Open market in the southeastern Turkish city of Dyarbakir, capital of the Kurds in Turkey. The city has been a focal point for conflicts between the government and Kurdish movements. December 2014. Credit: Fabíola Ortiz /IPS

By Fabíola Ortiz
DIYARBAKIR, Turkey, Jan 29 2015 (IPS)

A rupture inside the movement for the creation of an independent state of Kurdistan has given new impetus to the voices of those condemning the use of weapons as the way to autonomy.

The 40 million Kurds represent the world’s largest ethnic group without a permanent nation state or rights guaranteed under a constitution.

“We are the only nationality with a great population without land,” Murat Aba, a member and one of the founders of the Kurdistan Freedom Party (PAK), told IPS. “We’ve been split since after the First World War and we’ve never been allowed to rule ourselves. We are not a minority, we’re a huge number of people and we defend the independence of the four Kurdish groups living in Iran, Iraq, Syria and Turkey.”“The peace talks between the PKK and the [Turkish] government should take a different direction. They are being done in secrecy without any transparency at all. We are against the use of firearms in our struggle for independence” - Sabehattin Korkmaz Avukat, lawyer for human right causes involving Kurds.

PAK, which was formally launched towards the end of 2014, is the first legally recognised party in Turkey to include the word ‘Kurdistan’ in its name which, until recently, was forbidden for political parties in the country. According to its leader Mustafa Ozcelik, PAK will pursue independence for Kurds ”through political and legal means”.

This distinction is intended to differentiate it clearly from the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) – the armed group created in the 1970s to fight for self-determination for the Kurds in Turkey and considered illegal by the Turkish government. So far, the armed struggle for independence has killed over 40,000 people.

Today, around 20,000 PKK soldiers are being trained In the Qandil Mountains of northern Iraq, 1,000 kilometres from Diyarbakir, the capital of the Kurds in Turkey. Many of them are now fighting against the Islamic State (IS) in Syria and Iraq.

The financial resources to maintain PKK operations come illegally from Kurds living in Europe, Hatip Dicle of the Democratic Society Congress (DTK) admitted to IPS. The DTK is a political party which also includes members who are sympathetic to PKK ideology.

The Turkish government “does not allow us to collect donations by legal means,” Dicle continued. “There are over two million Kurds in Europe and all donations are sent secretly.” Dicle said that even it is a pro-democracy movement PKK does not give up the armed solution.

However, in recent years, the PKK has been involved in secret “peace talks” with the Turkish government. Through senior members of his cabinet, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has been negotiating with Abdullah Öcalan, the PKK leader in jail since 1999 on Imrali island in the Sea of Marmara.

The DTK gained strength when the peace process between Turkish authorities and  Öcalan began and, now, “we want this conflict to be over and we wish to achieve a common solution,” Dicle told IPS.

Nevertheless, the secrecy surrounding the peace talks with Öcalan and the PKK is being strongly criticised by those who call for an open process.

“The peace talks between PKK and government should take a different direction. They are being done in secrecy without any transparency at all. We are against the use of firearms in our struggle for independence”, said Sabehattin Korkmaz Avukat, a lawyer advocating for human right causes involving Kurds.

According to Avukat, deep-rooted reform of the Civil Constitution in Turkey is needed. “We want to follow the path of democracy and not violence. Our fight is totally addressed to achieving our own autonomy in a peaceful way. We wish to have our rights included in the Civil Constitution”, he argued.

For Mohammed Akar, the general secretary and founder of a new Kurd cultural entity called Komeleya Şêx Seîd, an organisation dedicated to cultural and educational activities for the Kurdish community and based in Diyarbakir, the road to autonomy in Turkey should not include armed violence.

“We don’t want to use violence to achieve our independence. It may even spoil our claim for democracy”, said Akar, the grandson of Şêx Seîd.  Also known as Sheikh Said,  Şêx Seîd was a former Kurdish sheikh of the Sunni order and leader of the Kurdish rebellion in 1925 during Mustafa Kemal Atatürk’s nationalist regime (1923-38).

Şêx Seîd’s name and image had been banned since then until recently, and this is the first time that a civil society entity has been authorised to use his name.

