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KURDISH REBELS BEGAN withdrawing from Turkey into their stronghold in northern Iraq on Wednesday, a major step towards ending a decades-long conflict that has left tens of thousands of people dead.
The pullout is the first visible sign that months of fragile talks between the state and the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) could succeed in ending 29 years of guerrilla war.
“We know that they have started moving,” Selahattin Demirtas, a pro-Kurdish lawmaker actively involved in the process, told AFP.
About 2,000 rebel fighters are expected to begin leaving Turkey on foot, travelling through the mountainous border zone to reach their safe havens in the inhospitable Qandil mountains in northern Iraq.
There they will join another 5,000 fellow militants at the command base which has been used as a springboard for attacks against Turkish security forces.
A “symbolic” date of departure
The withdrawals are expected to take three to four months, with several media outlets reporting that the rebels have been on the move for weeks and that May 8 is a “symbolic” date of departure.
On Tuesday, the rebels said they would not renege on their promise to withdraw following an order from their jailed leader Abdullah Ocalan.
Ocalan, known as “Apo” or uncle to Kurds but a “baby killer” by Turks, called in March for a historic ceasefire from his jail cell after months of clandestine peace talks with Turkish security services.
But if his supporters have agreed to the pullout, they have not yet taken their hands off their guns as the delicate process begins.
The rebels on Tuesday complained about Ankara boosting troops and carrying out surveillance flights at the border, saying they were “delaying the peace process” and paving the way for “provocations and clashes.”
The Turkish army has not confirmed these measures but said their “fight against any terrorism continues”, although no fatal clashes have occurred in recent months, the first such lull in years.
Acting PKK leader Murat Karayilan warned late last month that the fighters would would strike back and the withdrawal would halt “immediately” if they were attacked.
“We have no doubt about the state but fear provocation from dark forces,” Demirtas said, referring to the possibility of ambushes by splinter paramilitary groups which may not be fond of the process.
Mass withdrawals in 1999 were disrupted when Turkish forces ambushed departing rebels, killing around 500 people and wrecking hopes for a permanent peace.
Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan has repeatedly vowed that retreating rebels “will not be touched”.
He said Tuesday that “laying down weapons” should be the top priority for the PKK, blacklisted as a terrorist group by Ankara and the West, for the process to succeed.
Wider constitutional rights for Turkey’s Kurds called for
Karayilan said in April that the PKK was expecting Ankara to “do its part” before giving up arms, and called for wider constitutional rights for Turkey’s Kurds, who make up around 20 per cent of the 75 million population.
A permanent peace could transform Turkey’s impoverished Kurdish-majority southeast, where investment has remained scarce and infrastructure insufficient due to the threat of clashes.
It will also impact Erdogan’s political future, after he braved a major nationalist backlash in revealing the negotiations with Ocalan.
Millions of Kurds are expecting Ocalan, who narrowly escaped a death sentence in 2002 after European Union pressure, to be pardoned and join political life.
Ocalan said in his March peace call that a ceasefire would be the beginning of a “new era” for the Kurdish movement.
“It is not the time to give up the struggle, but to start a different one,” Ocalan said.
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I find pulling out from a ferret equally critical.
Embarrassing when you have to give yourselves a green thumb for those unintelligible comments.
I disagree
Solidarity with the PKK and the long suffering Kurdish people.
You may as well say Solidarity with the IRA or Solidarity with the Taliban
Interesting Sean ,how do you compare the IRA to the Taliban?
I dont compare the IRA to the Taliban. I compare the PKK to the Taliban and to the IRA. And I have done my homework, Daddy. Apo Ocalan was a failing narcissistic student caught up in the left right violence that engulfed Turkey in the 1970s when he seized on Kurdish nationalism as a new avenue to explore. He and his thugs bombed shopping centres killing babies and tourists, they attacked suriani monasteries in South East Turkey, they desecrated Armenian graveyards (their grandfathers having destroyed the churches), they shot school teachers and threatened kurds who sent their kids to school with death, they attacked health clinics and killed community health workers and then dressed up their violence against civilians with attacks on Turkish gendarmerie and army using weapons supplied initially by Sadam Hussein and Assad pere. They have systematically destroyed development projects funded by the Turkish Government, have funded their terrorism with drug smuggling and people trafficking and have terrorised the Kurdish population in Turkey, thousands of whom fled the PKK violence for Turkeys cities. I do not deny that the Turkish army response to the terorism was unforgiveably brutal but the myth that the Kurds are persecuted in Turkey is well propagated. Turkey has had a Kurdish president, several Kurdish chiefs of staff and very succesful business people and entertainers. Perhaps you should do your homework, boy.
Wonder how many of them really end up in Iraq, most likely they headed to Syria to join the ‘resistence’.
Real shame that these people are being allowed to escape justice. The Turkish military may not have been angels in the South East but these thugs butchered health workers, teachers, christians and babies. They follow a long tradition of Kurdish involvement in atrocities which includes intimate involvement in the Armenian genocide of 1915. And all in so called defence of Kurdish culture which among other things espouses honour killings. And they are let go because the man responsible for the de-secularisation of Turkey is trying to hold onto power for as long as he can so that he can turn Turkey into Afghanistan in Taliban times.
Surely ;- ” in a major step towards (ending) a three-decade long conflict that has left tens of thousands dead. “
- Thanks for inserting the word ‘ending’.
Sorry for playing the editor,
but someone has to…
Sean — Clearly you have no idea the extent and brutality of the violence rained down on the Kurdish people by the Turkish state. Do your homework, son. Your comment above is a disgrace.
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