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Turkey entered the new year with revived hopes of an end to the armed insurgency led by the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) that has claimed 40,000 lives in the past nearly 30 years. Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan disclosed in the last days of 2012 that talks with Abdullah Öcalan, imprisoned leader of the PKK, to put a definitive end to the armed conflict had started and would be continued if positive signs were received. The first days of 2013 witnessed the first visit to Öcalan of representatives of the Peace and Democracy Party (BDP), the political wing of the PKK. Cautious optimism spread when the main opposition Republican People's Party (CHP) leader Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu expressed support for the ongoing talks.
The truth that has increasingly become evident, as Ankara gave up the denial of the Kurds and started to gradually recognize their identity rights, is that Turks and Kurds have common interests. Take the Kurds of Turkey. In the classical Ottoman period both Kurds and Turks belonged to the “Muslim nation.” Together they fought against foreign invasion and partition at the end of World War I, and together founded the Republic of Turkey. Turkey is homeland to the Kurds as much as it is for the Turks. Istanbul is the largest city of both. Most of them both vote for the same Justice and Democracy Party (AKP). These facts basically explain why the PKK has long given up separatism and demands regional autonomy instead. When Turkey recognizes full democratic rights for the Kurds, its “Kurdish question” may indeed become history.
Take the Iraqi Kurds who the British separated from Turkey at the end of World War I, and have recently won broad autonomy in the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG). Their major leaders, Massoud Barzani and Jalal Talabani, strongly state that they favor the closest possible relationship with Turkey. The KRG is economically already highly integrated with the northern neighbor. Turkey is the door that opens to the West and the democratic world for the KRG. This is what Nechirvan Barzani, prime minister of the region, recently said: “Things have changed in Turkey. It's simple. Turkey needs something that it doesn't have. We need certain things that we don't have … And it doesn't have anything to do with politics. It's an economic matter. They would like, and we would like likewise, to achieve progress. Because Turkey is a very important country for us … We are attempting to play a role so that there will be a political solution for this [PKK] question.” (Time, Dec. 21, 2012.) When Turkey moves ahead to recognize full identity rights to its Kurds and to integrate even more closely with the KRG, it is highly likely that the Kurds in Syria, Iran and elsewhere will assume an amicable attitude towards it.
Turkey's policy until the end of the Cold War was essentially to subject its Kurds to forced assimilation, and cooperate with Damascus, Baghdad and Tehran to keep the Kurds down. Beginning in the early 1990s with President Turgut Özal, this policy was challenged by a new one aiming to recognize Kurdish rights inside and establish close ties with the Kurds outside, which eventually prevailed with the coming to power of the AKP. The denial of the Kurds has come to an end, and significant (though insufficient) measures have been adopted to recognize their identity rights, while the policy of cooperation with the neighboring states against the Kurds expired.
What obliged Ankara to gradually change its Kurdish policy is surely national interests. Two things were better understood by time: 1) Turkey's territorial integrity cannot be preserved by denial and force. 2) Turks and Kurds have not only a common history and culture but also common interests. To such an extent that a Western observer is prompted to conclude: “Since 2008, in reversal of earlier policy, the government of Turkish Prime Minister Erdoğan has been pursuing ‘full economic integration' with Iraqi Kurdistan … Turkey's extraordinary courtship with Iraqi Kurds has moved from the merely economic to the political and strategic, too (David Hirst, Guardian, Jan. 4, 2013).