Turkey is bringing forty years of war to a close while simultaneously redefining its position in the Middle East. But disarming an armed organization does not settle a historical question. A peace that avoids naming the people at its heart can create stability. It cannot create reconciliation.
August 10 could become one of those political moments in Turkey whose significance extends far beyond the day itself, because it changes the terms within which future debate may take place. By a vote of 468 to 88, the Turkish parliament passed a law that can suspend the prosecution of Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) members once the organization has been fully dissolved and disarmed.
After four decades of war, this is news that should not be understated. Every weapon that falls silent means one fewer family waiting for a daughter or son; every operation that does not take place, one fewer coffin.
And yet this law contains a void its provisions do not address. The government calls its project a process toward a "Turkey free of terror." The phrase is remarkably precise, specifically because it avoids naming anything else. It speaks of terror, weapons, dissolution and reintegration. However, it does not speak of the Kurds, their language, decades of denial, destroyed villages, the disappeared, or the dead on both sides.
One might object that this is unfair. Ankara often speaks warmly of "our Kurdish brothers," but that is precisely the distinction that matters. Brotherhood is a feeling, not a legal status; it can be granted and withdrawn again, and it appears in no statute book. The word does not appear in the name of the process or in the text of the law, and rights arise from texts, not speeches. One telling aside: anyone sentenced to life imprisonment before June 2005 does not benefit from the measure, including PKK leader Abdullah Ocalan. A process centered on a man whom it does not itself amnesty speaks for itself.
Political language is never innocent. It determines who is the subject of a history and who appears in it only as a disturbance. If a hundred-year conflict is described exclusively as terrorism, then, logically, there are only terrorists, security forces and, in the end, a procedure for disarmament. No one needs to be recognized, no past examined, and no thought given to the status of a language, because its suppression is presumed never to have been the problem.
That is precisely where the intellectual elegance and, at the same time, the political danger of this process lie: it could work. It could disarm the PKK, significantly reduce violence and give the state the calm in the southeast that it needs for its projects at home and abroad, perhaps even years of relative stability. But success and peace are not the same thing. A conflict can be ended militarily and preserved politically. It can change its form without losing its underlying cause.
From Mecca to Ankara
Three days before the law was passed in the Turkish legislature, Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman and Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif stood together in Mecca and signed a defense pact under which an attack on any one of the three states is treated as an attack on all - a mutual defense clause modeled on the North Atlantic Treaty, complemented by cooperation on defense technology, intelligence and air defense.
Saudi Arabia contributes capital and its status as custodian of the holy sites, Pakistan the weight of a nuclear power, Turkey its defense industry and the second-largest army in NATO. Other states could join, Erdogan said; some are already speaking of a Sunni NATO. The location was more than a backdrop: an alliance staged at the center of the Islamic world lays claim not only to military utility, but also to legitimacy.
The strategic implications go beyond the text of the pact. What is taking shape is an attempt to organize the security, energy and resources of an entire region without Western mediation. Turkey has for years pursued a policy of keeping several doors open: a member of NATO and a buyer of Russian air defense systems, the builder of a Russian nuclear power plant, an aspiring gas hub, and a country courting BRICS membership. That is precisely what makes Ankara attractive to Riyadh and Islamabad: a partner that masters Western technology without being bound to the West.
A bloc that brings oil, gas, transport corridors and arms production together negotiates with Washington, Moscow and Beijing from a different position - one in which the West would lose what made it indispensable: its role as security guarantor.
The objections should also be noted. Experts point out that the Gulf states remain heavily dependent on the United States militarily, and that it remains an open question whether the partners would stand by one another in a real crisis. An alliance on paper is not yet a power bloc. But intentions have political effects even when their implementation is uncertain, and the intention here is unmistakable.
It would be naive to treat Mecca and Ankara as unrelated events. A state that sees itself as a regional power cannot afford an armed conflict at home: it ties up troops, costs money and creates leverage that other powers can use. The Kurdish question is therefore not being resolved because the time for reconciliation has arrived - it is being cleared out of the way because Ankara wants freedom of action. This need not be inferred; it is stated openly.
