Abdullah Öcalan: Rebel without arms

Mahir Çayan, a Stalinist and an admirer of the Cuban revolution, was the head of the People’s Liberation Party-Front of Turkiye in the early 1970s. In March 1972, Çayan and 10 of his comrades abducted three NATO technicians from a radar station in Turkiye’s Ünye. Their demand was to prevent the execution of Deniz Gezmiş, a fellow guerilla who was called the ‘Che Guevara of Turkey’. The group was hiding in a safe house in Kızıldere. On March 30, 1972, they were attacked by Turkiye’s security personnel and everyone except one was killed. Among those who hit the street to protest the killing of the Marxist leader was Abdullah Öcalan, a 24-year-old graduate from Ankara University. He was arrested and charged with distributing a left-wing political magazine and jailed for seven months.

For Mr. Öcalan (pronounced Ojjalan), incarceration only inflamed his radicalism. Out of jail, he became active in leftwing groups and then founded the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), which initially blended Kurdish identity politics with Marxism Leninism and launched an armed militancy. More than 40,000 people have been killed in 40 years of the Turkish civil war between the state and Kurdish militants. Several attempts to bring peace in the past remained unsuccessful. On February 27, 2025, Mr. Öcalan, who has been imprisoned since 1999, made a public announcement, asking the PKK to lay down arms and dissolve itself. The PKK had “reached the end of its lifespan, making its dissolution necessary”, Mr. Öcalan wrote in a letter from the prison. His call, which has been welcomed by the Turkish government, has rekindled hope that the decades-long civil war could be brought to an end.

Marxist beginning

While growing up, Abdullah Öcalan’s hero was Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, the founder of modern Turkiye. He wanted to get enrolled into a military high school, but was rejected. While in college, he joined the Revolutionary Youth Federation of Turkiye (Dev-Genç). Later two convictions led him to found the PKK. One, he was convinced that “Kurdistan is a colony”. Two, he concluded that the Kurdistan issue was not a priority for the mainstream left-wing parties. Mr. Öcalan and his comrade Kemal Pir started mobilising Kurdish radical youth on the assertion that “the liberation of the Turkish people depends upon the liberation of the Kurdish people”.

In 1978, at a conference in the village of Fis in Diyarbakır, Mr. Öcalan announced the formation of the Partîya Karkerên Kurdîstan (Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or PKK). The PKK called for the “liberation” of the Kurdish regions of Turkiye. Kurds, who make up 15-20% of Turkiye’s population, are a persecuted ethnic minority, they argued. The Kurds, who are scattered across Iraq, Syria, Iran and Turkiye, are often called a people without a nation. The PKK built inroads among the Kurds living across the Syria-Turkiye border. In 1979, Mr. Öcalan moved to Syria’s Kobane from where he would continue to lead the PKK.

In 1980, the Turkish military seized power through a coup. The subsequent years saw mass arrests and torture of those who dissented. The crackdown on Kurdish political groups intensified. The junta enforced a media censorship to control the flow of information. On August 15, 1984, amid growing state violence, the PKK launched its first armed offensive against two military posts. This marked the beginning of the Turkish civil war. “It was my idea alone,” Mr. Öcalan later said of his decision to launch the guerrilla war. The state responded with massive force. The PKK started growing in strength on both sides of the Syria-Turkish border, gaining popularity among the Kurds and extending its regional influence. Kurds saw Apo (uncle) Öcalan as a charismatic leader who fought for their cause. But for Turkiye, he has been a “terrorist”. In mainstream Turkish media, he was labelled a “baby killer” because of the violent attacks the PKK carried out . “We are not in favour of violence to solve the problems,” Mr. Öcalan said in an interview in 1988. “But it was required to prevent our national identity from being destroyed entirely.”

The second phase of Mr. Öcalan’s militant activism began after he was expelled from Syria in 1998 (Syria, then ruled by Hafez al-Assad obliged when Turkey, a NATO member, threatened it with military action). Mr. Öcalan moved to Europe, but European countries, under pressure from Turkiye and its allies, refused to give him asylum. In February 1999, he was abducted by the Turkish National Intelligence Organization (MIT), with help from the CIA and Mossad, in Nairobi, Kenya, and was jailed on İmralı island in Turkiye. After a show trial (which was deemed unfair and impartial by the Grand Chamber of the European Court of Human Rights), Mr. Öcalan was sentenced to death. His abduction and sentence triggered a massive Kurdish uprising in Turkey, which met with violent state crackdown. In 2002, when Turkiye abolished the death penalty, Mr. Öcalan’s death sentence was commuted to “aggravated life imprisonment” (incarceration until death without parole).

For years, he was the lone prisoner in İmralı. But it was during this period of solitary confinement that Mr. Öcalan transitioned from Marxist Leninism into ‘democratic confederalism’, which he described as a borderless, community-based democracy that promotes ecological living and radical gender equality. He was inspired by the writings of American political theorist Murray Bookchin (1921-2006), a strong advocate of social decentralisation, with whom Mr. Öcalan had exchanged letters through his lawyers. “Nation-states have become serious obstacles for any social development. Democratic confederalism is the contrasting paradigm of the oppressed people,” Mr. Öcalan said, explaining his theory. “Democratic confederalism is a non-state social paradigm. It is not controlled by a state. At the same time, democratic confederalism is the cultural organisational blueprint of a democratic nation.” In essence, Mr. Öcalan gave up his demand for an independent Kurdistan and asked for greater autonomy for the Kurdish regions which can sustain themselves through local councils while being part of different national states.

In 1993, Mr. Öcalan had declared a unilateral ceasefire, demanding a political and peaceful solution. But it did not lead to any breakthrough. After he was abducted and jailed, the insurgency intensified. Between 2013 and 2015, there were multiple rounds of talks between the PKK and the Turkish state, now ruled by Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s Justice and Development Party (AKP). But the peace process collapsed in April 2015, triggering a new wave of violence by both sides. This period also saw the Kurds in Syria acquiring greater autonomy during the country’s civil war and defeating the Islamic State in a number of battles, including in Kobane.

Ice breaking

Alarmed by the political empowerment of Syrian Kurds, Turkiye carried out multiple military incursions into Syria’s border regions. In recent years, Turkiye has also carried out air strikes in Iraq’s Kurdistan, where the PKK has bases. But at home, the PKK continued its armed attacks. The ice broke in October when an ally of President Erdogan made a surprise call to Mr. Öcalan to end the insurgency in return for peace and his freedom. After this, the restrictions on Mr. Öcalan were eased and his relatives and political allies were allowed to visit him. A successful solution to the Kurdish question could strengthen the political hands of Mr. Erdogan, whose second term as President under the new Constitution would come to an end in 2028. If Mr. Erdogan wants to extend his power, he needs to amend the Constitution. And to amend the Constitution, he would need new political allies. Peace with Kurds will also better Turkiye’s domestic security and improve its regional standing.

For Mr. Öcalan, now 76, the rapprochement provides an opportunity to shut down the civil war, gain freedom and open a new chapter of Kurdish-Turkish relations. “There is no alternative to democracy in the pursuit and realisation of a political system,” Mr. Öcalan wrote in his letter from jail. From a former separatist guerrilla to a ‘democratic confederalist’, who spent 26 years in prison, Mr. Öcalan has come a long way. Those who take the sword must know when to put it back into the sheath. The theorist and commander of the Kurdish militancy believes this is the time.