Ocalan signals Kurdish road to peace
By Caleb Lauer
ISTANBUL - Anyone in Turkey on Thursday who turned on the television at 1pm local time and flipped to the state broadcaster's main news channel would have enjoyed full coverage of an official lunch for ambassadors of European Union countries. If anyone stayed tuned, they would have been pleased to watch a report from a toffee festival (mesir macunu) in western Turkey.
Almost every private news channel, however, saw fit to broadcast live the reading of a letter written by Abdullah Ocalan, the jailed leader of the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK), to a crowd of
hundreds of thousands in Diyarbakir, southeast Turkey on the occasion of Newroz, or "new day", the Middle Eastern celebration of the spring equinox that has been long-suppressed and only lately tolerated in Turkey because of its association with Kurdish nationalism.
Newroz celebrations began Sunday in Istanbul and other Turkish cities and built-up to Thursday's main event in Diyarbakir. For weeks people have been anticipating Ocalan's Newroz message, which was read out in Kurdish and Turkish by parliamentarians from the Peace and Democracy Party (BDP).
As part of the unprecedented moves towards ending the PKK insurgency, which has killed 40,000 people, Ocalan's letter was expected to call a ceasefire. BDP officials had said Ocalan would call for "something bigger" than a ceasefire. While the ambassadors were enjoying their state soup, the crucial sentence was broadcast.
"I, with millions of listeners witnessing my call, say this: a new era is beginning; politics, not weapons, are coming to the fore. It is time for a phased withdrawal of our armed elements beyond the [Turkish] border."
Given the emotional and political importance of the occasion, it is unsurprising that, apart from the withdrawal order - the "something bigger" than a simple ceasefire - Ocalan's rhetoric was mostly vague, affirmative, and contradictory.
The PKK's fight was never against other "groups", his letter informed the crowd, but against oppression, ignorance, and injustice. On the other hand, one group had achieved something. "Not one of our sacrifices or struggles was wasted. Kurds regained their self-esteem, their roots, and their identity."
Ocalan wrote that a natural fraternity - between "the people of the Middle East and Central Asia", within the civilization that Kurds had helped create, among Kurdish, Turkish, Arabic, and Persian societies, even among the mountains and rivers of Anatolia - had been corrupted by politics: "wars of conquest", "Western imperialism", and "imaginary borders".
Now all hope lay in politics. "This is not an end, this is a new beginning. This is not abandoning the struggle; this is letting a different struggle begin."
Ocalan renounced, again, the PKK's original aim of creating an independent Kurdish state. "To constitute ethnic and single-nation geographies is an inhuman production, a goal of modernity, which denies our origins and essence."
One assumes that Ocalan was also referring to Turkey. For this was the other clear objective of the letter - to supply rhetoric to the debate about the new Turkish constitution being drafted by parliamentarians. The present constitution codifies and protects an exclusive "Turkish" identity.
"At Gallipoli, Turks and Kurds fell as martyrs shoulder to shoulder; together they waged the War of Independence; together they opened the 1920 parliament," Ocalan wrote. The Turkish public "should know" they have lived "under the flag of Islam" with Kurds for almost 1,000 years, Ocalan wrote. He also encouraged Armenians, Turkmen, Assyrians, and Arabs to join with Kurds.
From his prison cell on an island near Istanbul, supplying rhetoric and authority is about all Ocalan can do, but it will be essential to any peace deal.
"Strong leaders make the process easier," Gultan Kisanak, co-chair of the BDP, said last week at a press conference for foreign journalists. She was speaking of both Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Ocalan. Both sides know the peace process depends on both men's status. The party made "Freedom for Ocalan, status for Kurds" its official Newroz slogan. The BDP's call for Ocalan's freedom is no doubt sincere; it is also strategic - reinforcing the symbolism of the man so that pragmatic politics can be done in his name. And it is a reminder that, in the eyes of many Kurds, the government will eventually owe Ocalan something.
But eventually the turn to pragmatic politics will place the BDP at the center of the peace process, surpassing its lately perceived role as part poste restante address and part courier company for Ocalan and the PKK. Party officials argued last week for the immediate institutionalization of the peace process, calling for commissions to be formed and other "mechanisms", such as new laws, to be created.
"Until yesterday the BDP was always shown as the legal external extension of the PKK," said Asiye Kolcak, co-chair of Istanbul's BDP office. She argued a peace process conducted through legal institutions will strengthen and show the necessity and legitimacy of the BDP. (Others have argued that the recent photos of BDP officials participating in a meeting chaired by Murat Karayilan, the leader of PKK forces in Iraq's Kandil Mountains, finally ended the pretense that the BDP was anything but the PKK's parliamentary wing.)
During the main speech at Istanbul's Newroz event on Sunday, Selahattin Demirtas, the BDP's other co-chair, attacked the major threats to the peace process narrative.
"Peace is not surrender," he declared. Peace, he said, meant living with one's own culture, beliefs, and language - exactly what the PKK fought for. Peace, in other words, is victory.
"We are not campaigning for the AKP," Demirtas informed his listeners. The BDP remained an opposition party, he assured them. Critics have denounced both Erdogan's governing AK Party and the BDP for finding common cause. Many assume the BDP, in exchange for a peace deal, will help Erdogan get a new constitution that provides the president's office - presumably soon occupied by Erdogan - with expanded powers. At Kisanak's press conference last week she spent some time arguing that "such a presidential system would not necessarily be undemocratic''.
Ocalan has spoken, and the PKK will likely comply with his call for their withdrawal from Turkish territory. He has also provided the terms Kurds will use to assert their constitutional claims. His call for the people of the Middle East to stand together fits easily with the anti-American and anti-western sentiment that pervades Turkish political culture.
But the difficult question remains: what deal will the PKK and the Turkish government strike? And when the answer is revealed, Ocalan will not be able to hide behind rhetoric, nor the Turkish government behind reruns of diplomatic lunch meetings. Both will have to answer to their constituents.
Caleb Lauer is a Canadian freelance journalist living in Istanbul and covering Turkey since 2006.
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