Famous Kurdish writer and political scientist Îbrahîm Guçlu also criticises the way in which the PKK is promoting its political view. He denounces drug trafficking, forced recruitment and coercion of young Kurds by the outlawed group.

“The PKK is an illegal formation whose leader is in jail and tries to manage his entire community from inside prison. We are different and we promote open discussion within society”, says Guçlu.

Edited by Phil Harris

Kurds in Diyarbakir: a generation lost in conflict. Credit: Brian Dell/Wikipedia

By Jacques N. Couvas
ANKARA, Jun 16 2014 (IPS)

Eighteen months after a ceasefire between the outlawed Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) and Turkey’s security forces took effect, clouds of trouble are gathering in the country’s south-east.

In early June, a series of violent events in the area that surrounds the key Kurdish city of Diyarbarkir gave a wake-up call to a nation, which for a year and a half was being reluctantly persuaded that its 30-year-long inter-ethnic conflict was on its way to a durable settlement.

After two weeks of unrest in regional towns, initiated by PKK supporters, the death on June 7 of a demonstrator has revived resentment towards the state.

This is an unwelcome development for Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s government, which has been trying to convince the large Kurdish minority of the country that its ethnic identity will be officially recognised, and to which, consistent with international conventions and European Union (EU) law, human rights will be conferred.The Kurdish problem has been, and still is, the main concern of Turkish citizens, who are weary of the protracted conflict but are also resistant to independence, or even autonomy, of the ethnic Kurds.

The recent deployment of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) to the zone that extends from eastern Syria to north-western Iraq now provides a clear warning that the status of the Kurds in Turkey needs urgent and consistent attention by Ankara.

On January 3, 2013, the Turkish government began a series of indirect contacts with PKK’s founder Abdullah Ocalan, who is serving a life imprisonment sentence for subversive activities that have so far cost the life of 40,000 Kurdish fighters, security forces and civilians.

Although behind bars in solitary confinement on an island off the coast of Istanbul since 1999, Ocalan has remained the de facto leader of PKK, an organisation that has been listed as a terrorist group by Turkey, the European Union and the United States.

In 2006, Ocalan entered into discrete talks with the Turkish authorities, promoting dialogue rather than violence from both sides. He also advocated an autonomous status for the Kurdish-majority populated region of Turkey’s south-east, instead of the creation of an independent state, which had been the aspiration of his movement since 1978.

But these talks went nowhere and in 2010 the dialogue stopped. PKK leaders in exile on the mounts that separate Turkey from northern Iraq resumed armed assaults against state security units. They demonstrated on a number of occasions that they had improved their warfare capabilities on a larger scale than in past operations.

The initiative in January 2013 to find a negotiated, rather than military, solution to the conflict therefore met the interests of the government and of the political branch of PKK. For the first time, ethnic Kurds who are elected members of the Turkish parliament were allowed to visit Ocalan and carry his views and recommendations back to Ankara.

The shuttling between Ankara and the island of Imrali, where Ocalan is guarded by more than 1,000 counter-terrorism troops, has resulted so far in 18 such exchanges. on April 25, 2013, the military arm of the PKK agreed to suspend harassment of the Turkish security forces and launched the withdrawal of armed PKK fighters from Turkish territory to the neighbouring Qandil mountains, which fall within the jurisdiction of the Kurdish Regional Government (KRG), an autonomous province of Iraq.

Prime Minister Erdogan seized the political opportunity to label the unofficial talks between the parties a ‘Peace Process’. The Kurdish problem has been, and still is, the main concern of Turkish citizens, who are weary of the protracted conflict but are also resistant to independence, or even autonomy, of the ethnic Kurds.

Similarly, the more nationalistic amongst the Kurds are suspicious of the government’s intentions, which they associate with mere quest for short-term political gain by the ruling Justice and Development (AK) Party ahead of the forthcoming presidential and legislative elections, in 2014 and 2015 respectively.

Although the ‘Peace Process’ has generated strong activity, through round table discussions, consultative committees, and the involvement of civil society and the media in public debate, there has been no substantive progress in addressing the true issues that are core to the Kurdish grievances.

