Image by Arzu Geybullayeva. Image created using Canva Pro

Following the 12th congress held between May 5–7, the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), which is designated as a terrorist organization by Turkey, the US, and the EU, announced its imminent disarmament and dissolution in a statement on May 12, 2025. “The 12th Congress of the PKK has decided to dissolve the organisational structure of the PKK and to end the armed struggle method in order to be managed and carried out by Leader Apo and to end the activities carried out under the name of the PKK,” read the statement according to reporting by BirGun newspaper.

The announcement came in response to an initiative launched in October 2024 by Devlet Bahçeli, leader of the Nationalist Movement Party (MHP) and a key ally of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. Following the initiative, a delegation from the pro-Kurdish Peoples’ Equality and Democracy (DEM) Party led a series of meetings with imprisoned PKK leader Abdullah Öcalan.

Following these meetings, in February 2025, the jailed Abdullah Öcalan, known as the founder and the leader of the PKK, called on the group and its affiliates to dissolve. On March 1, 2025, the PKK’s armed forces declared a ceasefire. The meetings led by DEM continued over the following weeks and months, culminating in the announcement made on May 12, effectively ending the 40-year-old fight, which has claimed tens of thousands of lives.

Kurdish people are an ethnic group that historically populated parts of modern-day Iraq, Iran, Syria, and Turkey. The PKK was a militant Kurdish group launched in the 1980s, fighting for Kurdish rights and self-determination.

The last time the ruling government attempted to engage with the PKK was as part of a peace process initiated from 2013 to 2015. Eventually, the peace talks fell through, and the group carried out a number of attacks across the country while Turkish military and security forces engaged in operations against the group in Iraq and Syria.

Since 2017, the number of PKK-organized attacks has dropped. Öcalan was placed behind bars in 1999 and sentenced to life in prison.

Peace at last?

Speaking after the announcement, Erdoğan said, “We are taking firm steps towards our goal of a terror-free Turkey by overcoming obstacles, breaking prejudices, and breaking the traps of sedition and discord.”

MHP Chairman Devlet Bahçeli said, “Today, the winner is peace and brotherhood. The winner today is politics and democracy.” He thanked Erdoğan and Öcalan, whom he called “the founding leader of the PKK,” as well as the DEM Party and the delegations involved in negotiations.

Pervin Buldan, member of the İmralı delegation and DEM Party deputy, said, “A new era has begun in which we will remove the barbed wire and crown peace.”

CHP Chairman Özgür Özel wrote in a tweet, “As CHP, we are on the side of peace in a historical consistency,” and emphasized that democracy and the rule of law must be institutionalized for social peace to become permanent. Echoing Özel, Ekrem İmamoğlu, the Istanbul mayor who is currently behind bars for political reasons, highlighted the importance of the rule of law in the country in this process and beyond in a statement.

Despite the historical significance of the decision, questions still loom as to what is next and what the decision implies for the broader domestic and global political context.

Ever since Bahçeli first made the announcement in October 2024, one question that dominated the discussion was why the ruling party was suddenly talking of peace — particularly as Bahçeli never hid his negative views on Kurds and the Kurdish issue.

In 2007, Bahçeli urged the state to execute Öcalan. The leader of the nationalist party also rejected peace talks in 2010. In 2021, when the Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP), DEM's predecessor, member Deniz Poyraz was killed, Bahçeli did not mince words, accusing Poyraz of being a terrorist. The same year, Turkey's Constitutional Court accepted an indictment seeking the closure of the HDP. Prior to the court ruling, the party had already been subjected to pressure in recent years. Scores of HDP's senior party members, including former co-chair Selahattin Demirtaş, were arrested on terrorism-related charges. Despite a European Court of Human Rights ruling, the former co-chair remains behind bars.

The main opposition Republican People's Party (CHP) said they would be open to talks with the PKK, but they also warned the move was primarily political, suggesting the ruling AKP and MHP alliance were looking to gain Kurdish party support before introducing constitutional amendments. This is in reference to discussions that the president would need to seek constitutional changes if he were to run for a fourth presidential term. In its current form, the constitution limits the presidency to two terms of five years. Already, the legality behind President Erdoğan's candidacy in last year's general election was a point of debate. Nevertheless, he ran and secured victory in the second round of the presidential vote.

When Erdoğan signaled his support for Bahçeli on October 12, he also said, “As the number of those who take these steps increases, we hope that we can expand the base of social consensus on the new constitution.”

Penalizing Kurdish support

It remains unclear what this newfound peace will mean in the context of numerous ongoing trials related to terrorism charges, among them academics for peace, and hundreds of elected mayors who were replaced by government-appointed trustees, citing terrorism links as the main cause.

DEM, (formerly HDP, Turkey's main pro-Kurdish Party), is Turkey’s third-largest political party. After previous local elections, many of the party's democratically elected mayors, 58 to be exact, were removed and replaced by the state-appointed trustees over their alleged ties to the Kurdish militants, or the PKK.

In May 2023, as Erdoğan stood on stage at a pre-election rally in Istanbul, a video played on a large screen beside him linking his main rival in this election, Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu, to the PKK. As the video started playing, Erdoğan addressed the crowd of supporters who gathered at the former international passenger Ataturk Airport, “[they] are walking shoulder [to] shoulder with the PKK. You, my national and local citizen, will you vote for them?”

But the video was fake. Fact-checkers debunked the video and proved its content had been manipulated.

According to reporting by local news agencies, ahead of the May general elections, the ruling government was planning to hang PKK banners with the CHP logo across 81 provinces, in order to insinuate there was a connection between the groups and scare voters away from the CHP. The CHP said they were taking all of the recent targeting campaigns to the Supreme Election Board (YSK).

In December 2021, the Ministry of the Interior shared a tweet claiming it had identified over 500 municipality employees and related companies with connections to Kurdish militants, leftists, and other controversial groups. 

As such, it is not surprising that many analysts and observers remain cautious. Gonul Tol, director of the Turkey programme at the Middle East Institute and author of ‘Erdoğan’s War: A Strongman’s Struggle at Home and in Syria’ wrote in a Financial Times piece: “As long as Turkey remains autocratic, the dispute over the issue will derail efforts to establish a democratic future, for both Turks and Kurds.”

“The state of lawlessness must end,” Pervin Buldan, member of DEM and the DEM delegation involved in negotiations, said in a statement, adding, “There have been great injustices in every sense of the word against the Kurdish people, democrats, opposition groups, workers, and politicians. All this needs to be improved. For this, parliament needs to step in.”

Only time will show what this disbandment will mean for Kurdish rights in Turkey and Turkish democracy as a whole.