Erdogan has repeatedly named the goals: the PKK's self-dissolution, unconditional disarmament, the complete end of its political influence, and the consolidation of the home front. This is not an agenda of democratization but an agenda of order. Anyone seeking to end the political influence of the other side is not planning a partnership but a transition period. The Kurdish movement is needed as a guarantor of calm, a reserve of votes for a new architecture of power, and evidence that the emerging order is inclusive. In the long term, this partner is dispensable.
None of this need be a conspiracy. States act according to their interests, and almost every historical peace settlement is the product of shifting power relations - there is nothing wrong with Ankara pursuing peace partly out of self-interest. The problem begins when interest-driven politics is presented as reconciliation and a population is expected to believe that the disarmament of an organization also settles its history.
Kurdish question predates the PKK
Anyone who makes 1984, the year of the first armed attack, the starting point of the conflict has already decided what kind of conflict it is supposed to be. Everything then follows a military chronology: uprising, counter violence, security operations, negotiations, disarmament.
But before that came Kocgiri in 1921, even before the republic was proclaimed; the Sheikh Said uprising of 1925; Agri in 1930; the Resettlement Law of 1934, which treated a population as material to be dispersed; and Dersim in 1937 and 1938. Then came the state doctrine of the "mountain Turk," a ban on the Kurdish language that lasted into the 1980s, the military prison in Diyarbakır after the 1980 coup, and later the thousands of villages cleared and the unsolved murders of the 1990s.
This history makes the PKK's violence neither right nor inevitable. Without it, however, it remains impossible to understand why the Kurdish question developed the political and emotional force it still possesses today.
Historical traumas do not disappear when they are removed from a state's narrative. They migrate into families: into names, photographs, remarks made over dinner, and silences between parents and children. Kurdish families carry forward Dersim, Diyarbakır and the disappeared; Turkish families carry the images of fallen soldiers and memories of attacks. Both societies have archives of pain, and both have learned to defend their own pain against that of the other.
Alexander and Margarete Mitscherlich described, in relation to postwar German society, an inability to mourn: not a forgetting of the past, but an inability to incorporate it into one's self-image in a way that has consequences for the present. Vamik Volkan has shown how large groups carry unmourned losses across generations as politically mobilizable traumas. What is not remembered and worked through does not become neutral. It waits. That is why it is dangerous to imagine that a conflict can be ended simply by removing its military form. What is not mourned returns: not as the same organization and not under the same flags, but as mistrust, as identity politics, as the next movement that wants to say aloud what its parents could only whisper.
Johan Galtung called the mere absence of violence "negative peace." The term sounds technocratic, but it describes something very human: waking up in the morning and hearing no explosion. "Positive peace" begins only when people live within the same political order without the identity of one being treated as a threat to the other. John Paul Lederach therefore did not reduce reconciliation to an agreement, but tied it instead to truth, justice, recognition and a shared future. Almost none of this is visible in the law of August 10.
Who speaks for the Kurds?
The PKK has a place in this history; anyone analyzing forty years of war cannot relegate it to a footnote. It has followers, a political tradition, victims, responsibilities, and an impact that reaches far beyond its military structure. But it is not synonymous with Kurdish society, and both sides find that distinction difficult to make.
For Ankara, equating the PKK with the Kurds is convenient because it turns a societal question into a negotiation with a single actor; for the movement, it is convenient because it affirms its claim to speak in the name of an entire society. The state wants a single interlocutor; the movement wants to be that interlocutor.
For a society, this is risky. Where does that leave conservative, liberal, religious, secular, Alevi, Yazidi and feminist Kurds who do not come from the PKK tradition? Where does it leave families that have experienced state violence and yet, for that very reason, do not necessarily share the line set on İmralı, or those who simply want to be Kurds without owing loyalty to any organization? A democratic society is not defined by having one strong voice, but by its ability to tolerate contradictory voices.
