When Syrian President Bashar al-Assad fled to Moscow to evade imminent death — a moment that signalled the collapse of his regime’s grip on power — the repercussions extended far beyond Syria’s internal turmoil. For years, Damascus had offered refuge and covert support to the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), leveraging the group to exert pressure on Ankara. Assad’s escape thus marked a decisive rupture in the regional dynamics that had sustained such insurgent alliances. The PKK, a principal actor in the Kurdish struggle and long engaged in armed confrontation with the Turkish state, announced a deliberate transition away from armed resistance. The disarmament ceremony held on 11 July 2025 in Sulaymaniyah was neither triumphant nor final, but marked a meaningful moment in a decades — long conflict that has claimed over 40,000 lives and left a profound imprint on Kurdish political identity and collective memory.
The ideological development of the PKK, as shaped by Abdullah Öcalan, represents a significant departure from orthodox Marxism towards a synthesis of Kurdish nationalism, cultural self-determination, and democratic confederalism. Öcalan himself articulated this shift in his prison writings, emphasising the centrality of culture and identity as the foundation for political liberation. In Prison Writings: The Roots of Civilisation, he stated, “The liberation of the Kurdish people cannot be achieved by military means alone; it requires a revolution of consciousness grounded in history, language, and tradition.” Further distancing himself from classical dialectical materialism, Öcalan rejected the conventional nation-state model, advocating instead for “a democratic system in which multiple identities and autonomies coexist without domination” (Manifesto for a Democratic Civilisation). This ideological transformation has drawn both acclaim and criticism, yet remains key to understanding the PKK’s persistence beyond its military activities.
Yet what unfolded in Sulaymaniyah was not the triumph of ideology but its abdication — or perhaps, its transformation. Twenty-six guerrillas and four commanders set alight their arms before Kurdish regional officials, international observers, and a cynical press corps. Öcalan’s voice, still echoing from the penal archipelago of Imrali Island, declared: “This represents a voluntary transition from the phase of armed conflict to the phase of democratic politics and law.” In doing so, he invited a critical historical question: is the voluntary end of armed struggle an act of ideological maturity, or merely a concession to exhaustion?
There are no clean answers. For four decades, the PKK embodied both resistance and rupture — resistance to cultural erasure, rupture from normative political channels. Its armed campaign emerged not from abstraction but from concrete dispossession: the enforced assimilation of Kurds, the ban on the Kurdish language, the razing of Kurdish villages, and a carceral architecture designed to extinguish collective identity. The visceral cost of this repression remains inscribed in the psychic life of Kurdish society, not least in the sacrifice of individuals like Mazlum Dogan, who in 1982 set himself ablaze in Diyarbakir Prison. His final words — “Surrender leads to betrayal. Resistance leads to victory” — transcended martyrdom to become a doctrine of ontological refusal.
Zeynep Kinaci (nom de guerre: Zîlan), the first female suicide bomber linked to the PKK, carried out her attack in 1996. In her farewell letter, she wrote: “The body is an instrument; the soul is the rebellion. I give one to save the other.” Her words reflect the PKK’s internal logic — where sacrifice and identity were inseparable from its mode of resistance. These narratives complicate any simplistic reading of the PKK’s disarmament as a redemptive denouement. They raise the spectre of what Giorgio Agamben has termed “bare life”: individuals reduced to bodies whose only agency lies in choosing the manner of their disappearance. In this context, disarmament may signal not only an institutional recalibration but also a painful decoupling of political meaning from historical memory. Even as the Turkish state publicly embraces the symbolic act, its deeper posture remains fraught with ambiguity. President Erdogan’s statement that “Turkey began to close a long, painful and tear-filled chapter” may sound conciliatory, but it contrasts sharply with the ongoing application of anti-terrorism laws, the removal of elected Kurdish municipal officials, and the imprisonment of representatives from the Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP). While a parliamentary commission has been announced to oversee the legal dimensions of reintegration, there is little indication that foundational constitutional reforms — namely, the legal recognition of Kurdish identity and language will follow.
This ambivalence is not lost on PKK leadership. Murat Karayilan, vice commander of the movement, stated unequivocally: “Legal steps and changes must be taken… Legal reforms must come first. Otherwise, it will be very difficult.” His phrasing — moderate in tone, urgent in implication — articulates the central tension of this new phase: disarmament without enfranchisement remains an incomplete peace.
The legacy of the PKK makes it necessary to disentangle the justness of its grievances from the problematic tenor of its methods. While the organisation was born in response to systemic negation, its own internal structures mirrored the authoritarianism it opposed. Dissent within the ranks was often met with punitive measures. Child recruitment, internal purges, and ideological absolutism were documented even by sympathetic observers. In attempting to forge a new Kurdish identity, the PKK at times jeopardised the very plurality it claimed to safeguard. Yet it would be myopic to equate insurgency with illegitimacy. The Kurdish movement cannot be understood solely through the metrics of security and insurgency; it is a sociopolitical phenomenon rooted in a longue durée of exclusion. Armed resistance, in this context, was not the first choice — it was the terminal option following the foreclosure of all others. The current peace process, then, represents not a capitulation but a recalibration, predicated upon shifting geopolitical tectonics in Syria, Iraq, and within the Turkish polity itself. What follows from this transition remains precarious. The promise of democratic confederalism, if not rendered into constitutional scaffolding and civic inclusion, risks collapsing into abstraction. The reintegration of former combatants, the revocation of draconian security decrees, and the cultivation of pluralistic Kurdish political representation remain prerequisites — not guarantees — for a sustainable peace. Therein lies the enduring lesson: rebellion, particularly one born from marginalisation, tends to absorb the moral vocabulary of its oppressors unless consciously tempered. The PKK, in choosing to disarm, now engages in a high-stakes experiment of historical re-narration — one where its legacy may shift from martyrdom to civic transformation, if permitted by the state to do so.
Peace, in such contexts, does not arrive as a formal treaty or a public ceremony. It arrives in the ability of former combatants to walk unarmed into towns where they once hid in shadows. It arrives in textbooks printed in Kurdish. It arrives in elections where mayors are not replaced by bureaucratic trustees. And it arrives, above all, in the state’s willingness to no longer see its own citizens as existential threats. The plight of being rebellion is not only to fight and suffer, but to surrender the very instruments of that suffering with no guarantee of reciprocity. The disarmament of the PKK marks a potentially luminous moment — but only if the silence that follows is filled not with erasure, but with recognition.
(The writer is a Colombo based columnist)