Öcalan’s Statement and the Future of the PKK w/ Dîlan

On Feb 27, Abdullah Öcalan, the long-time jailed leader of the PKK (Kurdish Worker’s Party), released a statement that shocked many. In the statement he called for the PKK to lay down their arms, which could spell the end of the 40-year long armed struggle against the Turkish state, and for the creation of a legal, diplomatic framework to ensure inclusion, rights, and dignity for the Kurdish communities within a democratic Turkish nation.

In this episode, Ayman Makarem, Israa, and Karena Avedissian are joined by Dîlan who provides a thorough overview of the present moment, situates it within the longer history of the Kurdish struggle, and explores analysis of what this all means – for Kurds and other communities across the WANA region.

Dîlan is a reluctant academic and tired organizer. She is interested in alternative historiographies, feminist methodologies, and memory. She considers herself an equal-opportunity hater regarding states and authoritarian power structures, and is a dedicated skeptic of reactionary tendencies in both organizing and academic spheres.

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Credits:

Ayman Makarem (host, producer, sound editor), Karena Avidissian (host), Israa (host), Dîlan (guest), ⁠Rap and Revenge⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ (Music), ⁠Wenyi Geng⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ (original TFTT theme design), ⁠Hisham Rifai⁠⁠⁠ (FTP theme design), ⁠Molly Crabapple⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ (FTP team profile pics), Elia Ayoub (episode design).

Transcript via Antidote Zine:

This is going to be a long term process. There are a lot of eye-catching headlines about how “the PKK leader has called for disbanding and disarming,” but this is not going to be an overnight process, and I don’t think it will even happen in a year, if it does.

Dîlan: Hello everyone, my name is Dîlan. I am a reluctant academic; I’ve spent the past decade or so organizing around the Kurdish liberation movement, mostly in the diaspora, spending a lot of time researching and doing some academic writing—very little publishing, for fear of state repression and restrictions on travel—and I spent a lot of the last decade being incredibly frustrated, as we’re all very familiar with.

As soon as this statement was released, Ayman messaged me like, What is going on? Let’s talk. I’m happy to be joining you all. I don’t claim to be an expert by any means, but an obsessive follower, among others, of these developments and of the party and the movement.

Ayman Makarem: I’m excited. We’re going to cover a lot of ground.

Because this only just happened, we’re probably going to tackle this in a way that’s different from most others. The Kurdish struggle is such an important aspect of anticapitalist, anti-colonial, anti-patriarchal internationalist struggle, and Öcalan himself and his writings have been very important especially for the internationalist left.

Dîlan, could you give us an overview of what’s happened? What’s the significance of the statement, and of the PKK leadership themselves initiating a ceasefire? What’s the historical, political context of all of this?

D: I’ll try my best.

On February 27, there was a message released by Abdullah Öcalan; it was handwritten by Öcalan himself, and was dated 25 February. The message was expected to be delivered by video, and a video was recorded: a delegation of politicians met with Öcalan on İmralı island in the prison where he’s been in solitary for twenty-five years.

The initial date for the release of the statement was February 15, which marks the anniversary of Öcalan’s capture in 1999. On that date, however, the democratically-elected mayor of Van, a city now known as a Kurdish city (originally an Armenian and Kurdish city), was deposed and replaced by an appointee by the [Turkish] government, and there were riots and hundreds of arrests, so the statement was delayed.

The statement that was released was read by two people. It was called the “Call for Peace and Democratic Society,” and it was read by Ahmed Türk in Kurdish and Pervin Buldan in Turkish. Interestingly, as the statement was livestreamed by Turkish state media, the Turkish was read first and when it came to the reading of the Kurdish statement, the audio was phased out—which is especially ironic given the content of the statement itself.

The big “surprise” of the statement was that Öcalan called on PKK leadership to lay down their arms and disband the group. It’s interesting that in some reporting it is named as a “call,” in others a “demand,” and in others a “must” or a “should.” The phrasing of the translations has been really interesting. Someone will probably write about this at some point.

He began his message analyzing the historical conditions that gave rise to the Kurdish question, talking about the twentieth century being marked by a lot of violence. He talked about the influence of socialist ideology on the PKK, and how the current peace effort is a continuation of a very old voluntary alliance between Kurds and Turks, and argued that the last two hundred years or so, especially the modern Turkish republic, signify a marked departure from this historical trajectory (I have thoughts on this idea of “brotherhood” that we can get into a bit later).

He suggests that the republican era of Turkey is the phase in which capitalist modernity seeks to sever the traditional Turkish-Kurdish alliance, and he portrays the relationship as a joint struggle against dominant forces, and calls for rebuilding this in the spirit of brotherhood—the main task is to restructure this historical relationship which has become extremely fragile, without excluding consideration for beliefs, in the spirit of fraternity; the need for democratic society is inevitable.

He talks about how the PKK is the longest and most extensive insurgency and armed movement in the history of the republic, and was primarily inspired by the fact that the channels of democratic politics were closed. There has been some discussion and some debate about the phrasing of the next section, where he says:

The inevitable outcome of extreme nationalist deviations such as separate nation-states, federation, administrative autonomy, or culturalist solutions fail to answer the historical sociology of society. Respect for identities, free self-expression, and democratic self-organization of each segment of society based on their own socio-economic and policial structures are only possible through the existence of a democratic society and political space.

Fascinating to me is that a lot of the text that was released talks about democracy and the historical context of the struggle, and all of the headlines talk about the disarmament and the disbanding—without talking as much about the terms of it, or the reasons for the need for armed struggle, or the conditions for possibly ending armed struggle.

The sentence that has caused so much stir is: “The call made by Mr. Devlet Bahçeli, along with the will expressed by Mr. President and the positive responses from other political parties towards the known call, has created an environment in which I am making a call for the laying down of arms, and I take on the historical responsibility of this call,” and ends with, “All groups must lay down their arms, and the PKK must dissolve itself.”

There was an additional note that Öcalan conveyed to the İmralı delegation that was not included in the published text: “Undoubtedly the laying down of arms and the dissolution of the PKK in practice require the recognition of democratic politics and a legal framework.” This has been excluded from a lot of publications, which I find very interesting.

A lot of the responses that came after the initial statement were shock and recoil, and possible outright rejection. I even saw some posts on the internet questioning if it was actually Öcalan, or if it was AI. People were over-analyzing the image, saying, Oh, the lines in the wall of the background don’t line up! Why is he wearing red? His buttons don’t match! The face doesn’t look like his face, it looks like if you took a photo and put it in some app that ages your face, that’s what you’d get.

But it seems to be real, as much as we can take away that it is legitimate. In response to this, the leadership of the PKK, the KNK [Kurdistan National Congress], released a statement today calling for a unilateral ceasefire—which is fascinating.

