The Kurdish news agency Firat reported on the decision of the Kurdish armed organization PKK, the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, on Monday morning. Last week the guerrillas held their 12th congress in Iraqi Kurdistan, where, according to the news agency, they made the decision to lay down their weapons. The PKK notes that the decision responds to statements made in February by historic leader Abdullah Öcalan. One of the founders of the guerrillas, Öcalan, who has been imprisoned since 1999 in Imrali, Turkey, in a statement in which he urged the PKK to put down its weapons and dissolve itself.

The guerrillas have announced that they will put an end to "armed actions on behalf of the PKK": "The struggle of the PKK has broken the policy of denial and destruction imposed on our people, leading to the point of resolving the Kurdish question through democratic politics, thus fulfilling its historic role." Shortly after Öcalan’s call in February, at the beginning of March, the Kurdish guerrilla declared a total ceasefire and explained that a new era of struggle for “goodness, justice, beauty and freedom” through democratic politics would begin. Two months after this was announced, the closure of this road came with the dismantling of the armed organization.

Expected completion

Four decades ago, the PKK launched an armed struggle against Turkey, a conflict that, according to UN data, has claimed more than 45,000 lives. Öcalan and the Turkish government launched peace negotiations at the end of last year, which was echoed by Devlet Bahceli, leader of the Turkish far-right party, along with some offers. One of them was the introduction of a legal procedure that would exclude the Kurdish leader ' s life sentence and limit his prison sentence to 25 years.

Bahceli also invited Öcalan to go to the Turkish Parliament, where he announced that the PKK was laying down its weapons. The Kurdish leader praised the "will for peace" shown by Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and other political parties in the country, noting that conditions were being created to end the armed struggle. The Turkish government, through Erdogan and Defense Minister Yasar Guler, has asked the Kurdish armed organization to hand over all weapons, as well as to eliminate "any illegal structure associated with the PKK."

"A historic milestone" for the DEM

Following the announcement by the Kurdish guerrillas on Monday morning, the Party for Equality and Democracy of the Peoples (DEM) has published an eight-point note. In the statement, the party called the PKK's decision "a historic milestone" and an important step towards peace. In fact, this Kurdish party has 56 seats in the Turkish National Assembly, which comprises a total of 600 seats, and in recent months Turkey has suffered the consequences of the intensification of the repression against the Kurds: At the beginning of the year, the Turkish Public Prosecutor’s Office ordered the arrest of the mayors of the nine municipalities of the country, most of them belonging to the DEM party, on the grounds that they had ties with the PKK.