Pushing restart on Turkey's Kurdish peace process

The bomb attack in Turkey’s southern town of Suruc on 20 July 2015, which claimed the lives of 32 people and wounded hundreds, has opened a new chapter in Turkey’s previously primed peace process.

Though this explosion is largely believed to have been conducted by the self-styled Islamic State (IS), the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) immediately blamed Turkey and killed two off-duty police officers as retaliation on 22 July 2015. This in return paved the way for Turkey to bomb PKK positions inside Iraqi Kurdistan, a process that has continued to the present.

Unless controlled and contained, this spiral of violence runs the risk of getting out of control, and hence inflicting a heavy and indiscriminate toll on both sides.  

No doubt Turkey's Kurdish peace process is experiencing hard times. And no doubt Turkey cannot afford to terminate the process altogether. Unless and until there is a better option, the two-and-a-half years long peace process is the only game in town that can facilitate a more democratic and prosperous Turkey and a better framework for Turks and Kurds to enjoy a better and mutually fulfilling future, putting the violence and bloodshed to rest.

That said, how should Turkey and the PKK now move forward with the peace process, especially after this recent outbreak of the violence and the ensuing burgeoning death toll on both sides? These recent developments are not the cause, but the symptoms of this process floundering. The causes lie somewhere else, more structural in nature, and necessitating us to revisit the assumptions that have thus far underpinned the process, especially on the government side. It is, therefore, clear that the process cannot continue as it has up until now.

Before delving into these factors and assumptions, it is necessary to stress one prevalent feature of peace processes and conflict resolution experiences in general. In almost all such processes, there is no smooth straight line between the start and conclusion. Instead, the road is bumpy. These processes proceed with stops and starts. They have bloody intervals and hopeful (re)trials. So the recent fighting between the army and PKK is not an aberration; rather, a very representative feature of peace processes. But this does not mean that the process should continue as if nothing has occurred. Such an approach would be counter-productive and likely to backfire.

This process should not be treated as a set of rules, procedures and principles set in stone which require the adherence of the quarrelling parties irrespective of new developments on the ground. Instead, the process should be dynamic and pay heed to new developments. New inputs, contexts and demands should pave the way for a new structure: hence Turkey should reconsider its previous assumptions vis-a-vis the peace process and rebuild the process on a new architecture.

Unsubstantiated assumptions

First, one of the factors that led to the initiation of the process was the prevalent feeling of stalemate in the conflict among decision-makers both in Turkey and within the ranks of the PKK. The PKK nonetheless believes that in the meantime regional developments have significantly shored up its position. Its sister organisation in Syria, the Democratic Union Party (PYD), has made gains, where it has established fledgling autonomous enclaves in the war-torn country’s north along the border with Turkey, which seems to have convinced the PKK to revisit its position and demands in the peace process.

Once Kurdish gains in Syria are consolidated, the PKK believes that it will then sit with the Turkish government with a stronger hand, and hence be in a position to demand tougher concessions. The PKK’s new and now victorious mood has, therefore, replaced its previous sense of stalemate in the conflict. This change in the PKK’s reading of regional affairs and its position within them has been one of the primary factors that have decreased the PKK’s resolve in pursuing the peaceful settlement of the Kurdish issue in Turkey at a moment when the region is undergoing a major transformation, out of which, the PKK believes, the Kurds will emerge strengthened and victorious. Hence, the PKK hasn’t maintained the motivation and urgency to pursue a speedy, peaceful track to settle the Kurdish issue.

Second, as a corollary, the discrepancy in the sides’ understanding of the content of a prospective resolution has become all too apparent despite previously being glossed over. At this juncture, the PKK no longer sees, if it has ever done, the Kurdish issue as solely an outcome of Turkey’s democratic deficit, and hence curable through the country’s further democratisation.

Certainly, some aspects of the Kurdish issue have resulted from Turkey’s dismal track record in the realm of democratisation; nonetheless, as an ethno-national issue, PKK believes, it is more than that. For the PKK, the crux of any settlement should include a framework in which the Kurds and Turks share sovereignty. Thus, for the settlement of Kurdish issue, Turkey’s further democratisation formula seems unfit for the PKK’s political-status focused demands and aspirations.

Third, the process as it stood previously primarily rested on the political commitment of Turkey’s then prime minister - now president - Recep Tayyip Erdogan and the PKK’s leader Abdullah Ocalan, the two most important political figures in Turkish and Kurdish politics respectively. Given the importance and centrality of Ocalan for PKK-led Kurdish politics, the government believed that he possessed the necessary political power and acumen to gain the PKK’s consent for any peace deal and framework that Ocalan cuts with Turkey, but to no avail.

This illustrates that in order to achieve the PKK’s decommissioning, the government needs to engage more actors than Ocalan. After all, unless the PKK’s leadership, based in Qandil mountain in Iraqi Kurdistan, is convinced, the goal of having the PKK lay down its arms will remain elusive.

That granted, the Kurdish issue is nevertheless broader and more complex than just the PKK terminating its armed hostility. In fact, the PKK laying down its arms will only provide amenable grounds for the political and civilian aspects of the Kurdish issue to dominate the picture more thoroughly. This also requires the government to engage Kurdish actors other than the PKK.

Since the initiation of the peace process, the government hasn’t made any distinction between the Kurdish issue as an ethno-national question and the PKK question as an armed insurgency. There is no denial that there is a significant level of overlap between them. But it would be unwise to treat both as the same; thus, some level of differentiation between the two is long overdue.

To the chagrin of the non-PKK Kurdish groups, Turkey has solely engaged the PKK to find a solution to both issues, mostly out of political expediency and convenience. Yet, non-PKK groups have increasingly voiced their displeasure at such an approach. Instead, they have demanded their inclusion into discussion on the settlement of the Kurdish issue. This is both a right and a democratic demand; therefore the government needs to pay heed to it. 

On the settlement of the political and civilian aspect of the Kurdish issue, the diversification of actors with whom the government should engage should be an integral part of any new strategy that aims to solve the Kurdish issue.

Given all these changes, it is apparent that Turkey's Kurdish peace process needs to have a new architecture, structure and new actors. The process should learn from its failures. It should build this new architecture based on lessons learned from these previous failures and a reconsideration of unsubstantiated assumptions.

-Galip Dalay works as a research director at Al Sharq Forum and senior associate fellow on Turkey and Kurdish Affairs at Al Jazeera Center for Studies.

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.

Photo: A man holds a PKK (Kurdish Workers' Party) flag behind a Turkish flag during a campaign rally of the pro-Kurdish People's Democratic Party (HDP) in Istanbul on 6 June, 2015 (AFP).