Open Questions on the Peace Process

What Is Happening That We Do Not Know About? Open Questions on the Peace Process

The guns have fallen silent, the law has passed, the congress has been held. Yet the academic who wanted peace is still at the door, the nurse who braided her hair is out of work, and Demirtaş is still inside. Who is sitting at the table of this process, who is waiting outside, and how are we supposed to trust this picture?

Dear Young Comrades,

This is the third text we have written on this site about the framework law. On 11 August, the day the law passed the Assembly, we took up the law itself under the title "Class Analysis of the Framework Law and Socialist Strategy": in Gramsci's terms a strategy of passive revolution, that is, a reform conducted from above by the ruling class in order to absorb the unrest coming from below; in Poulantzas's terms the relative autonomy of the state, that is, its protection of capital's long-term interest against the daily interests of individual capitals and individual politicians; and the transfer of implementation from the legislature to the executive, to presidential decrees and to the NSC. In that piece we also discussed the positions of the left parties in terms of their class depth: in TİP, the risk that a moralistic discourse treating the state as a "criminal organisation" loses sight of the regime of capital accumulation; in EMEP, the weakness of economism; in DEM, the risk that pragmatism becomes articulated into a bourgeois compromise. On 28 August, under the title "The Closed Door, the Leaked Text, the Hired Mind", we wrote about the process's regime of secrecy and the role assigned to intellectuals, and we set out three criteria: the removal of the trustees, the reinstatement of those dismissed by decree-law, and the implementation of court judgments. And a week ago, in our 1 September post, we spoke about the tenth year of the Academics for Peace and proposed a ruler: a ruler that separates labour's peace from capital's peace. In this piece we will pick up that ruler and measure the events of a week. And we will see that the ruler is not enough to measure the events; because a significant part of what needs measuring is invisible.

This is not a piece of answers, it is a piece of questions. What we hold in our hands is signs rather than certain knowledge; we will lay those signs side by side and ask, "what is going on here?" For a Marxist, asking questions is not weakness; on the contrary, honestly admitting the limits of the available data is the only way to think without slipping into conspiracy theory. Knowing what we do not know is a stronger position than pretending to know what we do not.

First we will list the facts. Then the questions. And at the end we will propose a class framework for those questions.

Part One: The Facts of a Week

1. Mızraklı is getting out — but not through the law; by serving out his sentence

Dr. Adnan Selçuk Mızraklı was able to serve only four months of the Diyarbakır Metropolitan Municipality Co-Mayoralty to which he was elected in 2019. He was then arrested; he received a sentence of 9 years, 4 months and 15 days. He spent roughly seven years in Edirne Prison. His lawyer, Mehmet Emin Aktar, said in a statement to BirGün that the release date is 8 September 2026, and that this is written explicitly in the document prepared by the Edirne Chief Public Prosecutor's Office.

Here is the detail worth noting: Mızraklı applied for conditional release a year ago and was refused. The enforcement judgeship accepted his objection, but that decision too was overturned upon the prosecutor's appeal. So Mızraklı is not getting out thanks to the framework law; nor thanks to the process; not even thanks to the conditional release that is his legal right. He is getting out by serving his sentence day by day.

In the middle of a "peace process," an elected mayor is being released without a single concession from the process itself, on whatever day the enforcement calendar happens to indicate. This is the first sign as to the nature of the process.

2. Demirtaş's letter: joy and anxiety together

The person who announced the release to the public was Selahattin Demirtaş, who spent five years in the same ward as Mızraklı. The piece of 5 September, titled "Memo the Gum-Chewer", remembers Mızraklı as "Diyarbakır's general surgeon with a heart full of love" and ends with "On Tuesday morning he will walk out of here; he is entrusted to you now." But it is not merely a piece of joy. The text is built around a crossword solved in the ward, and the framing sentence of the puzzle is this: "Its clue is harder than its answer." There are four clues. Brotherhood, nine letters: "a worn-out, battered, hollowed-out collective mood that is supposed to enter into force by a decision of the NSC." Justice, six letters: "the integral part of human dignity that does not come even if it comes late, and is supposed to arrive by a decision of the NSC." Freedom, eight letters: only a direction is given, "from the inside out." And will, five letters: "This one has no clue, only an answer."

Read those lines twice. Demirtaş takes the NSC decision, which is the key to the framework law, and places it inside the definitions of concepts like brotherhood and justice, making the absurdity visible: brotherhood does not enter into force by the decision of a security council; justice does not come from that decision, it turns into something "that does not come even if it comes late." The subject of the word "supposed" is left indefinite; he does not say who supposes it, nor does he exempt his own side. That he gives no definition for "will" is the text's heaviest sentence: for a reader who knows the slogan "Öcalan is our will," a concept that "has no clue, only an answer" is a concept that may not be questioned. Demirtaş does not mention the slogan; he says it without mentioning it. The piece also has a Melih Gökçek section: "Ankara's figure laden with sin, parcel by parcel" enters the courthouse chewing gum; in seven years Mızraklı "did not chew even once." The man who turned a municipality into a channel of capital accumulation is outside; the elected doctor who served four months is inside: a summary of for whom justice comes late and for whom it never comes at all.

