The Kurdistan Freedom Movement has consistently been the side to take the first step toward peace and to propose concrete programs for a solution during the most critical phases of the nearly fifty-year-long war. Abdullah Öcalan’s announcement of the first ceasefire in 1993, along with his words “I am looking for a counterpart,” clearly reflected his commitment to an honorable peace.
Following Öcalan’s historic call on 27 February 2025, Turkey entered a new phase. The Kurdistan Freedom Movement took significant steps to open the path for democratic struggle in Turkey and to enable peoples to unite within a shared life. Yet, a faction within the state that insists on imposing war and deadlock continues to block progress and persist in its provocative actions and rhetoric. Earlier ceasefire and dialogue processes were also obstructed by this same faction, which at times secured international backing, resulting in the collapse of peace efforts.
The Kurdistan Freedom Movement’s effort is not new
The Kurdistan Freedom Movement has continuously stressed from the start that it did not want war, reminding that the state has always suppressed and massacred the Kurdish people and their vanguards through the use of force. In the pamphlet On the Road of the Kurdistan Revolution the movement explained the necessity of armed struggle in Kurdistan as follows: “Kurdistan is a land that has historically been subjected to a consistently reactionary external force. The force directed at Kurdistan has always played a plundering and destructive role. Throughout the history of class societies, the force dominating Kurdistan has almost always been foreign in character and highly organized. This character of force is the primary reason why the productive forces of society did not develop and why Kurdistan remains impoverished. Today, the force in Kurdistan retains its reactionary character and is organized intensively in both depth and breadth. Since this external force is so intensely organized and affects our people every day, every hour, every minute, the revolutionary force that serves our people must, in the interest of our people, strike back at the counter-revolutionary force every day, every hour, every minute, every second. In response to the destructive, plundering and unjust force under the command of the counter-revolution, let us create a new, society-building, just and revolutionary force at the service of our people! The force the Kurdistan revolution will apply depends on the nature of the counter-revolutionary force.”
Definition of force in court defenses
After the arrests that followed the military coup of September 12, 1980, the main trial of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), which began in Diyarbakır (Amed), revealed the PKK’s ideological approach through the defendants’ court defenses. One passage from the defense of Mazlum Doğan, one of the PKK’s founding cadres, clearly expressed that the PKK had fought for an honorable peace from its inception: “The party is not in favor of bloodshed. We are not vampires; we are human too. If the struggle for power necessarily requires the use of force, an organization that sets as its duty to become the power cannot avoid this; it must look at things from that point of view.”
Kemal Pir, another founding cadre, described the PKK’s ideological formation and thought system in his court defense, said: “We are not in favor of state terror blowing over the people. In other words, we behave in accordance with however long a period without repression lasts. We always prefer a period without repression to one with repression. The same is true in our thinking system today. I believe fascists want a period of repression. I do not want the same thing. In other words, I do not want the state to come, to impose repression on them, and then for the people to rise up against it. We do not have such a thought system. Marxism does not have such a thing either. Because the revolution in Kurdistan is a national liberation revolution and targets the colonial political and economic structure, we have aimed at a long-term people’s war.”
Actions undertaken out of necessity
Mehmet Hayri Durmuş, one of the PKK founding members, explained the reasons for the PKK’s turn to armed struggle in his court defenses, said: “Let me put it this way: Marxism-Leninism does not hold a rigid position that violence must be used everywhere and at all times, or that everything must be resolved through violence. There is no such absolute stance in Marxism-Leninism. Entering as peaceful conditions as possible and preferring to apply such methods is preferred (…) Yet our movement has not, up to now, directed attacks toward its aims in the sense alleged in the indictment, that is, to incite public excitement, to gather people around the movement as propaganda, to accustom the youth to arming themselves so that the ground for an uprising is created, the state is provoked and unleashed upon the people. (…) It has engaged in armed actions against agent and provocateur organizations, against local treacherous forces, against militia forces, and especially against various circles that oppress the people and act to divide the unity of the people. But, as I said, these actions were never taken for the sake of propaganda; they were actions resorted to because they were absolutely necessary and they were tactical in nature.”
Öcalan: we had to resort to arms
Abdullah Öcalan said in an assessment from the 1990s that the movement did not take up arms out of a momentary excitement but was compelled to use weapons in the face of massacres. Öcalan explained the rationale behind the use of force in Kurdistan in the Political Report submitted to the PKK 1st Conference in 1981 as follows: “Kurdistan’s entire social life, its independent development in economic, social, political and cultural spheres, has been halted by colonial force. In this respect, in response to the compounded force of national oppression, it is essential that the revolution assert its own force. Especially under today’s conditions, in which fascist colonialism has declared outright war on our people, revolutionary force must inevitably assert itself. Naturally, this represents the principled determination of the strategic fundamental form of struggle of our national liberation revolution.”
To be continued…