This criticism is directed inward. Ocalan has a symbolic importance for large parts of the movement that is difficult to overstate; the problem is not his opinion, but the absence of opposing voices on an equal footing. A public sphere whose decisive orientation comes from a man imprisoned since 1999 and is conveyed through a party can possess enormous mobilizing power and still remain democratically incomplete.
There is another point that is rarely discussed because it sounds impolite. The leadership carrying this process on the Kurdish side has spent half a century in a closed world: mountains, camps, the underground, prison. An organization that operates according to the principle of democratic centralism, treats criticism as factionalism, and builds its cohesion on the authority of a single individual is, in sociological terms, a total institution. It produces discipline, willingness to sacrifice and loyalty.
What it does not produce are biographies in which someone has learned to lose an election and not see betrayal in an opponent who holds office. This is not a moral judgment, but a structural one: people can change, but institutions shape what they are capable of. And what these cadres can offer - organizational capacity and the reliable transmission of decisions - is precisely what a preventive policy of maintaining order requires. Therein lies the danger: that they are needed not as representatives of Kurdish interests, but as the hinge of a new system of order.
It is also telling which historical images are invoked to justify this understanding. Ocalan points to old alliances: those of Kurdish princes with the Seljuk sultan Alp Arslan, and later that of Idris-i Bitlisi with Yavuz Sultan Selim. Both were pacts among elites made over the heads of the population, and the second was directed against Shiites and Alevis. Anyone who invokes this model in 2026 unintentionally describes with remarkable precision what is happening: a settlement reached by bypassing society, held together by a religious framework that, for Alevis, carries an additional historical memory.
Conversely, Ankara cannot complain about a lack of Kurdish pluralism after decades of banning, criminalizing or administratively removing competing parties, media outlets and mayors. A state that systematically reduces diversity ultimately produces the very monopolistic counter power whose dominance it later complains about. The fact that a court in May declared the congress of the largest opposition party void and removed its elected leadership belongs in the same calculation: a government does not democratize simply by negotiating with one opponent; it may merely be rearranging its opponents.
Kurdish may be visible but not equal
Perhaps no question shows more clearly how far Turkey is prepared to go. Kurdish culture is more visible today than in the past: its music is heard, its television series find an audience, Newroz can be celebrated. Anyone familiar with earlier decades knows what a change even this degree of normality represents. But a culture can be visible without having real influence.
A language has a future not because people are allowed to sing in it, but because they can learn, teach, conduct research, administer and advance in it. When Kurdish is tolerated in private and cultural life while Turkish remains the unquestioned language of the institutional future, a very modern mechanism of assimilation emerges. No one needs to forbid a child from speaking their mother tongue; it is enough to make clear to parents which language offers opportunity. People then change languages not out of fear, but out of reason. That is where the power of this system lies: the old assimilation needed the gendarme. The new needs expectations.
One can call this integration. But integration presupposes that what is being integrated remains recognizable. A language with no institutional future, a history with no public place, and an identity with no constitutional name are not integrated; they are tolerated as long as they remain politically inconsequential. Recognition that costs the state nothing is not full recognition. It is controlled visibility.
The Mecca pact adds another layer. The idea of a community of Turks and Kurds under the umbrella of a shared Sunni Islam can be attractive; conservative Sunni Kurds in particular need not experience this as submission. It has historical resonance and may seem more conciliatory than the hard ethno-nationalism of earlier decades. But identities must be judged not only by whom they include, but also by whom they push to the margins.
What does a Sunni order mean for Alevis, for Yazidis, for Christians, for secular Kurds? Anyone who seeks to pacify an ethnic conflict through a shared religious identity may create new minorities before resolving the old conflict. The republic knows this pattern: unity is promised by declaring differences secondary. Those who want to preserve their differences thereby become the problem.
Peace does not mean that differences disappear. Peace means that they no longer pose a danger. The central test of the coming years, therefore, is not whether Turkey can absorb Kurds into a larger identity, but whether it can create an order in which no one has to be absorbed in order to be equal. This should be neither romanticized nor moralized. Minority rights have rarely been granted out of generosity; if a government grants them out of self-interest, they remain rights all the same. What matters is that they are actually granted.
