Abdullah Ocalan, the Kurdish militant leader who urged peace with Turkiye

New Straits Times

12-05-2025

THE 76-year-old militant leader Abdullah Ocalan has spent a quarter of a century in jail after leading his Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) to take up arms against the Turkish state to fight for a Kurdish homeland.
In February, however, he called for peace. The struggle had run its course, he said, asking the PKK to lay down arms.
On Monday, the militant group heeded his call. It said it would dissolve itself, according to a news agency close to the group, ending more than four decades of armed struggle.
Ocalan, revered by the pro-Kurdish political movement but reviled by most Turks for starting the conflict in 1984, made the call four months after being urged to do so by an ally of President Tayyip Erdogan.
"An end to the country's denial of Kurdish identity and improvements in freedom of expression led to the PKK losing its meaningfulness," Ocalan said.
Both Erdogan and the opposition pro-Kurdish DEM party have voiced support for efforts to end the fighting that has killed more than 40,000 people, reshaped Turkish politics and scarred towns and cities across the southeast.
"I am making a call for the laying down of arms, and I take on the historical responsibility for this call," Ocalan said in a letter made public in February by DEM party members after they had visited him in his prison cell.
A photograph released at the time, showed a grey-haired Ocalan seated at the centre of a table holding his statement and surrounded by DEM politicians.
Ocalan was captured in Kenya by Turkish special forces in 1999.
Despite being jailed, he continued to wield considerable clout and symbolic power over the PKK, whose fighters are mainly based in the mountains of neighbouring northern Iraq.
The idea of re-engaging with Ocalan was floated last October by an unlikely politician - Devlet Bahceli, an ultra-nationalist party leader and Erdogan's main parliamentary ally, who shocked the country when he suggested Ocalan could be freed if he succeeded in getting the PKK to end its insurgency.
Ocalan saw his profile peak during a 2013-2015 peace process between the Turkish state and his PKK fighters. Then prime minister, Erdogan regarded Ocalan as key to efforts to end the fighting.
From his jail cell, Ocalan - affectionately referred to as Apo by Kurdish nationalists - rose in prominence. Photos in Turkish media showed a benign image of a grey-haired and smiling figure, in sharp contrast to past pictures of him in combat fatigues wielding an assault rifle.
But in mid-2015, the peace process collapsed and the conflict entered its bloodiest phase, focused in urban southeastern areas.
In recent years, the conflict has been mainly centred in northern Iraq where the PKK is based.
Ocalan was born to a peasant family in the southeastern village of Omerli and his political ideas were shaped amid the violent street battles between left- and right-wing gangs in the 1970s.
He split from the Turkish left to found the PKK in 1978, pledging to fight for an independent state of Kurdistan after dropping out of Ankara University's political science faculty.
The PKK, designated a terrorist group by Turkiye, the United States and European Union, was led by Ocalan from Syria until Turkiye threatened war in 1998, forcing Damascus to expel him.
He sought refuge in Russia, then Italy and Greece before he was captured in the Kenyan capital Nairobi in 1999.
Appearing bewildered and dejected, he was flown to Ankara guarded by Turkish commandos, and sentenced to death.
His sentence was commuted to life in jail, where he has remained ever since.