AM: There’s a lot there. Thank you very much for that overview of the last two-three days, which has been monumental. There’s a lot of questions and explorations of Why now? What does this really mean? There are some contradictions in the statement itself, like usually it’s something that comes after the establishment of a legal framework.

Before we get into all that, could you situate this present moment within the historical context? Not necessarily in the last two hundred years of nationalism and the Turkish republic, as Öcalan says, but at least: who are the PKK? Who is Öcalan himself? Why is he the sole prisoner in an island prison off of Istanbul? What is this forty-year-long struggle?

D: Abdullah Öcalan is the leader of the Kurdistan Workers Party, also known as the PKK—Partiya Karkerên Kurdistanê. There are multiple leaders; he is a figurehead in a lot of ways, and the ideological leader of the party. It started out as a student organization in Ankara in 1974; in 1979 they declared themselves the Workers Party of Kurdistan. He himself was not in Ankara at the time of the initial formation of the PKK, but instead had relocated to parts of Kurdistan of Turkey, Bakur (north Kurdistan, we call it: Bakurê Kurdistanê).

Initially it started out as a Marxist-Leninist party calling for an independent socialist Kurdistan. Military operations of the party began in 1984; in the years between ’79 and ’84 the party was trained, interestingly, by the DFLP [Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine]—Palestinian leftists, George Habash’s communist party—in the mountains of Syria. They also spent some times in the Bekaa Valley in Lebanon, and were involved in the resistance to the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1981 (and had some martyrs as well).

The war against the Turkish state begins in 1984; the guerrilla forces of the PKK are known as the HPG, the People’s Protection Forces. They have waged war on the Turkish state for over forty years now. The party itself has taken many forms, and it would not be unfair to say that they have dissolved and re-formed a number of times over the course of history. The leadership structure has changed a couple of times, markedly—especially after Öcalan was captured in 1999, but even before that. The different committees that are involved in decisionmaking and determining the direction of the movement and of the party—it is an alphabet soup of acronyms, and a very long timeline of dates.

Markedly, in the early 2000s, the ideological orientation of the party took a very hard turn. One of the things I find the most fascinating about the PKK and Öcalan, ideologically, is the willingness to engage in self-critique and to work on change, and admit shortcomings and faults, and learn from the past as well, and acknowledge that. The practice of self-critique they have, the process of tekmîl, is still very Leninist, but has been adapted in some interesting ways.

In the early 2000s, a shift away from a socialist state happened, towards what we know as democratic confederalism. A lot of this came out of Öcalan’s prison writings, where he engaged very extensively with the work of Murray Bookchin, who was a disillusioned anarchist from Vermont who had a lot of traditional libertarian sense: pro-civic engagement on a very local level, as opposed to larger overarching government structures that are mostly bureaucratic nonsense and also a heavy arm of state control.

Democratic confederalism comes out of Murray Bookchin’s concepts of “social ecology,” and talk around this also caused some divisions within the party, a lot of discussions, but that shift was slowly implemented. We see the change in ideological practice of the party when it comes to organizing communities in ways they had not done before to the same extent: very ground-up, developing commune systems, interesting dual power formations within Turkey—formations that other people have written about very extensively; David Graeber has some interesting writings on the dual power formations of democratic confederalism as implemented in northeast Syria (written while and after he visited there about ten years ago).

So this war against the Turkish state has been ongoing; the PKK—the “Apocular,” followers of Apo (“uncle,” Abdullah Öcalan)—were declared a terrorist organization in 1979. The Turkish state did not actually know the name of the party at the time, just declared the Apocular, the followers of Apo, as terrorists. As I’m sure we’re all aware, the designation of “terrorist” is very arbitrary and determined by those in power, and there are different ways to define and understand what “terror” is. One could argue that the violence of the state against civilians is also terror (but not a lot of people do, unfortunately).

Some of the background to this is there have been repeated attempts at a peace process with the PKK. The first time a unilateral ceasefire was declared by the PKK was in March of 1993; the process collapsed after the then-Turkish-president Turgut Özal died—he had been supporting the peace efforts. Some people say the deep state assassinated him when he was in the hospital. In 1999, the ceasefire declaration was renewed, and the ceasefire continued until 2004 without achieving any real tangible progress, politically.

Then in July of 2010, some secret negotiations took place between the PKK and the Turkish state in Oslo, but no results really came of that, either. Between 2012 and 2013, peace talks were held again with Abdullah Öcalan, after he called for peaceful resolution to the Kurdish issue—He made this call on Kurdish New Year, on March 21. Despite some progress that was initially made, the process collapsed in 2015, when Erdoğan declared war against the Kurds.

Some of the context for the existence of the PKK, as a national liberation movement, initially, and then a more holistic, not nationalist, liberation movement later—as we are familiar, the hegemonic nationalism of the modern nation-state does not really allow for many different kinds of freedoms, but particularly those of minority populations and ethnicities, linguistic groups, religions, and so on. And the largest minority existing in Turkey now are the Kurds, numbering between twenty-five to thirty-five million, possibly more. The advent of the Turkish nation-state was more than a century ago, and began with genocide: at the end of the Ottoman empire, we see the Armenian genocide.

Much of the existence of modern nation-states is dependent on violence as a means of control, and the state is the sole arbiter of violence—and the sole determining factor of who gets to exist as individuals or as ethnicities or as cultures. And if your identity goes against the narrative of the nation state, then it is otherized and deemed a threat to the state itself—a threat to the very fragile sense of national identity, which is very much constructed, because states did not exist before.

The introduction of the nation-state paradigm to the Middle East was absolutely a colonial introduction and interference, and thus we see very violent constructions of hegemonic nation-state identities in the twentieth century, hence a lot of the violence we see against minorities and that was referenced by Öcalan in this statement.

As a result of this formation of the Turkish state under [Mustafa Kemal] Atatürk, we see the declaration of Turkish as a national language, and the implicit and explicit exclusion of any languages other than Turkish, including Kurdish. And of course, as we are wont to do, there were a series of uprisings in Turkey by Kurds of different areas—not super unified—over the course of twenty-thirty years after the initial establishment of the state, and they were very harshly cracked down on: there were a series of massacres against Kurds in the thirties and forties.

The language obviously was banned, and the legal status of the language has technically changed in the past ten years: it is no longer technically illegal to have a cassette tape of Kurdish music as it once was. However, as recently as a year ago there are reports of people, including an old man speaking on the phone in Kurdish, getting beaten up by nationalists and hospitalized—and even some murders in the past year as well.

The goal of the PKK as it formed—of an independent socialist Kurdistan, influenced by the socialist internationalism of the era, the 1970s—was also influenced by the necessity for self-advocating for Kurdish liberation: freedom to speak their own language and practice their own cultural traditions (which were also banned). And when left no other option, armed resistance is the voice of the oppressed.