But, since August last year, the PKK commanders in exile seem to have changed their stance. Disillusioned with the lack of tangible developments, they have resumed recruiting young Kurds who may constitute an enlarged fighting force if the vision of autonomy does not take flesh.

The events since the beginning of June are deemed to be part of the manifestation of this attitude.

Observers in the past two weeks have also begun questioning the actual status of the process, and the true motives of the parties.

It is obvious that the prospect of a peaceful solution of the Kurdish problem provides a strong card to a government before impending elections, in respect to both ethnic Kurds and Turks.

The concessions to be made and rights to be granted to the Kurdish community are, on the other hand, a double-edged sword. Opinion polls have in recent months shown that the opposed parties are rather firm in their positions. Changing the status of the Kurds by decree is unlikely to be acceptable to the majority of the Turks.

The resolution of the Kurdish problem can, therefore, only take root in a new Constitution, which should address the sensitive issues of minorities, equal citizenship and human rights.

To date, timid attempts to revise the 1980 Constitution, written under the auspices of military coup, have brought no fruits, mainly because they have approached the issue as a tinkering rather than as overhauling exercise.

A fundamentally new Charter, inspired by modern constitutional concepts, is unlikely to be attempted before the 2015 parliamentary elections. This time gap may have serious implications for the disposition and goodwill of ethnic Kurdish public opinion.

The increasingly assertive stance of KRG with respect to Baghdad’s authority, manifested a fortnight ago through oil exports via Turkey unauthorised by Iraq’s central government, and the occupation on June 12 by KRG soldiers of the oil-rich city of Kirkuk, nominally within Baghdad’s jurisdiction but over which Iraq Kurds have territorial claims, may be flares fired across the bow of the Iraqi ship that mark the intention of KRG’s leadership to proceed with full independence in a not so distant future.

Signalling of such intention is likely to provide ammunition to the separatists in the neighbouring countries: Syria, Iran and Turkey, whose ethnically Kurdish inhabitants form a society of 30 to 35 million people. Turkish ethnic Kurds represent approximately one-third of this group.

KRG’s ambitions are currently enhanced by the occupation on June 10 of Iraq’s second largest city, Mosul, by ISIS, a Sunni jihadist organisation affiliated until recently with Al Qaeda.

KRG has used ISIS’s aggression as a justification to annex Kirkuk, in order to spare it from jihadist rule. As the central Iraqi government is weak and its army in decomposition, it is unlikely that KRG will ever return Kirkuk to its former status.

According to experts in the fossil energy industry, the combined revenues from its own and Kirkuk’s oil production would endow KRG with enough financial resources to survive as an independent state. Political analysts in the region already speculate that in such a scenario, the United States, Saudi Arabia and Israel may eventually support the creation of a stand-alone Kurdistan, granting it legitimacy and status.

An outcome of this kind bears high probability that Turkish, Iranian and Syrian ethnic Kurds will be tempted to join their cousins of northern Iraq and get a taste of the prosperity that comes with petro-dollars, although KRG leaders will most likely temporarily dissuade such a rush to transnational independence movements in their region.

KRG needs Turkey at present, and may need Syria in the future, for its oil exports and economic viability.

A PKK soldier stands in front of a crowd gathered in the Qandil mountains. Credit: Karlos Zurutuza/IPS

By Jacques N. Couvas
ANKARA, May 13 2013 (IPS)

The peaceful withdrawal from Turkey of combatants from the Kurdistan’s Workers Party (PKK) began last Wednesday but is already at risk of being compromised following a twin car bomb explosion on Saturday afternoon. The terrorist attack in Rayhanli in the Syrian border province of Hatay caused 46 civilian deaths and at least 155 injuries.

Authorities’ initial reaction indicated a high degree of confusion, bias and lack of genuine intelligence as to the perpetrators of the explosions. No groups have claimed responsibility yet, but two Turkish deputy prime ministers and several ministers were quick to point to the Syrian regime.

However, Turkish media has favoured the possibility that the attacks were the next in a series of hostilities between Syrian refugees, the local population and Turkish security forces since the beginning of the year.