To grasp the significance of this tone we need to go back a month. On 10 August, while the framework law was being voted on in the Assembly, Demirtaş and Mızraklı had published a joint message: "We have to walk into the future hand in hand." The message thanked all the leaders supporting the process, from Erdoğan to Bahçeli, and stressed that democracy and justice reforms must move forward together with peace. A constructive, embracing text that left the door open.

A month later the tone changed. Why?

3. Demirtaş is still inside — despite a final ECtHR judgment

Demirtaş has been in prison since November 2016. He received a 42-year sentence in the Kobani case. The European Court of Human Rights found that the proceedings against him pursued the aim of "suppressing pluralism and narrowing political debate" — that is, that Article 18 of the Convention had been violated. That judgment became final and an application for release was made. In the words of former ECtHR judge Rıza Türmen: "The state's obligation is to implement the final judgment and release Demirtaş."

The state is not doing this. The same state that meets with Öcalan, that accepts the dissolution of the PKK, that brings membership of the organisation within the scope of deferral, keeps inside the co-chair of what was once this country's third-largest party by vote, despite the final judgment of Europe's highest court.

One more thing should be recalled: Demirtaş is someone who later openly opposed the 2015–2016 "trench" period and who criticised the political error of that period on behalf of his own side as well. So one of the Kurdish politicians most distant from armed struggle and most committed to legitimate politics remains inside during a process that opens the way for those who laid down their arms. Note this contradiction down; we will return to it later.

4. İkra Avcı: acquitted, then dismissed

In Diyarbakır, the nurse İkra Avcı shared a video of herself braiding her hair on social media in January 2026. The campaign had begun as a reaction to the cutting of the braids of a Kurdish woman killed in Syria; because cutting hair counts as a grave insult in Kurdish culture, women all over the world were sharing photographs of themselves braiding their hair. Avcı was taken into custody on 26 January and prosecuted on the charge of "propaganda for a terrorist organisation." On 21 May the court ruled that the post did not constitute the offence of propaganda and delivered an acquittal.

But six days before that, on 15 May, the Health Ministry's High Disciplinary Board's decision to dismiss her from the civil service had been served on her. The Ministry did not explain the legal grounds for the decision. Avcı made the situation public on 19 August.

Let us not squeeze this case into the news cycle of a single week and move on. Because this is the very same thing that happened in the ten-year story of the Academics for Peace, happening again in 2026, in the middle of the process. The criminal courts cleared her; the administration dismissed her. The same formula, the same scissors. Only the interval has fallen from ten years to six days.

5. Academics for Peace: not a single concrete step in ten years

We wrote it last week and we have to repeat it: of 406 dismissals, only 18 have been definitively able to return to their universities. The framework law was submitted to the Assembly with 360 signatures and adopted with 468 votes; but there is not a single line in it for the Academics for Peace. What Ulaş Bayraktar told Turkey recap sums up the academic side of the process: "I don't really believe in all this talk about peace, because the ecosystem is not right." And he adds: "Perhaps the opposite of war is not peace but justice anyway."

6. Kavala, Atalay and Gezi: even bourgeois law is suspended

Those who present peace as "a return to the rule of law" should first look at this picture. Osman Kavala has been in prison for 3,232 days. On 18 February 2020 he was acquitted in the Gezi case and rearrested the same day; on 25 April 2022 he was given an aggravated life sentence. In 2019 the ECtHR found a violation of Article 18 (the restriction of rights for a purpose other than the one declared); the Council of Europe's Committee of Ministers launched infringement proceedings for the first time in Turkey's history; and on 25 August 2026 the Grand Chamber, by 15 votes to 2, found violations of six articles including the prohibition of torture and said he "must be released as soon as possible." The next day the Chief Presidential Adviser Mehmet Uçum wrote that ECtHR judgments have no "binding force on the merits" and said Turkey was being "compelled" to reconsider its party status to the Convention and the right of individual application. We wrote this file up in detail two weeks ago: we criticise Kavala in class terms and defend him unconditionally in legal terms; because in an order where an acquitted person can be held for nine years, no one has any guarantee.