AM: Thank you so much for that.

There are a lot of reasons the Kurdish struggle is so fascinating and important for those on the left. For me as someone from the Levant, from the region, as a Lebanese whose state emerges from the Ottoman empire as well, and with this advent of nation-states: Kurdish nationalism, and in a broader sense the Kurdish struggle, is one of the most explicit ruptures or continued manifestations of the First World War.

I see this a lot in my readings of Lebanese history, and the entire region: like, Why these borders? This becomes an interesting question especially when it’s national borders that literally, completely cut organic ethnic formations. Kurdistan—or Kurdish-speaking areas—straddles four different nation-states: Syria, Iraq, Turkey, and Iran. Maybe this is too much to jump into, but the unifying idea of “Kurdistan” in spite of those splits—maybe I don’t have a specific question, it’s a comment: these essentially neocolonial nation-state borders are horrible for many reasons within the Kurdish question.

D: There’s a lot of pushback on this idea of the “Kurdish question” or the “Kurdish issue” (it’s often called that in Turkey, same with the “Cyprus problem”). But the Kurdish question, or the existence of Kurds within modern nation-state borders, speaks a lot to the idea of peripheries. Kurds exist in the peripheries of the nation-state, and also in the peripheries of how we understand national liberation movements, because there isn’t just advocacy for the liberation of one area, but rather four.

That is very difficult for a lot of people to understand, because it threatens the territorial integrity of four nation-states, not just one. And it is not very clear-cut, because it’s very much separatist, and I have seen lots of news reports about “separatist” jailed leader Abdullah Öcalan—interestingly, even though for the past more than twenty years, Öcalan has not been advocating for separatism but rather for a democratic nation within Turkey that enshrines rights for Kurds that they have been denied for the past hundred years.

Kurds exist on the periphery not only of these nation-states and of their historiographies and the way they are talked about, and language domination and other understandings of what nationalism is, but also on the peripheries of diaspora solidarities. There are interesting Kurdish solidarity groups, but they are often a question mark when it comes to the clear-cut campism that we see resurging, “East vs. West,” because Kurds don’t quite fit into either; they’re not on the eastern side or the western side, but some kind of third way. There has been some interesting writing about this different method that doesn’t quite engage with the far too clear-cut understanding of what evil versus good is (because honestly they all suck).

I also want to push back a little bit against this idea of congruent Kurdish territories, because I must say that a lot of Kurdish territories in modern Turkey were also inhabited by a lot of Armenians who have been expelled from the place; it was not just Kurdish land. And I think the idea of land “belonging” to people is not the way I want us to be relating to land, as territory to be “owned” by a particular group of people and thus not owned by others, but rather as land that is to be tended to, that gives us life, and that we live with and not just on or from. And it doesn’t necessarily just “belong” to Kurds in the way that we understand state narratives of “owning” land, but rather this is land where Kurds lived and have lived, and this is land where Armenians have lived and should live again.

There are a bunch of funny internet memes calling most of Anatolia “Western Armenia.” Honestly, why not?

AM: I’m sure Karena has a lot to add on this point.

Karena Avedissian: I wanted to bring up some further questions we can discuss, regarding moving beyond nation-state structures and envisaging ways of being together in multi-ethnic, multi-confessional societies.

Especially since the 1990s, from the Armenian perspective at least (which is the perspective I’m looking at this), freedom wasn’t defined within nation-state boundaries, but rather through democratic societies and movements. “Jin, Jîyan, Azadî” is a transnational movement that emerged from a militant organization, the PKK, which mobilized in different contexts, and, despite successive episodes of violence, gave entire populations a way to survive, politically and socially.

What I’ve found so interesting, also from a social movement perspective, is how flexible it’s been in finding answers, in different times of upheaval, that strengthen society in this reflexive way: on the micro level, the self-criticism, but on the macro level, finding new ways of adapting to changing contexts. In my mind, one question, given this current call for peace, is to what extent this is a historical continuation of that past. Is it just another adaptation? Or is this going to mean a break?

To be honest, my initial emotional reaction to it was like, Oh, no. Is this a break rooted in pragmatic considerations of survival for the movement? This is probably a work in progress—I’m seeing, slowly, more articulations of how we could see this, what it could be, what the challenges and opportunities are. There’s a lot that remains unseen yet, but it is clear this is a really important time of change and flux. It can be anxiety-inducing to think what this means for the struggle moving forward.

Another anxiety I have about it is—when I said it can feel like a loss, the movement has been so important for other “peripheral” nations like Armenians: the Kurdish movement and its recognition of the Armenian genocide, together with the struggle for Kurdish rights, especially within Turkey, and the possibility for real democracy in Turkey (which is obviously not happening now, but maybe fifteen years ago)—those three were really intimately intertwined. There was a lot of memory work that was done within Kurdish communities related to the Armenian genocide, that became almost mainstream in the Kurdish public sphere in recent years, and showed how possible it was, in this post-genocidal context, to have a group that benefited from a genocide coming to terms with it and working with Armenians to rehabilitate memory with regard to the events of 1915.

It was a model for what could be that was so inspiring. It’s stuff like that that I hope finds a way of persisting through the new formations we’ll be seeing.

D: There is a lot of historical solidarity between the PKK and the Armenian struggle, and not just in the context of the genocide. Monte Melkonian hung out with the PKK for a while in Syria and Lebanon, and there’s some interesting memories of his in his brother’s book, My Brother’s Road, where he talks about his time with the PKK.

Side note, Monte is one of my personal heroes. Monte Melkonian, to me, really embodies an inspiration in terms of true internationalist solidarity, in commitment and dedication to not just a single cause but to the broader cause of liberation for oppressed peoples across the world. I know I’m not the only one who’s been inspired by that, and not the only Kurd who’s been inspired by that. I also know that was very much seen and recognized by the party.

He was born to third-generation Armenian parents in Visalia, California (farmland); ended up going to UC Berkeley, where he learned Armenian and got in touch with his heritage in a way he had not been able to in childhood; he studied archaeology and got a full ride to Oxford to do a PhD—but it was the eighties, and Artsakh was coming under attack, and he went and fought and traveled around, hanging with leftists in Iran and the mujahideen in Afghanistan, and the PKK and the DFLP and PFLP [Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine] in Lebanon and Syria. He really was a true internationalist.

AM: Israa, I feel like you probably have a lot.

