Ocalan dissolves the PKK
By Alejandro Iturbe
In Türkiye, a great process of struggle against the regime of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan (RTE) has just begun [1]. A few weeks earlier, Abdullah Öcalan (“Apo”), founder and leader of the PKK (Kurdistan Workers’ Party), announced that his party was definitively abandoning the armed struggle against the Turkish regime and was disbanding in order to join the DEM (People’s Equality and Democracy Party), a legal organization that participates in elections[2]. What is the meaning of Ocalan’s announcement in the Turkish context?
In order to answer this question, we must first address the history of the Kurdish people, to whom we have dedicated numerous articles over the years[3]. In them, we analyzed that it is a nationality of almost 40 million people that has always been prevented from having its own nation-state (Kurdistan). On the contrary, since 1923, the Kurdish people and their historical territory (about 400,000 km2) have been divided into four countries (Türkiye, Iran, Iraq and Syria). In these countries, the Kurds have always been an oppressed minority. Therefore, they have been fighting against this discrimination and for their own unified state for more than a century.
The IWL’s position on the Kurdish people has always been to recognize and defend their right to separate their historical territories from the states into which they have been divided to form their own independent state as the only way to exercise their self-determination and reunification. Therefore, we fully support their struggle in this regard.
The Kurds in Türkiye
It is estimated that there are about 15 million Kurds in the country and they are the overwhelming majority in more than 25% of the Turkish territory, in the southeast of Türkiye (the Kurds call this region Northern Kurdistan).
This significant demographic and territorial weight has meant that since the establishment of the Turkish Republic in 1923, all regimes and governments have persecuted and repressed the Kurds and any attempt at independence or even regional autonomy. This was the case with the great revolts of Ararat and Dersim in the 1930s, which were bloodily suppressed by the secular regime of Kemal Atatürk with genocidal methods of ethnic cleansing similar to those used decades earlier by the Turkish Empire against the Armenian people (mass murder of women and children).
In the decades that followed, although there were no new massacres of this kind, the oppression and discrimination against the Kurds continued unabated (for many decades they were even forbidden to speak their language in public). In this context, a group of young Kurds led by Ocalan (b. 1949) founded the PKK in 1978.
The PKK and the Armed Struggle
The founding program of the PKK called on the Kurdish people to fight for national liberation and independence in all the territories into which it had been divided in order to build a “socialist, united and independent Kurdish state. To achieve this goal, the organization, with Maoist influences, proposed the development of a “protracted people’s war” and began to form its armed wing. The PKK recruited many young Kurds, especially from the poorest sectors.
In 1980, in the context of a political, economic and social crisis of the Kemalist regime, there was a military coup in Türkiye led by General Evren, who installed a repressive dictatorship that particularly targeted Kurdish organizations and leaders. The PKK was the only Kurdish party that was able to remain underground, and it continued to gain influence.
Evren’s dictatorship failed to resolve the crisis or stabilize the country. As it weakened visibly and tried to move forward with rigged and banned elections. In this context, in 1984, the PKK thought that the conditions were right to start the “people’s war” against the regime.
It managed to control some rural areas and set up its own administrations there. However, the harsh response of the Turkish army prevented its expansion and limited the area of confrontation. The conflict continued for several years and there were thousands of victims, especially Kurds.
Ocalan’s first turn
Ocalan was forced to leave Türkiye. He first went to Syria and then to several other countries. In 1999, he was arrested in Kenya by agents of the Turkish secret service and brought to Türkiye, where he was tried. He was initially sentenced to death, but the sentence was commuted to life imprisonment, which he has since served in conditions of harsh isolation and at great risk to his health.
While in prison, although the PKK continued its armed struggle, Öcalan initiated an important political shift in the organization’s program. He abandoned the goal of a “socialist, united and independent Kurdish state,” which implied the separation of Kurdish territories from the countries into which they had been divided.
This proposal was replaced by what Öcalan called “democratic confederalism”. The struggle of the Kurds in each country should now be to achieve autonomous regions without separating from them. In these regions, “grassroots democracies” should be established with a “people’s economy” based on “solidarity” and with ecological care and women’s equality as central issues. These autonomous regions would then form “Coordinations”, hence the general name of this proposal.
The debate on this concept and its utopian character will not be addressed here, as it has already been done in other articles. Especially those that refer to the experience of Rojava (the Kurdish region of Syria)[4]. In a future article we will analyze the current situation of the Kurds in Syria.
What we want to point out in this article is that, in reality, this has already meant a big step backwards in terms of the PKK’s initial objectives and an adaptation to the national and international system of bourgeois states and its current configuration.
A new step backwards
In this context, Ocalan has been thinking for years about the idea that the PKK should finally give up the armed struggle and make an agreement with the Turkish regime in order to legalize itself and join the electoral system in force in Türkiye, as other Kurdish organizations in this country have done. In fact, there have been rumors on several occasions that emissaries of the Erdoğan regime have held secret meetings with him in prison to explore a possible agreement, but no progress has been made.
