Kurdistan Workers' party: is the war really over?

[Aslan]

It is not often one can say without hesitation that conflicts are on their way to being resolved, but on Wednesday in one part of the world that is exactly what happened: as scripted in the peace process, PKK fighters began withdrawing from the mountains in south-eastern Turkey. It is not the first time in the last 30 years of warfare that this has happened. Ceasefires have fallen apart before with bloody consequences.

The difference this time is that the ground for peace has been assiduously cultivated. The jailed PKK leader Abdullah Ocalan is no longer demonised as a baby killer and terrorist-in-chief and the Kurds in Semdinli, where the first PKK attack was launched on 15 August 1984, are for the first time in three decades hoping for peace. Many big questions have yet to be answered: will the PKK withdrawal be total; will it be with or without their arms; once the PKK fighters are gone, how will the Turkish military behave towards the Kurdish majority population in the south-east? For the moment, all one can conclude is that each side appears to be sticking to its side of the bargain.

The irony is that glory is far from redounding upon the man who deserves it, the Turkish prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Both his own party, the AKP, and the Kemalist opposition are deeply split on the issue. There is deadlock in the cross-party parliamentary body whose task is to give birth to a new constitution. While no party will pull out of the commission for reconciliation just yet, it is now widely assumed that it will not deliver a new constitution.

And yet without one, or even with a series of amendments to the existing one, it remains an open question whether Erdogan will be able to deliver his part of the bargain to the Kurds. This includes the official recognition of the Kurdish identity, native language education and the right to campaign in the Kurdish language, a measure of devolution, plus the punitively high electoral threshold for getting into parliament being reduced.

Erdogan is pushing for a US-style presidential system, a role which he of course wants to fashion for himself, but he lacks the votes to push that through. The image of the AKP as the governing party would be harmed if it attempted to push through a constitution on which there is no consensus exclusively on the votes of the pro-Kurdish Peace and Democracy party. So, with deadlock in the commission, the ground on which Erdogan stands is brittle. Maybe by December, when the PKK withdrawal is completed, Erdogan will be able to go back to parliament with a stronger hand. It depends on how smooth the peace process is. But as things stand, a great opportunity for Turkey to move forward by reaching a political consensus is being squandered.