Israa: What this is bringing up for me right now is questions about—on the Turkish side of things, the negotiator is from the rightwing parties of Turkey, and in Turkey, we’re seeing in the last few years, with the rise of migration, that they’re eager to become part of the EU and using migrants as a bargaining chip, alongside a rise of ethno-nationalism. Whether it’s Kurds or Syrians or Palestinians, or any of the minorities in this state, this is something that’s missing for me in the statement. It’s talking about the relationship between the Kurds and the Turks—which is obviously very important and has a long history, but so have all these other identities, and we’re not engaging in that conversation. It’s interesting to me that Erdoğan has kept his distance from this, and that the person who’s leading this is from the rightwing party.

Going to the internationalist question—you’re right, Dîlan, Öcalan and the Kurdish movement are one of the few examples, like the Zapatistas, of leftist internationalism, anticapitalism, anti-state, that is truly experimenting with alternative ways of being, not only in organizing society but in the self-reflection piece that you brought in, starting with the self and what we have conditioned to, and how to de-condition ourselves so we can relate to each other in new ways, and build new societies and new ways of relating and being.

This is one of the things I’ve been sitting with over the last few days, with this statement: what does this do to our larger movements, when we have such an active experiment and now we’re saying, Hey, let’s integrate into the state, there’s other ways of doing this? I don’t know of an example of a nation-state, with power the way Turkey has, actively willing to give up its power to make space for those it’s been oppressing. So what does this do to our movements?

I don’t think it’s “giving up.” I do think Öcalan has shifted his strategies and tactics, and the movement has shifted over its existence, and that’s why it has continued to survive, and it’s important—but I also don’t believe in reform. And I don’t see how we could integrate with an entity that still doesn’t want us. We’ve seen all these statements coming out from the Kurdish side, and we’ve seen some acknowledgments on the Turkish side, but on the Turkish side it’s been, Here’s who should be dealing with it. It hasn’t been, Here’s what we should all be doing.

This is the opposite of what we’re seeing on the Kurdish side. The Kurdish statements I’m seeing are like, This is all our responsibility; we all need to be part of this; we all have to make this happen. On the Turkish side we’re seeing, It’s the parliament! and, Maybe this party should be doing it. I want to hear your reflections on this, because this is one of the tensions I’m struggling with.

Full transparency, I’ve been going through my own emotions from this announcement, like denial: Is this real? As soon as I saw it I was like, How do we know if it’s real? They don’t show his video, they don’t even allow the video to be shown! How do we know it’s not a setup? And the more I read into it, the more analysis I see especially from Kurdish movement leaders, the more I do believe it’s real—but also, I’m struggling to see the long vision and how this actually takes us to the next step.

D: I’ve also been going through a roller coaster of emotions since the statement was released.

One thing to keep in mind is that the fact he was unable to deliver the speech by video speaks to how much every statement released from İmralı has to be approved by the Turkish state, if not Erdoğan himself. Öcalan has been kept under incredibly strict control. He’s been in solitary confinement for twenty-five, twenty-six years now.

Some of the answer to this speaks to Karena’s question about if this is just a continuation of this rebirthing and re-forming process that the PKK has undergone a couple of times throughout its history, somewhat similar to a phoenix rising from the ashes—is this the next chapter? This does seem to be the next chapter, but we don’t know what it will look like—as we’ve never known. But this feels particularly terrifying, because often laying down arms, when armed struggle is the only tool you have against your oppressor, can feel like certain death.

There’s a pithy Instagram quote about freedom never being voluntarily given by the oppressor, but it must be demanded and fought for by the oppressed. When you lose your chip of how you fight for that, what’s left is bargaining. And the history of bargaining between the PKK and the Turkish state has not ever really gone well, so that feels particularly terrifying. If all we have are talks, and the ball is in the Turkish state’s court to respond to this in a way that actually listens to and reflects the call of the statement, and the very clearly-articulated demands of the party and of Öcalan over the past many years—it can feel terrifying to think the future lies in the hands of a genocidal state that has not ever treated minorities, or Kurds, or anyone they deem a “terrorist” (or threat to their existence as a nation-state), well at all.

The responses to the statement initially were driven by this emotional gut reaction of fear and recoil: Why would you do that? But this war has been going on for forty long years—longer. And people are exhausted. The guerrillas are exhausted. They are fighting a thankless war; they are fighting and dying. They are not getting paid for this; this is a lifetime commitment. If this is the next chapter, and if there is some kind of consensus from the KNK that this is the next step they are willing to try, then we can hold our breaths and cross our fingers and hope and pray for the best, I guess.

It does make us feel a little bit powerless, but we were powerless to begin with. I mean, I’m not on the front lines.

KA: I really appreciate you mentioning the fact that people are tired; guerrillas are tired; it is thankless and grueling. I wanted to go back to the timing of this. What analysts are saying—Erdoğan is about to be termed out of office; according to the Turkish constitution, he can’t run in 2028. What autocratic regimes do is prioritize ensuring regime longevity, and Erdoğan doesn’t have the necessary votes in parliament to either call early elections or draft a new constitution, so he could use the support of the pro-Kurdish party in parliament.

But there’s more at stake. PKK disarmament, for Erdoğan, could help him. He’s long pushed for disbanding its offshoot in the democratic autonomous administration of northeast Syria (DAANES), and he’s pressured the US to stop supporting it. He also wants to strengthen economic ties with Iraq, and Iran is weakened at the time, so this is an opening.

It seems that the Turkish state’s simultaneous negotiation with Öcalan and repression of Kurdish political movements overall fits into this broader strategy, perhaps. I don’t think any of us think this is a genuine attempt at conflict resolution from the Turkish side, but a convenient time to weaken Kurdish political agency, perhaps, while allowing Erdoğan to strengthen his own position.

But something that sticks in my mind, something worth looking out for, is delegitimization of Kurdish political movements overall by Turkey. I see it this way: by negotiating with Öcalan while Turkey is simultaneously removing Kurdish elected officials from eastern cities, and labeling pro-Kurdish activists as terrorists, Ankara is reinforcing the propaganda that the “real” Kurdish issue is terrorism, not political rights, not self-determination, which would marginalize legal Kurdish political participation—these mayors and other municipal leaders—and justify further crackdowns.

It’s control over the peace narrative that I’m concerned about, and how it ends up shaping how broader audiences see this.

I: It’s an interesting point. The negotiation process could be with the people on the streets right now engaged in this stuff, but instead you’re going to the symbolic head. Öcalan has been in prison for years now; he has not been on the front line, and while he still has major influence on the party and the thought process and the development of the movement, he’s not on the streets with those actively engaged in the struggle right now.

Dîlan, when you were talking about how long he’s been under imprisonment and solitary confinement, the strict control over who he engages with and how he engages with the world—that for me also leads to the question of what that does to a person. We know self-reflection is important, and obviously we see it in his writing, and I’m not taking away any of that. He’s been incredibly influential to me and my way of thinking. But also, when you’re separated in that way, that does have its own influence.

