The truce between the Kurdish rebel PKK and the Turkish government announced yesterday is indeed historic, even if some left-wing radicals within the PKK marked the long-expected announcement with bomb attacks in the capital Ankara. In a message to Turkey's Kurds, the imprisoned Kurdish leader, Abdullah Ocalan, who has been in months of talks via intermediaries with Prime Minister Tayyip Recep Erdogan, said: “We have reached the point where weapons should be silent and ideas and politics should speak. A new phase in our struggle is beginning. Now a door is opening to a phase where we are moving from armed resistance to an era of democratic political struggle.” The Kurdish leader who has been in a Turkish jail for 14 years ordered PKK fighters to withdraw across the border into the autonomous Kurdish region of northern Iraq. It seems almost certain that most PKK units will obey him. Some 30 years of rebellion in which at least 40,000 people have died have come to an end. And no one, it seems, is more relieved than ordinary Kurds. A huge demonstration to mark the Kurdish new year in the largely ethnic Kurdish city of Diyarbakir in eastern Turkey turned into a joyous celebration that at long last the violence appears to be over. The precise details of the agreement that led to the truce should become apparent in the next few days. Meanwhile, it is worthwhile considering the impact of the truce elsewhere. The arrival of several thousand hardened PKK guerrillas in the north of Iraq could change the complexion of the autonomous Kurdish region. There are historic rivalries between Kurds and the presence of the PKK fighters could generate instability for the regional government in Erbil. Equally, some of the guerrillas might choose to go to Syria to help protect the interests and territory of that country's Kurdish minority. The fundamental problem is that men who have been fighting for over a generation often find it hard to adjust themselves to peace. By the same token, the Kurdish rebellion became, in its way, a mainstay of the power and influence of the Turkish military with its long record of intervening violently in the political process to protect what it considered the country's Kemalist legacy. Now with hundreds of officers jailed or facing trial for treason, the Erdogan government would seem to have broken the political power of the military. Without the PKK to fight, the ability of generals to demand a significant part of the state budget is also now at an end. If Erdogan has indeed cemented the removal of the military from politics, then history may show that this along with the ending of the fighting with the PKK are his most outstanding political achievements. There remain some xenophobic Turkish nationalists who will seek to disrupt the deal with the Kurds, just as there are clearly PKK fighters who disavow the truce. The latter can be more easily handled. As happened with the Provisional IRA when they made peace with the British government, they knew and helped hunt down radicals who refused to buy into the deal. Far-right Turkish extremists may not be such a difficult problem either because the vast majority of Turks regardless of community will be celebrating the end of the violence and there will be little sympathy for diehard ultra-nationalists.
