Devlet Bahçeli, leader of the fascist Nationalist Movement Party (MHP), part of the “People’s Alliance” led by President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, declared on Tuesday: “When the isolation of the terrorist leader [the imprisoned Abdullah Öcalan, leader of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK)] is lifted, he should come and speak at the group meeting of DEM [the Kurdish party Peoples’ Equality and Democracy] in the Turkish parliament.”
“Let him proclaim that terrorism is completely over and that the organization [PKK] has been dissolved. If he shows that resilience and determination, then the path for the legal regulation of the ‘right to hope’ and its use should be wide open,” he added.
Devlet Bahçeli (left) in Mersin in 2019, where he campaigned in support of MHP’s mayoral candidate Hamit Tuna [Photo: Onur Erdoğan]
This extraordinary statement comes as the Zionist regime of Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, with full support from the U.S. and European powers, has escalated the genocide of Palestinians in Gaza and its attacks on Lebanon, while preparing for a major military assault on Iran.
The overwhelming majority of the Turkish people oppose the U.S.-Israeli genocide in Gaza and an escalation of the war against Iran. The Erdoğan government, recognizing the increasing danger, has declared its opposition to the expansion of the war in the region.
The Erdoğan government’s initiative follows Ankara’s application to join BRICS as part of its strategy to maneuver between Turkey’s NATO allies and Russia and China, all amidst the escalation of the Ukraine war. Erdoğan was expected to meet with Russia’s President Vladimir Putin in Kazan, Russia, on the sidelines of the BRICS meeting on Wednesday. Iran also joined the organization, early in 2024.
Iran’s Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi stated in Qatar: “All our neighbors have assured us that they will not allow their territory or airspace to be used against the Islamic Republic of Iran. Kuwait is the 11th country I have visited in the region. All the countries in the region have expressed their opposition to any Israeli attack on Iran.” Araghchi was also in Turkey last Friday.
Bahçeli’s call for a reopening of negotiations with the PKK, which Ankara considers a “terrorist group” and has suppressed since 1984, received Erdoğan’s approval and support.
Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in Sarajevo, Bosnia, September 6, 2022. [AP Photo/Armin Durgut]
Shortly after Bahçeli’s speech, Erdoğan declared: “The historical opportunity window we have opened as the People’s Alliance should not be sacrificed to greed. As the political establishment—parliament, civil society, the media, academia, and society—let’s build a Turkey without terrorism.”
Behind the Erdoğan government’s signal of a change in its policy of “military eradication” of the PKK lies the Turkish ruling elite’s concern that the escalation of the U.S.-Israeli war against Iran and its allies could draw Turkey in and lead to a redrawing of borders in the Middle East, including the establishment of an independent Kurdish state.
Erdoğan made it clear in his comments on Tuesday that this was aimed at strengthening the Turkish ruling elite’s hand against the escalating war across the region: “While maps are being redrawn in blood, while the war Israel has fought from Gaza to Lebanon approaches our borders, we are trying to strengthen our internal front. We want all 85 million of us to come together under the common denominator of Turkey.”
Turkish and American soldiers conduct a joint patrol outside Manbij, November 1, 2018 [Photo: Combined Joint Task Force – Operation Inherent Resolve/Spc. Arnada Jones]
The Kurdish population in Turkey is estimated to be between 15 and 20 million, in Iran from 10 to 12 million, in Iraq 8 million, and in Syria 3.5 million. The PKK has influence in all these countries through the party’s umbrella organization, the Union of Kurdish Communities (KCK), and the militia PYD/YPG that controls northeastern Syria is closely allied with the U.S.—the architect behind the regime change war in Syria that began in 2011.
Erdoğan has recently repeatedly warned of a possible war between Turkey and Israel. “The Israeli leadership, which acts with the delirium of the promised land and with pure religious fanaticism, will, after Palestine and Lebanon, set its sights on our homeland,” he said in early October.
The possibility of a war between Turkey and Israel amid the escalation in the Middle East is real. However, this critique of the U.S. and Israel comes from a government allied with Washington and Tel Aviv.
The Turkish ruling elites have supported American imperialism’s interventions and regime change wars in the region for more than three decades in line with its drive to dominate the Middle East and, like other Arab regimes, have been complicit with Israel in oppressing the Palestinian people.
With Turkey’s support for the invasion of Iraq that began in 2003, and the regime change war in Syria that started in 2011, they have not only been complicit in the deaths or displacement of millions of people. They have also contributed to the dynamics that have caused these countries to disintegrate and to the increasing U.S.-Israeli aggression across the region.
As the Socialist Equality Group explained at the time, the so-called “peace process” between the Erdoğan government and the PKK, which began in 2009, was an initiative developed with the approval of the U.S. and European powers as part of imperialism’s plundering war in the Middle East. When the U.S. made the YPG militia the primary proxy force in the regime change war in Syria—and a YPG-led proto-state emerged in northeastern Syria—Erdoğan ended the talks and launched a violent offensive against the Kurdish movement both in Turkey and Syria.