This authoritarian state power, that is top-down and is organized only to deal with who they’ve deemed as the symbolic head of the movement or the party—basically ignoring everyone else—is in itself a contradiction to what the party and the movement stand for. For me it’s honestly been a critique in the movement for a while, because while the movement is very much about democratic confederalism, horizontal organizing and distribution of power, and engaged in deep critique, Öcalan is still put on this pedestal. That never leads to anywhere good.

D: He is a ideological leader, and after past statements about the reorganizing of the party, decisions are made by the existing leadership structure that is not in prison, the KCK [Kurdistan Communities Union]. It is still a question, Will they actually lay down arms? There has been a call for a ceasefire, but not actually for laying down arms, and there was some chatter on the internet of how the decision to lay down arms will have to be made in a democratic way by a convening of the party and of the guerrillas.

One of the things that was called for is that Öcalan be physically present at those meetings—so one of the conditions of this meeting happening, and thus also the decision to lay down arms, will be the release of Abdullah Öcalan. Interestingly, the day the statement was released, PKK central committee member Murat Karayılan released a statement saying that the movement will not lay down its weapons until the leader, Öcalan, is free; that the Kurds have been deceived many times in the past and harbor deep distrust of the Turkish state; and “the language of the state must change to one of peace and trust-building before progress can be made.”

(Important to note here that Turkey has used the concept of “peace” as a way of silencing legitimate demands for political, social, and cultural rights, saying, We need to achieve peace and an end to the war before we can even talk about those things.)

“Only Öcalan has the authority to call for disarmament, but the decision will be made democratically, and a bilateral ceasefire—not just a unilateral call—is necessary before disarmament can be discussed.”

So the PKK has called for a unilateral ceasefire on their end, and are waiting for the bilateral ceasefire to be called, for Turkey to respond in kind. The female co-chair of the KCK, Besê Hozat, released a statement the same day talking about how the conditions of security, health, freedom, and work must be created for Abdullah Öcalan. Without these conditions he won’t be able to play his role in making appeals to society. Can he even make an appeal under conditions of isolation? Would such an appeal have any legitimacy under these conditions? How can one expect such a thing under conditions of isolation and torture? It must be added that any statement that is released must be approved by the state, and that the lifting of his isolation must be officially confirmed, and a law must be passed in parliament for this.

So it’s not that they’re agreeing to disarm; that’s important to understand from the statement today. The call for a ceasefire is not an agreement to disarm. It is a step in the process of this new chapter of how they are engaging with the Turkish state.

I: It’s also important to add that even with this unilateral ceasefire, they’re also saying, Yes, we won’t attack, but we will engage in self-defense. They’re still holding the self-defense line.

D: Which is good. That’s allaying some of the fears going from past experiences with the Turkish state, of disarming in the thirties and being met with massacres.

AM: And it is still an open conflict. It doesn’t get reported enough at all; especially European media avoids it, because they have this special relationship with Turkey. There were attacks today or yesterday by the Turkish state, that martyred several people.

D: Particularly in Rojava, daily Turkish airstrikes have not stopped at all. And the narrative of the Turkish state that the SDF is an extension of the PKK—they push that very strongly to justify their aggression on the border and beyond the border. This is the narrative that justified, on their end, the invasion of Afrin in 2018, and Operation Olive Branch (or whatever the fuck they called it) in 2019, and the establishment of the thirty-kilometer buffer zone—the occupation, basically, of that land.

One of the questions when it comes to media literacy, for the general population, is: How willing are we to reject state narratives, or question them a bit more? Because so much of how the PKK is talked about in global media—in European media—is directly from the mouth of the Turkish state.

AM: I will add to that also Al Jazeera. It’s important to note, because in the context of Palestine, a lot of people who are new to all this see Al Jazeera as much better than any of the American media when it comes to Palestine and a lot of the region, but it has its ideological and political [slant]. Even reading these statements how they describe the PKK: in the same way we do media analysis of the New York Times, the first thing they say about the PKK is “the outlawed” PKK; “separatists.” Starting with the statements from Erdoğan and then later on with some other stuff, burying the lede.

My only reflection at this point in this conversation that I can bring in is the use of this concept of the “peace process” we’ve grown up with. I’ve always heard of the “peace process,” but I was reading more about when this term came about, in the eighties (again, vis-à-vis Palestine), from Edward Said’s descriptions of it as a new thing. Like, Now they’re talking about this new construction, the “peace process.”

I find that very interesting, because it’s bullshit, and we’ve always known it’s bullshit. But the fear is, as we’ve seen with Palestine, that it’s a tool to just continue the project of colonialism, of ethnic cleansing, of building “Greater Israel.” Having this rhetorical device—Oh, there’s a process. That’s where people are a bit shocked: there have to have been concessions within these discussions; what those concessions are is not clear.

A lot of the things they’re now stating—those are the preconditions, usually, for then calling for a laying down of arms.

D: Did anyone really think the Turkish state would allow Öcalan to send a morale-boosting statement to the Kurdish fighters? Or declare renewed war against the Turkish state? There’s no way that would happen either. Of course the statement from him would call for some kind of peace. I don’t think there was a lot of expectation that he would call for complete disarmament—however, it was asked, How did we get here? and Why now? so a bit of a timeline on those things:

In December of last year, the DEM [People’s Equality and Democracy Party], formerly the HDP [People’s Democratic Party], was able to visit Abdullah Öcalan in prison, and it was the first time that anyone from the party, DEM or its predecessor HDP, had been able to visit him in almost ten years. The last time they met with him was April of 2015. Before that, there had been no contact with him by his family for about eighteen months, until March of 2024. There were questions like, Is he alive? Did he survive COVID?

After the meeting of his family in March of 2024, the party was able to arrange a meeting with him in December. Around the same time, Devlet Bahçeli, the leader of the MHP [Nationalist Movement Party], one of the far-right Turkish nationalist parties, the big one, suggested that the release of Öcalan could be negotiated if there was a call for disarmament of the PKK.

So the subsequent talks of the DEM party with Öcalan in January and February, after this December 28 meeting, and then subsequent meetings with different Kurdish parties across the Middle East—I remember seeing on the news that the DEM party was in Erbil two weeks ago, and that there were meetings with AANES and all these things—the tone for those meetings was very likely set by the statement of Bahçeli. It is interesting—you mentioned that Erdoğan has stayed completely out of this, and is letting the MHP be the voice of the Turkish nationalists when it comes to dealing with Öcalan.

As for how we got here, that’s a bit of the timeline, if that’s helpful. I also think something that has absolutely influenced Öcalan, in the statement and these decisions, comes from his statements after the December meeting. There was a seven-point democracy statement that was released (I don’t know what the exact translation to English would be), and the general framework of his ideas even then, in December, talked about the re-establishment of the bonds of brotherhood between Kurds and Turks and that it’s necessary for all political parties in Turkey to take initiative and act constructively, and that the parliament of Turkey plays a big role in this.

