ISLAMABAD: Pakistan on Monday welcomed the decision by the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) group, which has been locked in bloody conflict with the Turkish state for more than four decades, to disband and end its armed struggle.
Since the PKK launched its insurgency in 1984, the conflict has killed more than 40,000 people, exerted a huge economic burden and fueled social tensions. The PKK is designated a terrorist group by Turkiye and its Western allies.
Taking to X, Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif called the PKK’s dissolution a “historic development.”
“Pakistan welcomes the announcement of PKK’s dissolution, a significant step toward lasting peace and a terror-free Turkiye,” he wrote.
The Firat news agency, which is close to the group, reported on Monday that the PKK 12th Congress decided to “dissolve the PKK’s organizational structure and end the armed struggle.”
The PKK held the congress in response to a February call to disband from its jailed leader Abdullah Ocalan, who has been imprisoned on an island south of Istanbul since 1999. It said on Monday that he would manage the process.
On Mar. 1, the PKK announced a unilateral ceasefire, but attached conditions, including the creation of a legal framework for peace negotiations.
“The PKK has completed its historic mission,” the PKK statement said. “The PKK struggle has broken the policy of denial and annihilation of our people and brought the Kurdish issue to a point of solving it through democratic politics.”
The PKK’s decision will give President Tayyip Erdogan the opportunity to boost development in Turkiye’s mainly Kurdish southeast, where the insurgency has impaired the regional economy for decades.
A deputy leader of the pro-Kurdish DEM Party, the third largest in Turkiye’s parliament and which played a key role in facilitating Ocalan’s peace call, told Reuters the PKK decision was significant not just for Kurdish people but for the Middle East as a whole.
“It will also necessitate a major shift in the official state mentality of Turkiye,” DEM’s Tayip Temel said.
- With inputs from Reuters
