Militants from the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) have withdrawn from four camps in northern Iraq, Turkish security sources said on Monday, as part of a drawn-out disarmament process that could eventually include the return of former militants to Turkey.
Fighters from the PKK withdrew from “four shelters” in the Metina area near the border with Turkey in Iraq’s Kurdistan region, security sources told state news agency Anadolu.
The PKK last week said it had evacuated four “war tunnels” in the Metina area and withdrawn fighters from Turkey in the days before that. The moves showed it had “fulfilled” its strategy “to end the armed struggle against Turkey”, the group said.
The Turkish sources did not mention withdrawals from Turkey but said the PKK's departure from the locations in Iraq’s Kurdistan region was part of efforts to evacuate locations that “pose a risk of conflict to Turkey’s security”.
Neither Turkey nor the PKK said where the militants went next. The group is known to have locations in both federally-controlled Iraq and the Kurdistan region, including its headquarters in the Qandil Mountains. The PKK said last year it had withdrawn from other areas near the border with Turkey.
The moves are part of a process of dissolution of the PKK, whose insurgents fought a 40-year conflict with the Turkish state until the group’s jailed leader, Abdullah Ocalan, last year called for it to dissolve and disarm.
The conflict killed at least 40,000 people on both sides, spilt across Turkey’s borders with Syria and Iraq, and left an indelible mark on Turkish society, where up to one-fifth of the 86 million population is ethnically Kurdish. Turkey has long regarded the PKK as its main national security threat, and, alongside the EU and US, has designated the group as a terrorist organisation.
Turkey’s parliament in August passed legislation that provides a legal framework and procedures for the PKK’s dissolution. It allows for the suspension of some prison sentences and the postponement of other trials and investigations, depending on the severity of the alleged offences.
PKK members who live abroad, many in the group’s base in the Qandil Mountains, could be allowed to return home and reintegrate into society, although Turkish veterans’ groups have vehemently opposed such measures.
The aim is to eventually ensure “social reconciliation” to end more than four decades of internal strife, Anadolu reported on Monday.
But measures under the legislation can only take effect once Turkey's National Security Council is convinced that the PKK has completely dissolved and surrendered all its weapons – something that has not yet happened. Mehmet Ucum, a senior adviser to President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, said last month that the NSC would confirm the PKK’s dissolution and disarmament complete “by the end of this year at the latest”.
Tuncer Bakirhan, co-chair of the pro-Kurdish Peoples' Equality and Democracy Party (DEM), said last week that some former militants could return as soon as this month, but a lot depended on the confirmation of their legal status.
“People return not to a place where they don't know what will happen to them tomorrow, but to a place where their law, status, and security are defined,” he told the independent leftist Evrensel media outlet in an interview.
Kurdish politicians, who do not belong to the PKK but have liaised between the group and the Turkish government, have criticised the peace process for moving too slowly and failing to provide Turkey’s Kurdish minority with greater access to cultural, political and social rights. Elected Kurdish mayors in the country’s south-east, whom the Turkish government replaced with political appointees, have not been reinstated, and people dismissed from their jobs over alleged PKK links have not been allowed to return to work.
“Even the simplest steps are not being taken,” Mr Bakirhan said in separate remarks to MPs last week.
Turkish Vice President Cevdet Yilmaz told state media on Wednesday that the PKK’s dissolution process requires “patience”.
The PKK has demanded that Turkey release Ocalan, who has been in prison for more than two decades, as part of the dissolution process, but Turkey has made no such pledges: the move would be highly unpopular among much of Turkish society after the decades of unrest and loss of life caused by the conflict between the PKK and the state.
Ocalan could have a role on a disarmament committee as part of the dissolution process but would not be released from prison, presidential adviser Mr Ucum said last month.