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THE PKK IS GONE, HAVING ‘FULFILLED ITS HISTORIC MISSION’  
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Tiziano Saccucci
May 14, 2025
Il Manifesto Global
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_ The PKK has dissolved itself, but leaves behind a renewed political
vision the final communiqué calls “socialism of a democratic
society”: anti-hierarchical, feminist, ecological and municipalist,
rejecting the nation-state and statist socialism. _

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“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.” 

_Il manifesto was founded in 1969 on the idea that truth and
freethinking are more important than everything else, including
profit. The paper pays for its editorial idealism in the form of lost
advertising. But we more than make up for this in the support of tens
of thousands of subscribers who believe a better world is possible.
There are no owners (il manifesto is a cooperative), and the editor
and managers are elected every four years by the employees. We
maintain a newsroom in Rome and correspondents around the world,
filing dispatches from Paris, London, Berlin, Jerusalem, Havana, New
York, Los Angeles and elsewhere. Until 2016, il manifesto published
only in Italian. (Pick up a paper from a newsstand next time you're in
Rome.) But that changed with the launch of il manifesto global, an
English-language digital publication bringing translations of our
reportage, news analysis and commentary to an international audience._

Originally published
at [link removed] on 2025-05-13

* Kurds
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* PKK
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* Turkey
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* armed struggle
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* democratic struggle
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