And he says, “The developments and events in Gaza and Syria have shown that solving this problem by external imposition has become like a gangrene, like a rotting destruction and death, and has reached a situation that cannot be postponed. With seriousness and in order for fair and balanced actions to succeed, the contributions and proposals of the opposition are also important.” So he is somewhat aware of what is going on, and was briefed about what is happening in Syria and Gaza at the very least.

He also talks about how this is an important direction to take for democratic transition, that this delegation will share his ideas with the state and responsible offices and political parties, and he “stands ready to take the necessary positive steps in advocacy,” and that this is a “time of peace, democracy, and brotherhood for Turkey and the region.”

Another thing that was mentioned is the timing of this with regard to what’s happening in Syria, and with the Kurds in Syria. The continued aggression of Turkey in Kurdish areas of Syria, and their insistence that the SDF is a branch of the PKK (which they explicitly are not), is possibly contributing to this as well. If a bilateral ceasefire is declared, that would hypothetically, theoretically, end aggressions against civilians in northern Syria as well.

I: My mind is going to Turkey as an empire. We know that the democratic confederacy of northeast Syria has been allied with the US against ISIS, and that with the fall of Assad there have been talks with the Zionist entity. This does put different pressure on Turkey as its own empire, and using the “getting-the-Kurds-in-line” tactic to close that line off.

There’s lots of critiques on that, on many different levels, and while I understand the necessity to protect, and to find alliances, I am definitely someone who’s like, Okay, constantly be reassessing your tactics and your strategies, and if in a moment you have to align with your enemy to get you through the more deadly enemy right in front of you, and reassessing from there…

We’re seeing these shifts in the geopolitics of the area that are a lot more nuanced than we ever expected, and are showing how ugly this stuff can get. There is no clean way. There is no right or wrong, there is no black and white. I’m really stuck on the consolidation of power by the Turkish state—and while that would be great against the Zionist entity and against the American empire, what does that also do to our bigger movements? If we empower one empire in order to destroy another—how do we break that cycle?

This is where my mind keeps going.

D: I had a couple people reach out to me when there were reports of the AANES having phonecalls with the Israeli state. One thing to keep in mind there is the ideological lines we have the privilege of drawing and upholding in the diaspora and in the West. Being able to choose to boycott and call for divestment, and not buy Israeli products and not engage with that, is not an option for people who face certain death at the hands of one genocidal state versus another.

And in the face of going on more than a hundred years of anti-Kurdish sentiment that has been embedded in different iterations of nationalism—in Syria, in Turkey, in Iran and Iraq—there is no one they can turn to. The US is a very fickle and shitty ally, for many reasons beyond them being an imperial power. But when it came to fighting ISIS, the ideological or moral question of accepting help from the empire or dying at the hands of Daesh was not really a question. You take the help you can get.

The critiques or gotcha moments I’ve had thrown at me by Western anti-imperialists—Well, they accepted help from the West!—really begs the question: are we calling for people to die on some ideological hill that you determine?

I: The strategy and tactics question becomes so vital. This is one of the movements I see really struggle with this. I agree with you—and we saw the same thing in Syria. You have an immediate death threat, and while this other shitty entity exists and also impacts your life, this other one is literally in your face threatening everything you know.

D: In the case of Syria, for the Kurds, there are multiple immediate death threats: Turkey, the FSA, the SNA, and ISIS.

I: Yeah. I think this is where the nuance becomes so important, and I don’t think most of us could hold these nuances. I’ve had many arguments, especially within the Palestine movement in the US, where it’s like, No, you can’t trust the Kurds! or You can’t trust Syria! It’s all part of the imperial hegemonic power! and It’s the empire, they’re CIA movements! and all this bullshit. But it’s not! It’s not that. It’s not that simple. It actually gives too much power to these entities and completely removes the actual liberation movements themselves and the people involved, and the people on the ground who are experiencing the day-to-day struggle.

As an academic who’s thinking about this stuff and trying to hold the bigger things and imagine a strategy forward—the thing is, I would do the same thing. How do you then make sure that you don’t get caught up in it? I understand—I’m reading this today, I’m going through all these emotions, I’m digging more into it, and I’m like, Okay, I understand why this shift in strategy. And I don’t want to call it “reform” right now; it’s an attempt to be accepted into a democratic society of Turkey while also holding the hope that you could push that society more to the left, more into liberation, creating the world that we all want.

It sucks that it’s coming from the right wing, and it’s coming at a time like this. But for us, how do we make sure that we don’t get caught up in it, so we don’t repeat the same shit? So we don’t repeat the same mistakes of the Nelson Mandelas or whoever it is? This is where I’m going.

AM: I think I can tie together a lot of the strands of this conversation. In terms of the movements, in terms of the discourse, in terms of the shifting narrative (or lack of shifting the narrative): I remember in 2017-18, when the US was talking about “pulling out of Kurdish areas” in the north of Syria, at the time one of the biggest figures in the Western anti-imperialist strand of the left, Noam Chomsky, came out and said that’s a terrible idea. And people jumped, because they could not understand.

Because the only framing is “US bad.” They couldn’t understand this situation where a guy who, to them, his whole schtick, his whole career, his whole analysis is “US bad,” in this moment is able to hold the nuance of Kurds facing imminent threats from the Turkish state, from Daesh, from sectarian armed groups—and also remnants of Arab nationalist thought.

We had this conversation off recording vis-à-vis Jordan and Egypt, where in response to Trump’s ethnic cleansing plan of pushing Palestinians out to Egypt, their response is: No, Egypt is for the Egyptians. In that same way that Syria is for the Syrians, its like: No! You are constantly going to re-create those same tensions and contradictions and violence against minority communities.

D: Who is Syrian becomes a question. Only Syrians should be at the table, and then they don’t invite any of the Kurds?

AM: Who are the Syrians? Are they Syrian Arabs? Are they Muslims? Because Arab nationalism is a really bullshit concept that is very fluid and vague, like all nationalisms, and it services a certain group.

D: I don’t know about vague, Ayman. I think Arab nationalism is markedly supremacist, and borders on genocidal in its practice.

AM: What I mean by “vague” is that how it’s manifested in Iraq under Saddam and how it’s manifested in Egypt—it’s very different.

D: There are a lot of parallels between Iraq’s and Syria’s Arab nationalism, particularly under the Ba’athists, obviously, but even before then.

AM: “Vague” may be the wrong word. Maybe it’s “fluid.” With Iraq, his attempt to blend a geographical nationalism with a Muslim Arab nationalism—it’s terrible.

