The Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), the Kurdish outlawed political organization that has been at war with Turkey for over four decades, announced on Monday that it is disarming, according to media close to the separatist group.
“The 12th Congress of the PKK decided to dissolve the organizational structure of the PKK and to end the armed struggle method,” the group said in a statement, according to the pro-Kurdish news outlet Firat News Agency.
It was added that the “practical process” of dissolution would be managed by their imprisoned leader, Abdullah Ocalan, and that they have “ended the work carried out under the name of the PKK.”
The PKK was founded by Ocalan in 1978 and has been fighting Turkey ever since in an effort to establish an independent Kurdish state in the country’s southeast. However, in recent years, the group has called for increased autonomy within Turkey.
Its move to end armed struggle has been described as historic. The group also heeds a call by Ocalan, who has been jailed in an island off Istanbul since 1999, urging his fighters in February to disarm or disband.
Abdullah Ocalan called on his movement to lay down its arms and dissolve itself, potentially ending a decades-long conflict with Turkey that is estimated to have killed at least 40,000 people.
“I am making a call for the laying down of arms, and I take on the historical responsibility of this call,” the jailed leader said in a statement in February that was read by Turkish lawmakers. “All groups must lay their arms and the PKK must dissolve itself.”
Ocalan said that, for more than a thousand years, “Turkish and Kurdish relations were defined in terms of mutual cooperation and alliance,” which was broken in the last 200 years. “Today, the main task is to restructure the historical relationship, which has become extremely fragile.”
Before his announcement, Ocalan, 75, had met with Turkish MPs for several hours on Imrali, an island in the Sea of Marmara southwest of Istanbul, where he has been imprisoned in solitary confinement.
His announcement came months after ultra-nationalist leader Devlet Bahceli, who is an ally of Turkey’s government, launched an initiative to bring an end to the conflict.
“There is no alternative to democracy in the pursuit and realization of a political system,” Ocalan’s letter read. “Democratic consensus is the fundamental way.”
He said the movement—banned as a terrorist group in Turkey, the EU, the UK, and the US—was formed primarily because “the channels of democratic politics were closed.”
Ocalan made a similar call to his followers over a decade ago, but the 2013 peace process soon collapsed as tensions reignited, dragging Turkey and the PKK back into a bloody war and ending a two-year ceasefire.
