Abdullah Ocalan, the imprisoned leader of a Kurdish guerrilla movement that has been waging a bloody insurgency against the Turkish state for decades, has called on his fighters to lay down their arms and disband.
The rare message from Mr. Ocalan on Thursday raised the possibility that a conflict that has killed more than 40,000 people over four decades could finally end.
Who is Abdullah Ocalan?
Mr. Ocalan is the founder and leader of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or P.K.K., which has been battling the Turkish state. He has been in a Turkish prison for a quarter century.
The P.K.K began as a secessionist group that sought to create an independent state for Turkey’s Kurdish minority, but more recently it has said it was seeking greater rights for Kurds inside Turkey. Turkey, the United States and other countries classify Mr. Ocalan as a terrorist and the P.K.K. as terror group for its attacks that have killed Turkish security forces and civilians.
But many of Turkey’s Kurds view Mr. Ocalan as a potent symbol of the struggle for Kurdish rights. And despite his imprisonment since Turkey convicted him in 1999 of leading an armed terrorist group, he wields great influence over the P.K.K. and its affiliated militias in Syria, Iraq and Iran.
Mr. Ocalan founded the P.K.K. in the late 1970s with a group of other rebels and largely ran the organization from neighboring Syria as it launched attacks in southeastern Turkey and later in other major Turkish cities.
In 1998, Syria forced him out and he traveled to Greece, Italy and Russia to seek asylum before Turkish intelligence agents, with help from the C.I.A., captured him inside a plane at an airport in Nairobi, Kenya, on Feb. 15, 1999.
That same year, Turkey convicted him and sentenced him to death. That sentence was commuted to life imprisonment after Turkey abolished the death penalty as part of its bid to join the European Union.
What Does Mr. Ocalan Want?
At the start, the P.K.K. sought to create an independent Kurdish state and Mr. Ocalan said that armed action was necessary to advance that cause.
“We are not in favor of violence to solve the problems,” he said in 1988 in his first interview with Turkish journalists. But it was required, he said, “to prevent our national identity from being destroyed entirely.”
After his capture in 1999, he was incarcerated on Imrali Island in the Sea of Marmara, south of Istanbul, where he was the only prisoner for many years. Behind bars, his views changed. His goal moved away from achieving an independent state, and he wrote that nation-states themselves violated people’s rights.
Instead, he proposed a new ideology, “democratic confederalism,” which he described as borderless, community-based democracy that promotes ecological living and gender equality. He also argued that Kurds could achieve their rights through what he considered to be the proper application of democracy in Turkey.
His new views were heavily influenced by the American political philosopher Murray Bookchin. The two men exchanged letters through Mr. Ocalan’s lawyers before Mr. Bookchin’s death in 2006.
How Does Turkey See Mr. Ocalan?
For most Turks, Mr. Ocalan remains the country’s most hated terrorist, accused of ordering deadly attacks and driving an insurgency that killed more than 40,000 people over four decades. Turkish politicians and the news media frequently refer to him as a “baby killer” or the “chief terrorist.”
Human rights groups criticized his isolation on Imrali Island. In 2009, five other prisoners were sent to the facility, and Mr. Ocalan was allowed to meet them a few times a week, according to Turkish media reports.
But in recent years, Mr. Ocalan and the island’s other inmates were not allowed any visitors, including their lawyers, or any phone calls with family members.
Last October, a powerful political ally of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, made a surprising public call to Mr. Ocalan, requesting that he tell his fighters to lay down their arms and end the conflict.
That led to limited visits from relatives and political allies of Mr. Ocalan to explore the possibility of a new peace process between Turkey and the P.K.K.
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