Turkey's parliament this week received the most concrete legislative step yet in Ankara's four-decade conflict with the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK): a 12-article bill, formally titled the "Law on Strengthening National Solidarity and Social Integration," submitted Wednesday with the signatures of 360 lawmakers from six parties. Yet as the bill heads toward debate, Kurdish politicians and the PKK's own leadership say it leaves untouched the political and cultural questions that have defined — and repeatedly derailed — every previous attempt to end the conflict.
The bill sets out the legal machinery for what happens after the PKK's declared dissolution: deferral of prosecutions and prison sentences for people convicted of PKK membership, for up to ten years. Judges would have discretion to postpone sentence enforcement for five years for those sentenced to 15 years or less, and for ten years for those sentenced between 15 years and life. Militants living abroad would get a six-month window to return without facing prosecution, provided they were not involved in killings. None of it takes effect until Turkey's National Security Council formally verifies that the PKK has, in fact, disarmed and dissolved.
AKP parliamentary group chair Abdullah Güler was careful to frame the bill as something narrower than clemency. "The legislation is intended to place the process on a clear legal footing, while preserving Turkey's fight against terrorism and ensuring that all measures are implemented under the rule of law," he said Wednesday, adding that the proposal should not be read as amnesty. Parliament Speaker Numan Kurtulmuş has likewise said the bill will not include a general pardon or individualized amnesty. Notably, Abdullah Öcalan, the PKK's jailed founder and the man whose February 2025 call started the current process, will stay behind bars — the bill does nothing to change his status.
The bill is the product of a process that began in October 2024, when Devlet Bahçeli, the ultranationalist leader allied with President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, made an unexpected overture toward the pro-Kurdish DEM Party. Four months later, on February 27, 2025, Öcalan — writing from İmralı Island prison, where he has been held since 1999 — called on the PKK to lay down its arms and dissolve. The group announced its dissolution in May and staged a symbolic handover of weapons in Sulaymaniyah, Iraq, that July. A DEM Party delegation has since met Öcalan repeatedly, most recently on August 2, when he pressed for a legal framework that accounts for "mutual sensitivities" and described "organizing society" as a historic step for peace.
But the PKK's own leadership in the Qandil mountains has warned Ankara against treating disarmament as the whole of the bargain. In a statement ahead of the bill's submission, the group's Kandil leadership said calling the legislation a "root law" rather than a final settlement is only acceptable if Ankara explicitly commits to further democratization measures — and warned that reducing what was billed as a "peace and democratic society process" to disarmament alone would betray its intended scope. Earlier this year, PKK Executive Committee member Murat Karayilan accused Turkish authorities of "effectively stopping the process" by withholding reform, and DEM Party co-chair Tuncer Bakırhan cautioned that "a one-sided and binding law would hinder rather than advance the process." Ankara, for its part, has resisted DEM Party demands to ease legal barriers to Kurdish political participation; earlier drafts reported by Kurdish media would bar returning PKK members from political activity for five years.
The gap is not new. Turkey's last serious attempt at a Kurdish peace process, launched in 2013, delivered limited concessions — easing restrictions on Kurdish-language education and place names — that critics at the time said didn't touch the substance of the conflict. It collapsed in 2015. Analysts tracking the current round have flagged the same asymmetry: one research institute has noted that "the disarmament initiative appears to be one-sided," with the government offering no formal guarantees on cultural rights, democratic reforms or Öcalan's release in return for the PKK laying down its arms. A European policy analysis has gone further, observing that the entire process is unfolding "under authoritarian conditions, with opposition leaders prosecuted and mayors replaced by trustees" — a backdrop it says raises real doubts about reconciling a security bargain with democratic norms.
Turkey's Kurds make up close to a fifth of the country's population, and the conflict with the PKK has killed an estimated 40,000 people since 1984. Whether this attempt fares better than 2013–2015 will likely depend on whether Wednesday's bill turns out to be a first chapter or the whole book. So far, the legislation on the table addresses reintegration and security — not the language rights, electoral thresholds, elected-mayor removals, or Öcalan's own legal status that Kurdish politicians say sit at the center of the "Kurdish issue." A peace process built only on disarmament, without a matching commitment to democratic and cultural reform, is a pattern Turkey has tried — and lost — before.