Now, after Ocalan’s announcement, the agreement is already being finalized and would mean a new and qualitative step backwards in the PKK’s proposals to the Kurdish people. It would be the final abandonment of the path of struggle for their self-determination and their own nation state. It would mean full integration into the Turkish regime to see if they can get “something in return”.
We want to make two points. The first is that we are aware that there are many situations in the course of a struggle that force one to retreat and accept a ceasefire or a truce with unfavorable conditions in order to try to regain strength. But this is not what Ocalan is doing now, because his proposal is, as we said, that the Kurdish people should finally give up the struggle for their historical demands.
The second is that we respect Ocalan for his long decades of struggle that made him the main leader of the Kurdish people in Türkiye and other countries. But if this step is taken, it would be a betrayal of the struggle and the demands of his people. An analogy could be drawn with the figure of Yasser Arafat and the Palestinian people: after leading the struggle for decades and becoming its main figurehead, he betrayed it and gave it up in the Oslo Accords of 1993.
Modern Türkiye is a country of just under 800,000 km2 and 85 million inhabitants. Its current territory is what remains of the dismantled Turkish-Ottoman Empire, which was defeated in World War I. The vast majority of its territory is in the region known as Asia Minor, although a small western strip is in Europe. This strip includes part of Istanbul (the former Constantinople), which has historical ties to Europe. Because of its history, Türkiye has always been a kind of nexus between the European continent and the Muslim world.
The current Republic of Türkiye was born in 1923 after a section of the military, led by Kemal Atatürk, overthrew the imperial regime (the Sultanate). This military sector installed a sui generis bourgeois nationalist and Bonapartist regime (Kemalism) of a secular nature, which promoted a certain level of industrial, infrastructural and educational development. For several decades, the CHP (Republican People’s Party) was the central political support of this regime.
From the 1970s, changes in the global economic and political conditions made it increasingly difficult for these bourgeois nationalist experiences to survive, thus initiating a process of severe crises throughout the world, as was the case with Argentine Peronism.
The CHP split and gave rise to other parties that, together with the parties of Islamist character, formed a much more fragmented political system with different electoral and governmental coalitions.
The background was the general decline of the country, whose bourgeoisie was trapped between the aspirations to maintain some autonomy and a role as a regional power and the growing submission to U.S. imperialism and the European Union (which Türkiye has applied to join, without success so far). All these governments have implemented austerity and privatization plans.
This decline in Türkiye has cyclically manifested itself in socio-economic crises and also in a weakening of the national currency (Turkish Lira), which is undergoing a historical process of liquefaction of its value, with some very acute moments[5]. Another expression of this decline is the emigration of millions of Turkish families to Germany.
Erdoğan in power
It is in this context that the figure of Erdoğan begins to emerge and gain prestige, with a discourse that the Turkish crisis is due to the abandonment of the precepts of Islam, since the national constitution is based on secular principles. Therefore, the government had to apply them.
With this discourse and with the support of a radical Islamist party, he won the election for mayor of Istanbul in 1994. Four years later, after a violent public speech, the Constitutional Court dismissed him from office, sentenced him to 10 months in prison and banned him from holding public office. He was released four months later and allowed to run for office.
He began to moderate his discourse and founded his own party: the AKP (Justice and Development Party) with a much more liberal capitalist program. With the AKP, he began to run in national elections and received significant support in terms of votes. Based on these results, he was appointed Prime Minister in 2003 and elected President of the Republic in 2014. His rise to power was supported by the U.S. imperialism.
Erdoğan intensified the politics of privatization and the deals made with them and public spaces. In 2013, he faced a massive mobilization against his plan to destroy Istanbul’s Taksim Gezi Park to build a shopping mall. Despite harsh repression, the protests lasted a month. However, as we have seen, Erdoğan won the 2014 elections.
A regime change
From this triumph, Erdoğan tried to advance his project of changing the Turkish constitution towards a completely presidential and Bonapartist regime. To this end, he used the failed coup of July 2016, carried out by a small Islamist faction of the army that accused Erdoğan of being a “traitor,” to his advantage.
In response, Erdoğan called on the Turkish people to take to the streets to defend his government. Millions of people answered the call, in some cases confronting the rebellious military.
The coup attempt was ultimately defeated, and Erdoğan emerged greatly strengthened in his project. In 2017, he called for and won a constitutional referendum. In the same year, the parliament approved the reform. This marked a regressive change in the Turkish bourgeois political regime[6]. Erdoğan took advantage of this to advance a repressive policy against opposition politicians, journalism, workers’ and people’s struggles.
A great help for Erdoğan
Erdoğan often “navigated” through “troubled waters”, such as the aforementioned liquefaction of the Turkish lira in 2018. However, through various maneuvers and agreements with smaller parties, he always managed to move forward and remain at the center of Turkish politics. As a result, he was re-elected president in the 2023 elections.
