has succeeded where many previous governments failed.

Three decades of Kurdish terrorism have taken an immense toll on Turkey, said Abdullah Bozkurt in Today’s Zaman. If you add up the costs of the fighting, housing the refugees, and paying benefits to the wounded and the widowed, plus the lost tourism revenues, it all comes to at least $100 billion, and perhaps three times that. And “no one can put a price on the violation of people’s right to life.” Since 1984, nearly 40,000 people have been killed in the conflict—more than half of them Kurdish fighters. Hundreds of thousands of villagers were displaced. Turkey is long past ready to “usher in a new era.”

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Slow down, said Cihan Celik in Hurriyet. Ocalan’s sudden switch from “yesterday’s archfoe to today’s man of peace” is giving me whiplash. The Kurds have been told they are not to get a state—but just how much autonomy are they to be given? The details are far from clear. Most alarming, Ocalan has promised to lay down weapons but not hand them over. The fight could one day resume. “Yes, we are only on the bottom rung,” said Eyup Can in Radikal. We have a way to go yet—but that first step was the hardest. “Ocalan actually said ‘Long live Turkey.’” Few of us ever thought we’d hear such words from him.

We Kurds can’t believe our ears, either, said Mehmet Unludere in DengeKurdistan.nu. “We support silencing guns, but we do not accept the one-sided sham that is trying to be passed off on us as a solution.” Our priority is still self-determination. That means we only want a federal solution within Turkey that is based on equality. “The rights of Kurds can’t be subject to negotiation.”