The ministry of interior has tried to dismiss this explanation, which could exacerbate tensions in the province. However, the arrest of nine Turkish citizens Sunday afternoon reinforces the likelihood of a local conflict between refugees and Hatay residents.

Meanwhile, Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan Saturday night cautioned against jumping to conclusions. In a press statement, he implied that the incident may be linked with the PKK’s pulling out of Turkey.

“We have started a resolution process [of the PKK problem] in our country, and there are those who don’t accept this new era, or do not consider the air of freedom to be positive, who might have been involved in such [attacks],” Erdoğan said.

Erdoğan’s mind was on the “deep state”, various clandestine nationalist organisations allegedly sponsored by loyal followers of the doctrines of Kemal Ataturk, founder of modern Turkey.

An overview of Kurdish history

The Kurds, an Indo-European ethnic and linguistic group, have long inhabited what is now south and southeastern Turkey but never created an independent state. In the sixteen century, the Kurds formed an alliance with the Ottoman Empire, whose administrative documents referred to vilayet-i Kurdistan (state of Kurdistan), which was composed of small emirates.

For the next 500 years, the Kurds enjoyed autonomy in the Ottoman territories, as did other minorities, particularly religious ones. Most Kurds are Sunni, but many are Alevi, a Shia Muslim denomination.

But the creation of the Turkish Republic following World War I deprived the Kurds of such autonomy. They had been loyal to Ottoman rulers, with the exception of a revolt in the late 1890s over tax collection issues, but the new government in Ankara headed by Ataturk was not prepared to let ethnic identities flourish.

During Treaty of Lausanne negotiations in 1923 between Turkey and the Allies, victors of the war, the British insisted on including Kurds in the ethnic groups that the new state would protect. The Turks, in turn, made clear that they would only accept a religion-related definition of minorities, as it had been the practise in the Ottoman Empire.

Yet the Kurdish community supported the Turkish view. Recent academic research has claimed that this position was motivated by a fear that ethic minority recognition in the Treaty would give reclaim rights to the Armenians, who had been ousted from southeastern Turkey in 1915 by the Ottoman government with help from the Kurds.

In the end, three communities were recognised in Lausanne as minorities: Armenians, Greeks and Jews. The Kurds missed their chance.

Following the adoption of Turkey’s new constitution in 1924, the Kurdish community realised that their previous autonomy and rights had been abolished. The charter recognised one national identity and one language: Turkish. At the end of that year, the Kurds began resorting to armed resistance, with varying success for the next decade.

A sustained revolt began in January 1937, but the state put an end to it in 1938, occupying and destroying Dersim, an Alevi city in eastern Turkey. The clashes resulted in 40,000 deaths on both sides, according to British intelligence estimates.

Dersim’s surviving population was forced to relocate around the country. Renamed Tunceli, the city was virtually erased from the map and a long period of relative calm followed, until a military coup in 1980, when the junta revived absolute nationalism, persecuting ethnic and religious minorities.

The Kurdistan Worker’s Party

The PKK, formed in 1978 by Abdullah Ocalan, launched its guerrilla warfare against the state in 1984. Because the PKK has also assassinated civilians, particularly dissident Kurds and collaborators with security forces, Turkey and other countries consider it a terrorist organisation.

Ocalan was arrested in 1999 and sentenced to life imprisonment, although he was indirectly involved in a process to negotiate peace between the PKK and the state, even as hostilities between the two continued, with periodical ceasefires.

From his solitary confinement on the island of Imrali, in the Aegean Sea, Ocalan agreed to cooperate and ordered his troops to pull out of Turkey. The retrieval began on May 8, with the departure of 2,000 fighters. There are still an estimated 15,000 dispersed in Turkey, who will need to find safe passages to cross the border to Kurdish Northern Iraq.

Although half of ethnic Turks are favourable to the peace process, politicians doubt how effective it will ultimately be. “Cautious optimism is essential,” Mustafa Akyol, a prominent editorialist with Hurriyet daily and a historian, told IPS.

The deal with PKK was not negotiated with the government, and public opinion is fiercely against any granting of special rights to the Kurds. Recent opinion polls indicate that 93 percent of Turks consider PKK members to be criminals. And in the absence of an official agreement, the terms around the process are opaque.