I don’t talk very much about the fact that I’m from a Druze family; it’s not something I identify very strongly with or that influences much of my life or thinking. But very recently the Israeli state has been engaging in open aggression in Syria, and openly talking about it as protection of the Druze community. Which is complete bullshit, because the Druze community is not asking for any of this. Maybe this is a weird connection, but a big part of my thesis these days, that’s in the video essay, is a quote from Edward Said: With the exclusionary, racist walls of Zionism came the exclusionary, racist walls of Arab nationalism.

I think Kurds exist in that space where they’re pushed out from that Arab nationalism, and so are forced to form pragmatic alliances.

D: It’s worth mentioned that Edward Said, in the eighties and nineties, repeatedly denied the gas bombing of Halabja by Saddam Hussein, and said it was a CIA plot, and very much played into the early stages of campism that we see now, the Well, if the US says Saddam is bad, then Saddam must be good kind of narrative.

AM: I find that really disappointing.

D: I don’t find it shocking, though. I will say as a Kurd whose family faced a lot of oppression by Arabs: I don’t find it at all shocking. It’s disappointing, but certainly not shocking.

I: He has the beginnings of critique, but then it stops short. It’s taken by a lot of people and really breeds intense campism, its own cult-like mentality, and basically halts the conversation. Instead of people building on that and critiquing more, and building a more nuanced understanding, it’s just held where it was left.

D: Absolutely. I’m so glad I’m not the only one who feels that way about Said and the way he’s engaged with—or not engaged with, really. Sound bites are taken from it, and they become cutesy fucking Instagram posts, and that’s it, that’s all that’s left. So much potential. Very much halted.

AM: I do want to engage more with these critiques. I’ve definitely seen critiques of him, but from other Arabs or from people who are more to his left. What I want to be doing with looking into Arab nationalism as an ideology, as a project—we spend a lot of time seeing what our enemies are doing to us, but we don’t spend enough time being like, What are we doing to people? How are we engaged in oppression, in our own systems of domination?

It’s not the easiest thing to do, and I’ve noticed a lot of Arabs are not willing to do it. It’s situating yourself in a place of like, I’m not just a victim.

D: I also benefit from systems of oppression elsewhere.

And we’re not just talking about diaspora populations, obviously, but that’s been my overwhelming experience: being like, Huh, yes, you’re oppressed here, but back home you were rich and privileged.

KA: We’re well-placed to have this conversation, and I wanted to say I’m glad to have it, because these things are so nuanced, and looking within and having more marginalized voices point out these truths is essential to not falling into campism, or disrupting those campist narratives that seem so tidy and clean and black-and-white. They’re not. It’s really important to bring this up.

D: That’s the danger of limited, basic engagement with Said’s work: it reifies the binary of Us versus Them. You align yourself with the Us, and then the evil Them is just the West. There’s evil on both ends, my friends!

I: It’s a lot easier to look at someone else and say, You’re doing it wrong, than to look at how you’re replicating and creating the same dynamics. This was one of the things that drew me to the Kurdish movement: that self-reflection piece, the constant looking and reassessing, the inner work as you do the outer work.

D: And the radical imaginary of what an alternative future can look like beyond Just replicating what we had, but with ourselves in power. Algeria is a great example. Oh, let’s oust the French and then put ourselves in their same positions, and run the same violent networks of oppression and control of power they had! But it’s us now! Arab nationalism played a part in that also.

AM: Yeah. In Algeria, the FLN [National Liberation Front] were explicitly part of that Arab nationalist trend. And same with Syria, same with Iraq.

D: This becomes the question when we talk about solidarity—and I will situate myself as someone who’s done a lot of Kurdish liberation solidarity and also engaged in Palestine solidarity. One of the questions that I have not always felt comfortable asking, or a critique I’ve not always felt comfortable leveraging, is: What engagement can we have with the methods of the people who we’re in solidarity with? Is there a dialogue? Is there a discussion?

Are we aligning ourselves purely based on, Well, they’re fighting against someone I think is bad, therefore I’ll be in solidarity with them! or aligning ourselves with These people are facing genocide, therefore I’ll be in solidarity with them! (which is completely logical), or aligning ourselves with parties like, say, Hamas, who are fighting for the liberation of Palestine—but what does that liberation look like? What did Gaza under Hamas’s control look like? How different was that from Iran in the first years of the revolution, when it came to restrictions on women’s freedom and clothing?

Is there a critical engagement with the groups we are aligning ourselves with? This is one of the things where it’s like, What kind of world are they hoping to build? What kind of leadership will it be? What kind of power structure? What will it look like for minorities, or for women in particular? This is one of the things that I appreciate about the PKK: that there’s a women’s movement—which is a somewhat separate entity from the PKK at this point. One of the big self-reflections that the party undertook was the establishment of the women’s movement and the dedication to women’s liberation as a core part of the liberation of people—not as something that will be pushed aside and dealt with after the liberation of the people (which has been the case in Palestine, historically).

That becomes a big question for me also: how are these movements dreaming of a different future? Are they actually dreaming of a different future, or are they dreaming of replacing those in power with themselves but maintaining the same power structure? The PKK does not wish to do that. There is a very democratic process and orientation, and a very radical imaginary for what different futurities could be, what society can look like beyond how we know it now, and not just accepting that This is the way that it is, but it can be us in power instead, but really challenging the multiple structural dynamics in oppression of peoples, including patriarchy, including capitalist modernity—and the ties between patriarchy, capitalism, and the state, and how they reify each other and work together and depend on each other.

To really dream of an alternative future means confronting the three of them, not just one or another.

I: I’m immediately thinking about when [Öcalan] was talking about—I forget which writing it was in—how the first colonization beyond the land was the colonization of the female body, and how impactful that was. When I talk to people who are starting to engage in this stuff, or want to know what I’m doing or why I think about what I think about—or how do we move beyond the reactionary—being able to hold all these little things together, as difficult as it is, is critical in us being able to move forward, and creating new ways of things emerging.

I genuinely don’t believe any of us could imagine a liberated world in this moment, just because our imagination has been impacted, and our abilities and our tactics—even just the possibilities—are all impacted. But at least naming this stuff, and knowing it, and seeing how they’re all tied together opens up the field so much more, and sows the field in a way that allows us to sprout new seeds.

Öcalan’s writing and the Kurdish movement itself—and specifically the Jineolojî branch—is so beyond interesting to me. It’s so fundamental, and they are representative of the processes we should all be going through: the process of Kill the male ego, the tekmîl process, these things that are about how we relate to each other, how we hold space with each other, how we de-condition what we think we know in order to create new possibilities.

If there’s any movement that could try to integrate into a state and push it forward, they have the tools, they’ve been building the tools, and they’ve been engaged in the practice of these tools for all these years, and there’s such an investment and a commitment to this self-reflection and these practices that I think it might be possible that you could push a state like Turkey into a new way.

