Kurdish PKK Fighters Burn Weapons in Step Toward Peace With Turkey

The disarmament of the P.K.K., a group that has battled since the 1980s for Kurdish independence, could end a conflict that has killed more than 40,000 people.

Dozens of Kurdish fighters from Turkey publicly burned their weapons on Friday during a ceremony to demonstrate that their insurgent group was giving up its decades-long armed struggle against Turkey.

It was the first concrete sign of disarmament in a peace process started last year to end a conflict that has killed more than 40,000 people over four decades. If successful, the process could end Turkey’s most serious domestic security threat and give a political win to President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

But it was unclear what would happen next.

The de-escalation has been run out of the public eye and in closed meetings between Turkish intelligence officers and Abdullah Ocalan, the jailed leader of the insurgent group, the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or P.K.K.

There has been no word on what would happen to the militants who disarm.

The ceremony on Friday took place in the rugged mountains of northeastern Iraq, a Kurdish region where many P.K.K. cadres are based.

Images released by journalists showed dozens of P.K.K. guerrillas, men and women, arriving at the site in military uniforms, carrying rifles and rocket-propelled grenade launchers. They stood onstage in front of a large image of Mr. Ocalan, who is serving a life sentence in a Turkish prison and who declared an end to the group’s armed struggle in a rare video released on Wednesday.

Other images showed the fighters placing their weapons and ammunition belts into a large metal container where a bonfire was lit.

The fighters who participated in the ceremony said in a statement released by a P.K.K.-affiliated news outlet that they were destroying their weapons “of their own free will” to show their willingness to “carry out our struggle for freedom, democracy and socialism from now on through democratic politics and law.”

Turkey’s government communications office said in a statement that the ceremony “marks a concrete and welcome step toward ending the group’s decades-long campaign of violence.”

The P.K.K. began its insurgency against Turkey in the 1980s, aiming to establish an independent Kurdish state. Over the years, P.K.K. attacks on Turkish security forces and Turkish military operations against the insurgents killed tens of thousands of people, including many civilians.

Turkey, the United States and the European Union consider the P.K.K. a terrorist organization.

The Kurds are Turkey’s largest ethnic minority and faced efforts by Turkey over many decades to suppress their language and culture. After Mr. Ocalan was sentenced in 1999 for treason and separatism, he shifted the P.K.K. away from the pursuit of statehood and toward greater Kurdish autonomy in Turkey.

Not all Turkish Kurds support the P.K.K.’s militant approach, but many have sought official recognition of the Kurdish language and public acceptance of Kurdish holidays, traditional dress and cultural practices.

Under Mr. Erdogan, the Turkish government has licensed Kurdish-language broadcasters and allowed for limited Kurdish-language education.

The government has also removed dozens of elected Kurdish mayors from office in recent years and replaced them with appointed “trustees,” a practice that pro-Kurdish politicians have called antidemocratic.

The momentum toward ending the conflict began last fall with a surprise call by a key political ally of Mr. Erdogan for Mr. Ocalan to disband his forces to possibly end his life sentence.

In February, Mr. Ocalan made such a call in a letter from prison, saying that the era of armed struggle had passed and that his group should push for greater Kurdish rights through democratic means.

In May, a P.K.K. congress announced that the group would disband, and Mr. Ocalan declared in a publicly released video this week — the first of him in a quarter-century — that the insurgency was over.

All along, Turkish officials have publicly rejected the idea of offering any concessions to the militants in exchange for disarmament, raising questions about what would happen to the fighters.

In its statement on Friday, the government communications office said that the “irreversible disarmament and dissolution” of P.K.K. military structures would be followed by legal steps to integrate fighters and ensure accountability alongside efforts to promote reconciliation.

Politicians who support the process have pushed for the creation of a parliamentary committee to develop a legal framework for the process. At Friday’s ceremony, Bese Hozat, a P.K.K. leader, said that for the process to succeed, “there is a significant need for legal reforms, legal and constitutional amendments.”

Mr. Erdogan has hailed the process as a way for Turkey to rid itself of terrorism.

“The P.K.K. terror group’s laying down of arms will be the start of a new period for Turkey, with security, democracy and development,” he told reporters last week.

Iraqi and Turkish officials were on site to watch Friday’s ceremony, including a delegation from Turkey’s pro-Kurdish political party, the Peoples’ Equality and Democracy Party.

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