Akyol described the PKK’s expectations as major changes including “recognition of the Kurdish identity in the future Constitution, rights going beyond recent minimal gestures, such as state-controlled radio and TV stations, amnesty for PKK combatants, and commitment for the creation of a Kurdish autonomous region over time”.

Ibrahim Anli, a director of the Turkish Journalists and Writers Foundation, meanwhile, told IPS, “The main concern of the Turkish establishment is still a strong fear of partition of the country.”

The Iraqi government is also concerned over PKK’s withdrawal, as these fighters will join autonomous Northern Iraq, which may seek independence, during troubled times between Baghdad and Iraqi Kurds. Iraqi Kurds and Turkish Kurds total 19.5 million, with another 9.5 million living in Iran and Syria.

A PKK soldier stands in front of a crowd gathered in the Qandil mountains to hear the long-awaited message of peace from Abdullah Ocalan, the imprisoned leader of the PKK. Credit: Karlos Zurutuza/IPS

By Karlos Zurutuza
QANDIL MOUNTAINS, Iraq, Mar 22 2013 (IPS)

It was only seven in the morning when Mohamed Abdi spread out a rug a few metres away from an artillery crater, up in the Qandil mountains of northern Iraq. This Iraqi Kurd from Suleimaniyah, 260 kilometres northeast of Baghdad, was ready to celebrate the Newroz – the Kurdish and Persian New Year – along with his family.

They had travelled here for what promised to be the most special Newroz festival in years — not only for its setting in these imposing snow-capped mountains but for bringing a long-awaited message from Abdullah Ocalan, the imprisoned leader of the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK).

“Last year there were much less people here, probably because of a fear of bombs. Maybe it’s crowded because we are talking about peace this time,” this former ‘peshmerga’, an Iraqi Kurdish soldier, told IPS.

The Abdis were far from the only family who had risen so early. In fact, over a hundred PKK guerrillas were struggling to manage the unusually busy traffic as thousands of Kurds in hundreds of vans and minibuses crawled along the winding road up to this PKK stronghold.

For almost three decades, the PKK has been fighting the Turkish government in Ankara, in a deadly struggle for language rights and constitutional recognition for the country’s 15 million Kurds that has claimed over 40,000 lives and destroyed thousands of Kurdish villages on both sides of the Turkish-Iraqi border.

Between 30 and 40 million Kurds are today divided by the borders of Iraq, Iran, Turkey and Syria. But on Thursday, those borders seemed to melt away as Kurds from various regions converged here, prepared to wait several hours to hear news of a ceasefire.

Starred PKK flags mingled with the yellow and green flags of the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) and the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK), the dominant coalitions in the Iraqi Kurdistan Region.

The stage set up for musical performances, speeches, and even small theatre sketches attracted most of the attention. Blown-up images of the most prominent deceased PKK fighters – including the three Kurdish female activists murdered in Paris in January — stood out starkly against the snowy peaks, rising above a sea of heads and thousands of waving flags.

People lined up to have their pictures taken next to huge portraits of the Kurdish leader, imprisoned since 1999; food and tea was served and books were sold from makeshift stalls. Many also took the chance to greet long-lost friends and relatives.

Having driven up here from Van, 920 kilometres east of Ankara, Gulistan hugged her younger brother for the first time since he joined the PKK four years ago.

“We have seven family members in the PKK and we are all very proud of them,” claimed their father Muhamed.

Three Kurds queued next to them to get a picture with the young fighter, a request that was made of each and every guerrilla present that day.

“We have driven from Erbil (the administrative capital of the Iraqi Kurdistan Region, 320 kilometres away from Baghdad) to celebrate Newroz with our brothers from the north,” Nashuan, a young Iraqi Kurd, told IPS.

Ayub Salahadin, a taxi driver from Suleimaniya, echoed his sentiments.

“The PKK today reminds us Iraqi Kurds of what we were just twenty years ago. We all feel some kind of nostalgia when we see these young guys,” he told IPS, referring to the decades-long guerrilla war that Iraqi Kurds fought against Saddam Hussein’s regime. That conflict ended only after the Kurds started building up their own autonomous region in 1991, after the First Gulf War.