While the Erdoğan government officially cut off trade with Israel in May, confronted with popular anger and opposition, it has been revealed that exports of crucial products such as steel to Israel continue to flow through Palestine. Turkey’s strategic partner Azerbaijan is, moreover, Israel’s main supplier of oil, which continues to fuel Israel’s war machine through Turkish pipelines and ports. U.S.-NATO bases in Turkey, believed to provide Israel with intelligence for its aggression against Palestinians, Lebanon, and Iran, continue to operate.
As the World Socialist Web Site recently stated: “At the root of this contradiction is the bourgeoisie’s deeply entrenched connection to imperialism. The greatest fear of the Turkish ruling class, which, far from being able to oppose imperialism, acts as its proxy in the Middle East, is that a revolutionary movement of the working class against imperialism and Zionism will develop.”
Tülay Hatimoğulları, co-chair of the Kurdish nationalist party DEM, welcomed Bahçeli’s call, stating: “If this is to be a start, isolation must be lifted immediately. The compass for the solution of the Kurdish question is democratic negotiations and honorable peace.” The legal Kurdish leadership, and its pseudo-left allies, fully supported the previous negotiations under the banner “peace and democracy,” as part of their orientation toward imperialist powers and the reactionary aims of the Kurdish and Turkish bourgeoisies.
Özgür Özel, leader of the Republican People’s Party (CHP), which came first in the local elections in March, said: “As CHP, we will fully support the end of terrorism… Whatever needs to be done should be done in parliament. There will be no result without full social consensus. If this issue is to be resolved, it must be discussed at a table that includes all parties.”
Öcalan has been imprisoned on İmralı Island in the Sea of Marmara since he was captured in Kenya in 1999 in a CIA-backed operation and extradited to Turkey. He has been subjected to arbitrary isolation for the past 44 months.
** image 4; caption: Abdullah Öcalan, the founder of the PKK, pictured in 1997 [Photo: Halil Uysal – Archive of the international initiative “Freedom for Abdullah Öcalan – Peace in Kurdistan” / CC BY-SA 3.0]
The “right to hope” that Bahçeli referred to means a possibility for prisoners to be “conditionally released for good behavior within the deadlines set by law.” The European Court of Human Rights ruled in 2014 against Turkey based on the “right to hope,” finding that a sentence of aggravated life imprisonment without the possibility of conditional release violated the European Convention on Human Rights.
Bahçeli’s statement, supported by Erdoğan, is an acknowledgment of the political nature of Öcalan’s isolation and imprisonment. Many people who have raised this issue of fundamental democratic rights and demanded the release of all political prisoners in Turkey have been imprisoned.
Bahçeli’s statements regarding the Kurdish question since the beginning of October were welcomed by DEM, but received a sharp response from a KCK/PKK leader.
Besê Hozat, co-chair of the KCK’s Executive Council, said on October 7 that these moves were a “game and a conspiracy” by Erdoğan and Bahçeli, and that the goal was “to completely neutralize the internal opposition, and create confusion among Kurds… to create a dissolution within the DEM party, within democratic politics, if they can, if they succeed, to completely take over the CHP and place the party at their service.”
She added: “Turkey’s fear is not that Israel will attack Turkey. It is that the Kurds may benefit from this war environment. The Kurds can achieve more.” This statement, which confirms the PKK leadership’s calculation of benefiting from the escalation of the war, affirms the impulse that drove the Turkish bourgeoisie to this step. It also testifies to both Turkish and Kurdish nationalism’s reactionary character.
Days after this statement, a report from Al Monitor, referencing unnamed sources, claimed that Öcalan had recently spoken on the phone with KCK/PKK leaders in the Qandil Mountains in northern Iraq. “Öcalan told them it was time to discuss disarmament,” one source said. Another source stated: “They want to prevent a new Syria [a reference to the strengthening of the YPG]. They want to be proactive this time,” said another source.
A new “peace process” between the Turkish ruling elite and the Kurdish nationalist movement, allies of U.S.-NATO imperialism—the forces behind an aggression that could involve the major powers in the Middle East—is just as disingenuous as the previous one. As Leon Trotsky explained in his theory of permanent revolution, the Turkish and Kurdish bourgeoisie, like the bourgeoisie in the Middle East and other parts of the world with delayed capitalist development in the imperialist era, are organically incapable of opposing imperialism or establishing a democratic regime. These are the tasks of the working class.
The democratic solution to the Kurdish question, and an end to the escalating genocide and war in the Middle East, depends on uniting and mobilizing the international working class on a socialist antiwar program to take power, against the imperialist powers and their bourgeois proxies.