In foreign policy, Erdoğan kept Türkiye in the “Western bloc”, a member of NATO and one of the main allies of U.S. imperialism in the region. At the same time, he combined this policy with “flirting” with Putin and the Iranian regime of the ayatollahs, with whom he met at the Tehran summit in July 2022[7].
In reality, Erdoğan’s main concern in foreign policy has been the issue of the Kurds, especially in Syria (a country bordering Türkiye), since the emergence of the autonomy of Rojava, supported by its own militias. Erdoğan feared that Rojava would be a base of support for the strengthening of the Kurdish struggle in Türkiye, led by the PKK; this concern led him to invade Syria and attack the Kurds there in 2016 and 2019 in order to create a “security cordon” separating Rojava from Turkish Kurdistan and isolating the Kurdish cantons of Syria from each other[8]. Since then, Türkiye has maintained a military presence in Syria, later disguised as the Syrian Democratic Forces, whose main activity before and after the fall of the al-Assad dictatorship was to attack the Kurdish militias.
The flip side of this policy of attacking the Kurds of Rojava is the excellent relations that Erdoğan has with the government of Basur (autonomous Kurdish region of Iraq bordering Türkiye) headed by Massoud Barzani. Barzani is a politician who heads the KDP (Kurdistan Democratic Party), which represents the Kurdish bourgeoisie in the region and has been in dispute with the PKK over the leadership of the Kurdish people.
In 2003, the KDP joined the coalition of forces led by U.S. imperialism that invaded Iraq and overthrew Saddam Hussein’s regime. In return, the new Iraqi constitution of 2005 granted Basur the status of an “autonomous federal entity” with the right to elect its own government and parliament and to conduct its own foreign relations. In effect, it was almost a Kurdish state within Iraq. Since then, Basur has remained relatively stable politically and economically. It is important to note that this is an oil producing and exporting region. In this sense, it is the main supplier of oil to Türkiye [9]. This is one of the explanations for the excellent relations between the Erdoğan and Barzani governments.
Within Türkiye, Erdoğan has encouraged the Kurdish bourgeoisie to intervene in the electoral processes, which they do through the aforementioned DEM. In this way, the Kurds elect deputies and mayors and as a result, and they have some space to do business and act as an intermediary in the Basur oil trade. For this reason, this Kurdish bourgeoisie has in fact established a non-aggression pact with Erdoğan and has even supported parliamentary government coalitions.
As we have seen at the beginning of this article, Erdoğan is facing a mass rebellion against his government in Istanbul and other cities in the country. It is important for him to keep the “Kurdish front” quiet. In this context, Ocalan’s policy of dissolving the PKK into DEM instead of calling on the Kurds to actively participate in this struggle is a great help for Erdoğan. That is why he is very happy with it[10].
Sources
[1] https://litci.org/es/turquia-entra-en-una-nueva era/?utm_source=copylink&utm_medium=browser
[2] https://www.infobae.com/america/mundo/2025/02/27/tras-40-anos-de-lucha-armada-el-fundador-de-la-guerrilla-kurda-en-turquia-pidio-la-disolucion-del-pkk/
[3] See especially https://litci.org/es/sobre-la-lucha-del-pueblo-kurdo/?utm_source=copylink&utm_medium=browser and http://litci.org/es/por-que-defendemos-el-derecho-de-los-kurdos-a-tener-su-propio-estado/?utm_source=copylink&utm_medium=browser
[4] https://litci.org/es/rojava-kurdistan-sirio-un-estado-burgues-atipico-parte-1/?utm_source=copylink&utm_medium=browser and https://litci.org/es/rojava-kurdistan-sirio-un-balance-necesario/?utm_source=copylink&utm_medium=browser
ylink&utm_medium=browser y https://litci.org/es/rojava-kurdistan-sirio-un-balance-necesario/?utm_source=copylink&utm_medium=browser
[5] https://litci.org/es/turquia-inicio-del-efecto raki/?utm_source=copylink&utm_medium=browser
[6] https://www.bbc.com/mundo/noticias-internacional-39616815
[7] https://www.france24.com/es/medio-oriente/20220719-putin-erdogan-y-raisi-tres-pesos-pesados-reunidos-en-teher%C3%A1n
[8] https://litci.org/es/repudiamos-el-ataque-del-ejercito-turco-contra-rojava-kurdistan-sirio/?utm_source=copylink&utm_medium=browser
[9] https://litci.org/es/masivo-plebiscito-la-independencia-basur-kurdistan-iraqui/?utm_source=copylink&utm_medium=browser
[10] https://www.dw.com/es/erdogan-califica-de-oportunidad-hist%C3%B3rica-llamado-del-l%C3%ADder-del-pkk/a-71791070
