A fog lifts over Turkey’s rift with Kurds
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In the Middle East, reconciliation between warring factions, either ethnic or religious, often comes hard. In Turkey, however, small steps in recent weeks have pointed to an end of a four-decade war. They offer a glimpse into a transition to peace that might be able to balance justice and mercy.
On Friday, the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, designated widely as a terrorist group and known as PKK, began to get rid of its weapons and to disband. The public ceremony came more than four months after the PKK’s imprisoned leader, Abdullah Öcalan, called for an end to the goal of an independent state for Kurds – who make up 18% to 20% of Turkey’s population – and instead urged the seeking of greater Kurdish rights through democratic means.
On Saturday, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan welcomed the start of what may be a long peace process. He plans a commission to ensure the group is dismantled and then integrated into politics. “Turks and Kurds are embracing each other in friendship,” he said.
In a message that could lead to national healing, Mr. Erdoğan admitted that past Turkish governments have made mistakes by using “wrongful” practices. He listed them off: “The unsolved murders were one of them. Diyarbakır Prison [for PKK inmates] was one of them. The villages that were burned down, the people forced to flee in a single night, the mothers who couldn’t speak Kurdish with their children in prison.”
Much still needs to be done to start a dialogue among survivors of a war that killed an estimated 40,000 people. In addition, Mr. Erdoğan is under suspicion of merely using the peace process to win Kurdish political support in order to change the constitution as a way to stay in power. “Resolving [the PKK conflict] will require serious democratisation, while Erdoğan’s desire to remain in power requires Turkey to remain an authoritarian regime,” Mesut Yeğen, a researcher at the Reform Institute, an Istanbul think tank, told the Financial Times.
A dialogue to mutually expose past atrocities is an essential step in achieving accountability. Yet it can also leave room for leniency in cases of remorse by perpetrators of violence. “Turkey has gained significant momentum to reconcile with itself and, to some extent, with its history,” wrote scholar Mensur Akgün in Karar news.
“For this momentum to continue, continuous action is needed,” he added, “separating violence from politics and bringing it into democratic platforms.”