Uncertain future

Ocalan’s message was officially read out by leaders of the pro-Kurdish Peace and Democracy Party (BDP) in Diyarbakir, Turkey’s biggest Kurdish city, located about 670 kilometres southeast of Ankara. At two o’clock the message reached the roughly 8,000 people gathered in Qandil.

According to the ceasefire declaration, “The stage has been reached where our armed forces should withdraw beyond the borders…It’s not the end. It’s the start of a new era.”

PKK Chief Leader Murat Karayilan confirmed the statement in a broadcasted message late Thursday afternoon.

Although the mood in the mountains was joyful, many of the older generation struck a wary tone when discussing the future.

“It’s not just us who need to make a move towards peace — Turkey should do her part too,” explained Saharestan, a veteran fighter from Afrin, a Kurdish town in the north of Syria.

Years of struggle in the mountains have already turned this middle-aged woman’s hair completely white; a seasoned fighter, she is hesitant to express optimism, claiming that Turkey has fooled the Kurds  “too often” in the past.

If negotiations remain on track, Saharestan and her comrades will cease armed activities in Turkey and withdraw definitively to these mountains.

In a clear move toward dialogue, the PKK handed over eight prisoners – six soldiers, a policeman and a civil servant – to Ankara on Mar. 13.

But unsettled issues and simmering tensions suggest the road to peace will not be smooth.

“I don’t feel too optimistic,” confessed Mahmud, an Iranian Kurdish fighter. “It’s mandatory that Apo (a popular nickname for Ocalan) is released from prison, in order to finally reach a peace agreement between the two parties,” he stressed.

In fact, prudence seemed to be the most popular sentiment among the guerrillas.

“We cannot comment on anything until we have examined in depth Ocalan’s message,” PKK Press Liaison Roj Welat told IPS from a tent adjacent to the stage.

“Nonetheless, it is obvious to everybody that Turkish policy in the Middle East has failed. Besides, the whole region has been shaken by a wave of revolts and unrest for the last two years — these two factors shall definitely play a key role in Ankara’s will for peace.”

(END)

Abdullah Ocalan, the jailed Kurdish rebel leader, has issued a long-awaited ceasefire declaration that would be a major step towards ending a 30-year conflict that has cost around 40,000 lives in Turkey.

The ceasefire announced on Thursday, which coincides with the Kurdish New Year, or Newroz, also calls for the withdrawal of his PKK organisation, likely to bases in northern Iraq.

Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan said the ceasefire call was a “positive development”.

“There are groups that are fed by terror in our country. This process will ruin their game,” he said, speaking during a visit to the Netherlands.

In Ocalan’s letter, read out by members of parliament Pervin Buldan, in Kurdish, and Sirri Sureyya Onder, in Turkish, the PKK leader said: “Let guns be silenced and politics dominate.

“The stage has been reached where our armed forces should withdraw beyond the borders … It’s not the end. It’s the start of a new era.”

The statement was read out to a sea of red-yellow-green Kurdish flags, in the Kurdish-majority city of Diyarbakir, where hundreds of thousands gathered for celebrations.

Erdogan expressed his disappointment because there were no Turkish flags at the Newroz celebrations in Diyarbakir.

“This is a provocative approach by the circles who wants to influence the process in a negative way,” he said.

Ocalan’s ceasefire is likely to be in return for wider constitutional recognition and language rights for Turkey’s up to 15 million Kurds.

The peace plan is the result of written consultations between Ocalan, pro-Kurdish legislators and PKK bodies in Europe and northern Iraq, under the close monitoring of Turkish agents.

Kurdish legislators say Ocalan might ask for commissions to be established to properly monitor the ceasefire, and call for safe passage for fighters wishing to leave Turkey.

‘Political career’

Erdogan and Ocalan both appear to have staked their political futures on the renewed push to end the conflict.

Al Jazeera’s Zeina Khodr, reporting from Diyarbakir, said Erdogan had made no secret that he was eyeing the presidency.

