Amid the noise and turmoil within the CHP, it did not attract much public attention, but traffic around the Kurdish Peace Process has intensified in recent days. A DEM delegation traveled to İmralı and returned with a message from Abdullah Öcalan. Parliament Speaker Numan Kurtulmuş also visited political parties to discuss the process. At the very heart of this flurry of meetings lies the “framework law” for the process. Its exact content is not yet known, but a broad consensus appears to have emerged that it can no longer be delayed.
ÖCALAN'S POLITICAL JOURNEY
Abdullah Öcalan can be described as a man of the 1968 generation. He took his first political steps in Ankara in those years, when he was a university student. At the time, he moved among armed left-wing movements that regarded both the CHP and the TİP as too pacifist. Toward the end of the deeply turbulent 1970s, Öcalan went on to found the PKK. Following the Sept. 12 military coup, he moved to Syria and ran the organization from there. After being forced out of Syria in 1999, he was captured in Kenya and brought to Turkey. He has been imprisoned on İmralı Island ever since.
The first peace process unfolded in the 2010s, while Öcalan was on İmralı. He played the leading role then, too. It produced no result. In the process now underway, however, Öcalan took the most radical step from the outset: In his late seventies, he dissolved the PKK, the organization he himself had founded.
Beyond hard-line nationalists, there are also those who oppose the process because it lacks a goal of “democratization.” Others simply have no sympathy for Öcalan. Some even argue that there can be no peace process without the release of Selahattin Demirtaş. Demirtaş himself, however, fully supports the process.
NOT A KURDISH NATIONALIST
When Öcalan founded the PKK, he followed the Marxist — even Stalinist — tradition of the Turkish left. Over the years, however, he softened those positions. Even during the bloodiest periods of the conflict, he consistently called for ceasefires and peace. In his statements, rather than calling for a Kurdish state, he has tended to speak of Kurdistan primarily as a geographical region.
That’s why Öcalan can hardly be described as a “Kurdist” or a “Kurdish nationalist,” either. Over the years, he has often harshly criticized Kurdish society itself, as well as Kurdish intellectuals, artists and politicians. Today, Öcalan openly says that he no longer seeks a Kurdish state. Instead, he advocates a model in which different ethnic groups live together with mutual respect — in Istanbul, Izmir, along the Mediterranean coast and in the Southeast, all regions with significant Kurdish populations. It’s a vision of a kind of “peaceful coexistence.”
The prospect of ending a bloody conflict that has lasted nearly half a century offers hope. Öcalan, of course, will be questioned and debated, but the way to do that begins with turning the possibility of peace into reality.
