Abdullah Öcalan and a strategic case for mercy

Abdullah Öcalan should be dead, but instead he is suing for peace. The renewed efforts at Turkey-PKK peace show that pragmatic politics remain strategically superior to the Manichaeism of zero-sum ‘counter-terrorism’.

In 1999, the leader and a founder of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) – an organisation outlawed by Turkey as a terrorist entity – was captured in Nairobi, Kenya, tried by the Turkish state and sentenced to death for treason. However, some 16 years later Öcalan is still alive and, on 28 February he renewed his call for peace between the PKK and Turkey.

The trial itself had been highly emotionally charged. Öcalan pled for his life, promising to sue for peace, while lawyers for both the prosecution and the defence drew on emotive testimony from victims of the fighting on each side.

At the time the conflict had claimed approximately 30,000 lives – a number that has since risen to more than 35,000 according to a Turkish parliamentary report – and in that context, to many in Turkey the death sentence would have appeared entirely legitimate. But these events occurred at the end of the last century, before dawn of the ‘War on Terror’ – and Turkey was aiming to join the EU and had suspended all executions since 1984.

Instead Öcalan was kept alive but in isolation in prison on İmralı island, in the south of the Sea of Marmara, until 2009 when – under pressure from the Council of Europe – the Turkish government relocated him, along with some other PKK prisoners, to a new facility on that same island. Though his appeals for leniency during his trial had alienated Öcalan from many of the PKK cadres, during the 2000s he reasserted his status as an ideological leader, advocating Kurdish self-determination and publishing regularly from prison.

During that same decade the conflict between Turkey and the PKK grew more fractious and more extreme. In 2009 Ankara appeared to offer some compromises in to Turkey’s nearly century-long denial of Kurdish identity. However, this ‘Kurdish opening’ was short lived, and comprised too few, and too basic, reforms to placate the PKK and other Kurdish organisations. Instead the conflict escalated and both sides employed tactics that were becoming commonplace elsewhere where a similar dichotomy – where counter-hegemonic struggle met a securitization agenda of counter-terrorism – was evident. These included suicide bombings, devastating drone warfare and the curbing of basic democratic liberties.

However, during this period the dynamics of the broader regional environment were also in flux. Just as the AKP government sought to mollify the Kurdish ‘issue’ on the one hand, it also pursued an apparently radical shift in policy towards much of the region. It moved to improve its relationship with neighbors, including Syria and Iran and famously, but superficially, Turkey’s then-prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, raged over Israel’s oppression of Palestinians in a bid to win the support of the Arab street.

Yet this agenda – dubbed ‘Zero Problems‘ by Ahmet Davutoğlu, the then foreign minister and now prime minister – but criticised as ‘neo-ottoman‘ by skeptics – proved calamitous, as Turkey found itself embarrassed by friendships with autocratic regimes in the new context created by the ‘Arab Spring’. Thus with its best-laid plans in ruins, Turkey was forced to adapt. Opting for an apparently unlikely alliance with Iraqi Kurdistan (preferred to a hostile relationship with the Maliki administration in Baghdad) and in a de facto anti-Assad coalition with Syrian Kurds.

It was in the context of this new strategic environment that the relationship between Ankara and the PKK leader could find new purpose. Indirect talks between Erdogan and Öcalan took place and – in an unprecedented step – both sides not only admitted that the process was taking place but also echoed each other statements calling for peace.

Of course, nothing about a Turkey-PKK peace process is likely to be set in stone, and indeed there have been a few false-starts, but the continued work by both sides offers real hope that the bloody war over Turkish territorial integrity and the right to self-determination of the Kurdish people that has raged since 1978 – but smoldered since before the end of the Ottoman-era – could be brought to an end through peaceful negotiations.

At a time when the ‘threat of terrorism’ remains an issue conceptualised as a zero-sum-game in much of the metropolitan West – particularly with the rise of ISIS – and beyond, these events serve as a powerful lesson that nuance, ambiguity and even mercy can be part of a more effective strategy to deal with such threats.

Yet where the rhetoric of the US-led ‘war on terror’ has subsided under Obama administration, governments on both sides of the Atlantic – and elsewhere – are still pursuing absolutist strategies in an effort to counter and disrupt, what they would describe, as existential threats from international terrorism.

Advocates of these strategies justify the use of killing, torture and the denial of political dialogue based on a claim that the world is a dangerous and rapidly changing place, civilized societies have enemies and those enemies are people that cannot be reasoned with.

But the examples such as of the Turkey-Öcalan-PKK negotiations should be heeded internationally. Just like the reality that – if (a) Ariel Sharon had successfully dispatched Yassir Arafat in 1982; (b) South Africa had put Nelson Mandela to death; or (c) the British Government had killed its then-terrorist enemies at the head of the IRA – then these men would not have been able to (a) sign the Oslo accords; (b) end apartheid; or (c) shake the Queen’s hand and play a role in bringing peace to Northern Ireland.

In Öcalan’s case the Turkish government – albeit acting under pressure from external forces – showed leniency to a hardened adversary and proven threat to the state.

Notwithstanding arguments over legitimacy from either side in the conflict, these developments prove that though by not executing Öcalan in the first instance, Turkey gave up a tactical opportunity to kill a battlefield enemy, what it gained over time was a new chance to pursue a more valuable strategic goal: the possibility of a genuine peace process with the PKK and an opening for the resolution of the ‘Kurdish issue’.

We live in a world now where ethics – particularly in foreign policy – have been fully superseded by pragmatic rationale. For instance: arguments against torture have to show that it is not effective, never mind being wrong. That intrusive mass-surveillance does not actually catch terrorists (forget about your right to privacy). Thus it is time for to think about a strategic rationale for mercy too.

The argument is simple: no one could have foreseen the dramatic shifts in regional dynamics before 2011. No one could have known that Turkey and Kurds of Iraq, Syria and the PKK would face a common foe. And no one could have predicted the fact that Abdullah Öcalan could become a strategic asset to Turkey.

We don’t know today what the world will be like in 16 years. We don’t know what enemies we will face or who we fight today that may be a strategic asset in the future. It is reasonable then, to try and escape the hyperbole that seems to come with all discussions on terrorism. To avoid thinking in terms of a zero-sum-game when it comes to facing new threats. And even – no matter how absurd it may seem in the moment – consider a place for mercy in our strategic rationale.

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Monitor.