“He will need to amend the constitution and would like to increase the powers of the president. He cannot do that without the support of the Kurdish party, the BDP.”

Erdogan said he was putting his faith in the peace process “even if it costs me my political career,” in the face of accusations that Ankara was making concessions to Ocalan.

Ocalan, known as “Apo,” has said he wants peace for the greater good of his people.

“Consider Apo dead if this process fails. I am simply out,” the burly 64-year-old was quoted as saying in a rare prison meeting with Kurdish legislators last month.

Hard road ahead

If a ceasefire holds, the path to disarmament, and the reintegration of PKK fighters, will still be long and vulnerable to sabotage.

The fate of Ocalan also remains uncertain, but any move to release him would be strongly opposed by critics who see any settlement as threatening Turkish unity.

The prospect of talks with the PKK has outraged many Turks who revile Ocalan and hold him personally responsible for the bloodshed.

*Published under an agreement with Al Jazeera.

Kurdish rebels in Turkey have released eight hostages after their jailed leader Abdullah Ocalan called for a prisoner exchange.

The Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) freed the eight soldiers and civil servants on Wednesday as part of a peace process with the Turkish government that it hopes will lead to a ceasefire by August. The hostages were freed in Iraq and they were back in Turkey on Wednesday afternoon.

According to reports, Ocalan began secret talks with Turkey to end the 29-year conflict in October.

Al Jazeera’s Omar Al Saleh, reporting from Antakya in Turkey, said the deal to release of the hostages was considered a gesture of goodwill in a proposal made by Ocalan.

‘Ceasefire’

“Now this takes us to the more important step we could see by next week, this is according to Ocalan, we could see calling for the PKK to announce a ceasefire,” Al Saleh said.

The hostages met their families in Zakho, northern Iraq, and then entered Turkey from the border at Habur.

Al Saleh said Ocalan’s plan was for a ceasefire to begin in the next few months, up to the middle of August.

“Then the PKK will call on its fighters to leave the Turkish territory and withdraw and then lay down their weapons,” Al Saleh said.

Turkey has yet to announce what it has offered in return, but there has been speculation that it will make some changes to the Turkish constitution. These include recognition of the existence of the ethnic Kurds, which is one of the main demands by Kurds in Turkey.

The hostages have been named as Zihni Koc, Abdullah Sopceler, Kemal Ekinci, Nadir Ozgen, Kenan Erenoglu, Resat Cacan, Ramazan Basaran, Hadi Gizli.

The number of hostages held by the PKK have been disputed. Turkish media has reported numbers that vary from 10 to 20.

Delayed release

They had been kidnapped in various dates in Diyarbakir, Van, Mus, Bingol and Sirnak provinces in eastern and southeastern Turkey.

The release was expected to take place on Tuesday but was delayed because of “technical reasons”, according to the BDP.

A spokesman for the pro-Kurdish Peace and Democracy Party (BDP), Cemal Coskun, told the pro-Kurdish Firat news agency that the BDP-led delegation had travelled to the northern Iraqi city of Arbil for the expected release.

“We hope the powers longing for peace and democracy will see the gesture and speed up the steps for peace,” he told Firat.

Representatives from the interior ministry and two non-governmental groups were also in Arbil for the release, which both sides say should be interpreted as a confidence-building measure in new efforts to end the 29-year-old Kurdish insurgency.

Leader’s call

The promised release follows a call the Kurdish leader Ocalan made from in prison in Turkey last month.

He said that both sides held prisoners and he hoped to see them “reach their families”.

Besir Atalay, Turkey’s deputy prime minister, said the initiative should be regarded as a gesture of goodwill in the ongoing process. But he ruled out speculation that the government made secret concessions for the release.

“There is big public support, expectation and hope,” Atalay told the state-run Anatolia news agency.

Peace talks resumed late last year between Ocalan and the Turkish state with the ultimate aim of ending the nearly three decades of violence that has claimed around 45,000 lives since the PKK took up arms against Ankara in 1984.

Ocalan has been in prison for 14 years for treason. He is expected to call on his outlawed PKK to abide by a ceasefire due to start on Mar. 21, the Kurdish New Year.

*Published under an agreement with Al Jazeera.