Kurdish politician hints at renewed peace efforts between Turkey-PKK during Nevruz celebration

Kurdish politician Leyla Zana hinted at new efforts for peace between Turkey and the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) during Nevruz celebrations in the majority-Kurdish city of Diyarbakır that were attended by thousands despite rainy weather, Turkish media reported on Thursday.

Nevruz is traditionally marked by Kurds in the second half of March as the first day of spring, with colorful celebrations across the country’s predominantly Kurdish southeast. However, Nevruz celebrations, which have a highly symbolic meaning for Kurds, have often been marred by heavy-handed police intervention.

The event was held under heightened security. It began with a commemoration of Kemal Kurkut, who was shot dead by police during Nevruz celebrations in 2017. Among those attending were the mothers of Deniz Poyraz, who was killed in an attack at a Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP) building in İzmir in 2021, and Ceylan Önkol, a 12-year-old who died in the explosion of an mortar shell in the predominantly Kurdish Lice district of Diyarbakır in 2009.

Tuncer Bakırhan, co-chair of pro-Kurdish Kurdish Peoples’ Equality and Democracy Party (DEM Party), laid carnations at the spot where Kurkut was shot, accompanied by several party deputies and Kurdish politician Leyla Zana, who made her first public appearance in seven years. Mehmet Öcalan, the brother of imprisoned PKK leader Abdullah Öcalan, was also present at the event.

The Nevruz speeches emphasized the unity of the Kurds, the lifting of the isolation of Abdullah Öcalan and the call for peace in the Middle East.

The “isolation” of Öcalan, who has been jailed in a high-security prison on İmralı Island in the Sea of Marmara since 1999, refers to his inability to speak with his lawyers for years.

Serra Bucak, the DEM Party’s co-mayor candidate for Diyarbakır, spoke in Kurdish and emphasized that the city has been governed by trustees for eight years and that the municipality wants to “send the trustees back to Ankara” in the local elections on March 31.

Doğan Hatun, another DEM Party mayoral candidate for Diyarbakır, addressed the ongoing hunger strikes of political prisoners protesting the isolation of Öcalan and called on the public to raise their voices again in the elections.

The event also highlighted the participation of the Peace Mothers, a women’s civil rights movement in Turkey that aims to promote peace between Turkey’s different ethnic groups through non-violent means, while flags of the Kurdistan Regional Government of northern Iraq were displayed to signal a call for Kurdish unity and peace. Leyla Zana’s speech focused on the importance of self-determination in the upcoming elections and criticized the political parties’ assumption that Kurds have been content with their rule over the last century.

Zana referred to a 1993 peace process initiated by Abdullah Öcalan and the late President Turgut Özal when she asked the crowd if they were ready for a new peace process. The answer was an overwhelming “yes,” reflecting the collective desire for peace and freedom.

A cease-fire that was declared by the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) in 2012 with the outlawed PKK in an effort to resolve the ongoing conflict only lasted until July 2015.