D: I hope so also. I’m trying to stay cautiously optimistic. And the call itself comes from a place of restriction, and the power dynamics at play are obviously to be considered. You are coming up against the state, that is the arbiter of power and violence and control, and this is the hand that is being dealt. There is some agency there, but limited; restricted agency, not full agency.

There has been a lot of groundwork laid towards the building of democratic society, and there are restrictions on how that ball is being put into Turkey’s court, but we also have to keep in mind that Turkey has jailed the majority of Kurdish politicians and journalists—Selahattin Demirtaş, for example, who released a statement today in support of Öcalan’s statement. Demirtaş was the former co-chair of the HDP who was jailed in 2016 for having ties to the PKK, and in May of last year was sentenced to forty-two years in prison.

The Turkish state has a longstanding practice of talking about peace talks to distract, and then doing more power grabs and enacting more violence, and then removing elected Kurds from positions they’ve been democratically elected to, and appointing AKP [Erdoğan’s Justice and Development Party] trustees in their place to assert more control over Kurdish regions, and regions of organizing, and regions of unrest.

There have been attempts at pushing beyond the dual power formations of democratic organizing within Kurdistan of Turkey, like the city of Cizre that declared themselves semi-autonomous (and was razed by the Turkish state in 2015-16). What’s the phrasing for this? You’re in such a shit position, negotiating-wise. You’re essentially backed up against a wall with guns pointing at you, and you may have a handgun and could do a quick draw and fire—or you try to bargain and negotiate.

The negotiating position that Kurds find themselves in, repeatedly, is of disenfranchisement. They are not granted a seat at the table. There have been attempts to build their own table and have their own way of doing things, so they don’t have to deal with the state and the state doesn’t have to deal with them, which have been repeatedly shut down and violently suppressed. The power dynamics of these peace talks—all of the peace talks, from the ones with the PKK and Öcalan and the Turkish state to the peace talks in Palestine over the years—are ones of unequal power share. What kind of actual dialog can you have when there’s a gun pointing at one of the parties, and the other party is holding that gun?

Israa, you said something about Turkey as a colonial power, and the neo-Ottoman fetishism, and I can’t help but think of Artsakh and Azeri aggression into Armenia as an extension of this, and as being emboldened by Turkish aggressions, and supported by the Turkish state (and Israeli drones and weapons). The public narratives of the Turkish state in support of the Palestinians—Iran did this also, and Saddam did this also (Saddam did it at particular times when he was not very popular, to muster up Arab nationalist, pan-Arabist support)—Palestinians get used as a prop in a shitty game of 3D chess.

I don’t want this region to be a shitty game of 3D chess. Where’s the agency of the pieces and of the players? It shouldn’t just be a couple of people playing. There is some agency—and the PKK really embodies the agency that you can have in the face of state repression, in dreaming for something beyond the confines of the game that you’re pushed in to play.

The irony of Turkey calling for an end to genocide in Gaza and an end to bombardments, while doing the same thing in Kurdish areas, and having been doing the same thing in Kurdish areas for so long (and continuing to buy weapons from Israel and trying to hide it), is not lost on us.

KA: I like drawing the parallel between Kurdish self-determination and Artsakh/Armenian self-determination, with Turkey playing such a major role in the oppression and subjugation of peoples that challenge its hegemony in the region. One thing I appreciate you saying is that this is a practicing of agency, and maneuvering in a really constrained space. This is a topic for another episode, but you could argue that Artsakh was lost as a result of Armenians not doing that, not looking at the cards that you are dealt and doing what you can to preserve what you have.

I would be curious to see, moving forward, what real concessions Turkey is able to give (even though we can see it has the upper hand here), just in terms of addressing historical and ongoing oppression, and ensuring cultural and political rights for Kurds in the country. These are things I wish I was more optimistic about. But because we’re talking about things like providing meaningful autonomy—is this just not something Turkey will be willing to do?

Beyond that, there’s other places it could do a little bit of justice—again, my expectations are low—for victims of the conflict, all those people who lost their lives, homes, communities in the conflict. Justice in the legal system: you mentioned the thousands of Kurdish politicians, activists, journalists, ordinary citizens that have been imprisoned under Turkey’s broad anti-terror laws. Judicial reforms—what is that going to look like? What are we getting in exchange for this?

D: Hundreds of thousands of people disappeared.

One of the things that makes me think of Artsakh a lot when it comes to this is, again, the relationship to land and how people relate to it differently: say, Artsakhsis relating to the land versus Azeris relating to the land. The same goes for Kurds in areas they have lived for a very long time, and the state wanting to have an extractive relationship with the land, extracting resources in particular. I don’t think there is ever enough discussion beyond the genocidal nationalist narratives and reasons for invading Artsakh and colonizing, and incursions into Armenia—and also into northern Syria and different parts of Kurdish areas of Turkey as well.

A lot of it is economically motivated. There are gas and oil pipelines at stake. There are minerals they want to mine, for economic reasons. The drive of capitalist aim plays a huge role in these nationalist narratives, but a non-explicit one as well.

AM: We’ve covered quite a lot of ground. Wrapping up, are there any final comments or thoughts?

D: One thing that comes to mind is: there will likely be a party congress of the PKK in the next few months—this is going to be a long term process. There are a lot of eye-catching headlines about how “the PKK leader has called for disbanding and disarming,” but this is not going to be an overnight process, and I don’t think it will even happen in a year, if it does. There will need to be a party congress to determine the next steps, absolutely. There haven’t really been any concrete actions from the Turkish state in regards to the statement. And other than the statement of a unilateral ceasefire, there haven’t been actions by the PKK, either.

So we will see what happens. I am very curious to see what happens. It’s an interesting development, a pivotal moment in the history of the PKK and the relations with the Turkish state—and also of the region. The PKK is active in all four parts of Kurdistan, in different ways, and the SDF leader, Mazloum Abdi, did say that the call for laying down arms does not apply to them, which is also important to note, because they are not the PKK. They only function within Syria, so the call does not apply to them.

Maybe there will be a part two to this at some point.

I: I want to encourage people to process the emotions that come up with something like this, and to think about strategies and tactics, and being fluid in the face of empire and in the face of end-stage capitalism and climate crisis, and be open to the possibilities. This conversation is allowing me to move through that a lot more.

My initial anxieties are a lot less intense right now, and I am finding a lot more curiosity about the possibilities. It is reminding me we can’t just focus on one tactic or one strategy and say that’s it. We have to be willing to try different things while holding the long vision in our dreams, and be continuously working and seeing what emerges, and adjusting from there.

AM: Thank you, Dîlan, for joining us. Karena and Israa as well, of course, and thank you, listener, for listening.

D: Thank you for having me.