Turkey’s Government has unveiled a “historic” offer to end its 25-year armed conflict with Kurdish fighters that has cost more than 40,000 lives.
Besir Atalay, the Interior Minister, told parliament that he intended to end permanently the conflict with separatists, who are thought to have about 6,000 fighters. “Our slogan is more freedom for everybody,” Mr Atalay said yesterday, outlining what he described as “an open-ended process” to “end terrorism and raise the level of democracy”.
One of the first steps would be to lift a ban on private television channels broadcasting in Kurdish. The Government would then end a ban on political campaigning in the language, and permit the restoration of Kurdish names to towns and villages given Turkish names since the 1950s. A committee will be established to address Kurdish concerns that they suffer discrimination.
For a country that once denied it had a Kurdish community, the plan is a dramatic move and builds on small steps to build peace in the Past two years. It may also help Turkey’s application to join the European Union — a consideration that will not have been lost on the Government Separatists led by the Kurdistan Workers’ Party — PKK — have made gestures to the Government in recent months, but Mr Atalay’s plan falls short of the independent state many have long sought. However, in the long term, Mr Atalay said, Turkey needed a new “democratic and civilian” constitution to replace one drafted by a junta in 1982. “The country has outgrown this constitution. Our people deserve better.”
His speech follows efforts to marginalise support for Kurdish militants, and an unprecedented and open debate about the issue in the Turkish press. On October 19, in the first sign that the initiative might be showing success, eight PKK members surrendered to Turkish authorities at the Iraqi border, saying that they had come to “strengthen the foundations of a peaceful solution”.
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Cevat Ones, the former deputy head of Turkey’s intelligence services, said conditions in Turkey and the region had never been more favourable to a solution: “On one side, you have a country ready for peace and a Government with the will to push it through. On the other, a terrorist group that knows war is no longer an alternative,” he said.
But televised scenes of tens of thousands of Turkish Kurds celebrating the arrival of the PKK peace group raised anger in Turkey, and forced the Government temporarily to slow the process. In Parliament yesterday the leader of the main secular opposition party accused the Government of “collaborating with the PKK”. A nationalist leader called the session “one of the most unfortunate days in Turkey’s 89-year parliamentary history”.
Their criticism was not new. The ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) has been criticised since May, when the President talked of a “historic opportunity” to end a war that has cost the country an estimated £180 billion since 1984, and severely damaged its reputation.
In May Murad Karayilan, the acting head of the PKK, told The Times that the party was ready for “a peaceful and democratic solution, to be solved within Turkey’s borders”. Mesut Yegen, an analyst who specialises in Kurdish affairs, said much now depended on the personal charisma of Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the Prime Minister: “For the first time, the Kurdish issue has been openly debated in parliament ... That is historic, yes. But it is still far from clear where Turkey will go from here.”