Promises are not guarantees
Many politicians respond that this is only the first step; democratization, cultural rights and a new status for the Kurdish language would follow disarmament. This may be sincerely meant, but politically it is not enough. The decisive question is not what is promised today, but what will still hold tomorrow. Where are the publicly available agreements, the deadlines, the institutional commitments? Which rights are enshrined firmly enough that they will not disappear with the next parliamentary majority?
Turkey's history demands sobriety: minorities and members of the opposition have seen often enough how quickly openings can be reversed and commitments reinterpreted. A people of millions cannot base its future on good intentions; that is what distinguishes a historic settlement from a tactical arrangement.
What this would mean in concrete terms can be stated in a few sentences. A constitutional article that names Kurds as Kurds. Kurdish as a language of instruction, not merely an elective subject. A system in which elected municipal representatives cannot be replaced by administrative decree. A truth commission with access to archives on destroyed villages, the disappeared and torture, and equally on Dersim, Maras and Sivas. Compensation where people were displaced and dispossessed. Legal proceedings where they are still possible. And a public sphere in which not every act of remembrance is treated as an attack on national unity.
This would be neither a Kurdish victory over the Turks nor a Turkish defeat. It is precisely the idea that recognition must make someone a loser that has kept this conflict alive for so long. Turkish society, too, has a right not to be retroactively declared a collective perpetrator. The families of fallen soldiers and the victims of attacks cannot be written out of a new narrative of peace simply because the old one suppressed Kurdish suffering. Reconciliation does not mean reversing the roles; it means leaving the logic of those roles behind.
At first, this does not even require forgiveness. Forgiveness is too large a concept, and societies cannot simply decide it. The more sober hope is the better one: that people begin to acknowledge the suffering of the other without having to relativize their own. That a Turkish father can mourn his son who was killed without having to justify a destroyed Kurdish village. That a Kurdish mother can speak of a disappeared relative without having to excuse an attack. A republic capable of bearing this would truly have changed.
The next generation
The next generation will, in any case, ask different questions. Many young Kurds know the war only through stories. They study in Diyarbakir, Istanbul, Berlin or Stockholm, move naturally between several languages, and will not let either Ankara or Kandil tell them what identity they are supposed to have. Their conflicts will be less military and more politically demanding: language, education, history, local self-government, memory, and the question of whether equality means being treated the same or whether it includes the right to remain different.
To the state, this may seem less dangerous; a generation without weapons is easier to tolerate than a guerrilla movement. In reality, it may prove harder to control. An armed organization has a leadership, camps and negotiating partners; one can wage war against it, sign ceasefires with it and monitor its disarmament. A societal demand for recognition has no headquarters. It surfaces in universities, in art, in court rulings, in municipalities, in the diaspora, in families. No order of self-dissolution can be served on it.
Perhaps August 10 is therefore less an ending than a shift. The military dimension of the Kurdish question is drawing to a close, while the political dimension is coming all the more clearly to the fore. That would not be a defeat of the peace process; on the contrary, it would be its real purpose: to move the conflict to where democratic societies work through their conflicts - in parliaments, courts, universities, newspapers and elections. But for that, Turkey must take a step more difficult than any disarmament: it must stop thinking of peace as the condition in which the state is simply no longer disturbed. A state can create calm. A society is not reconciled when its history, because it is inconvenient, is omitted from the agreement.
Three days separated Mecca and Ankara. Perhaps one day people will say that in that week of August 2026 a new order began: a Turkey that ended its internal war while repositioning itself as a regional power. Whether that also gives rise to a new republic will be decided by a different question: not whether the PKK disappears, but what is allowed to become visible afterward. The hardest moment of a peace process does not come when the last weapon is handed over, but afterward, when no gunfire drowns out the real question. Then a state must face the people who remain: their name, their language, their memories and their contradictions.
Peace does not begin when one side lays down its weapons. It begins when the other side speaks the name aloud and is strong enough to bear what is said afterward.
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