Can Atalay is in the same file: the lawyer of Soma, of Ermenek, of Çorlu; he was sentenced to 18 years, elected MP for Hatay in 2023, and never allowed to take the oath. The Constitutional Court twice found a violation of his rights; the 3rd Criminal Chamber of the Court of Cassation not only refused to implement the Constitutional Court's judgment but filed a criminal complaint against its members; in January 2024 his seat was stripped. He has now been inside for 1,596 days, and although Article 153 of the Constitution says that Constitutional Court judgments "bind the legislative, executive and judicial organs," it does not bind them. We wrote about this in May as well: where a lower court refuses to recognise a Constitutional Court judgment, the constitutional order effectively does not exist. On 10 August, while the law was being voted on, Atalay sent a statement from prison. Its opening was heavy: "Let us forget for a moment that the Constitution is suspended." He then repeated what he had said on 4 March 2025: every step taken towards "politics without violence" matters, and the Kurdish question must be solved through dialogue without the shadow of weapons; but the silencing of the guns is not enough on its own — the "tutelage of trusteeship" must end, those dismissed by decree-law must return to their jobs, and the Assembly must be the centre of the process. We wrote a dialectical response to that statement: rights are not granted by law, they are won in the squares, the factories and the streets; and the emphasis on "politics without violence" risks making invisible the everyday structural violence of capitalism (workplace killings, wage poverty, the housing crisis). Our criticism stands. But that a month later the Constitution he called "suspended" remains suspended, and that the author of the statement we criticised is still inside, means his diagnosis has been confirmed rather than ours. We do not accept the imprisonment of the author of a statement we criticised; these are two separate things.

And the other Gezi convicts: Tayfun Kahraman, Çiğdem Mater, Mine Özerden, 18 years each; according to Kısa Dalga's new judicial year tally, five people from Gezi, twelve politicians from Kobani including Demirtaş and Yüksekdağ, thirty-one elected CHP municipal officials and thirteen journalists are inside.

Here is what this picture has to do with our process. Marxists do not defend bourgeois law as an ideal; they see it as a temporary balance of the class struggle, a position that is lost if it is not defended. But the issue here is not the inadequacy of bourgeois law; it is that it has been suspended. The ECtHR judgment is not implemented, the Constitutional Court judgment is not implemented, the acquittal is not implemented. If a state does not recognise Articles 90 and 153 of its own Constitution, what is the guarantee that it will recognise the articles of the framework law it has passed? This is exactly what Bayhan called "hostage politics": people released under a ten-year deferral are left to the mercy of a state that does not recognise the law. The situation of Kavala and Atalay is not "another matter" outside the process; it is the measure of the ground on which the process's promises stand. Kavala, who does not get out on an ECtHR judgment; Atalay, who does not get out on a Constitutional Court judgment; Demirtaş, who does not get out on an ECtHR judgment: all three say the same thing. This state does not open the door on a court judgment; the door is opened only by its own timetable and its own bargain. And a door opened by a bargain closes when the bargain breaks down.

7. The framework law: in force but not operating

The law passed the Assembly on 10–11 August with 468 votes in favour and 88 against; it was published in the Official Gazette on 18 August. But the law's operation depends on one condition: the publication in the Official Gazette of a decision by the National Security Council establishing that the organisation's dissolution and the laying down of arms have been completed. That decision is awaited; the optimistic timetable points to the end of September, and to October for implementation to begin. Once implementation starts, a six-month application window will open; there is talk of around 3,500 people benefiting in the first instance.

Let us recall the logic of the law once more: this is not an amnesty, it is conditional deferral. Five years' deferral for offences carrying up to 15 years' imprisonment, ten years for graver offences. Intentional homicide and life sentences from before 1 June 2005 are excluded. It applies only to the PKK/KCK; political prisoners from other organisations are excluded.

So the key to implementation is not in the hands of the elected Assembly but of an appointed security council. This is the second sign as to the nature of the process.

8. The leaked notes: "We will be as solid a leg of this state as the MHP"

On 17 August, a France-based outlet called Utopia TV Ari published notes it claimed belonged to Öcalan's İmralı meetings with the DEM Party delegation on 20 July and 2 August. According to soL's report, the statements attributed to Öcalan in the notes include: that the process requires becoming "as solid a leg of this state as the MHP"; "we will take our place in the constitution"; that Kurds and Turks shaped the history of Islam together; that Kemalist theses of history could be reviewed; the idea of a "two-legged republic."

In its statement of 23 August, the DEM Party İmralı Delegation said the texts had been tampered with, that additions and deletions had been made, and that certain sentences about individuals had been inserted afterwards. It called for no document that does not come from the delegation, the family or the lawyers to be given credence. The statement did not, however, say which parts of the notes were fake and which were genuine.

Here we must be honest: what we have is an unverified document and a statement that denies it without rejecting its content entirely. We will not use this document as fact. But we will say this: in a peace process, the public learning what the parties are saying to each other from leaks is itself a fact about the process. Whether the leak is genuine or fake, there is a closed door and we do not know what is being said behind it. As we wrote on 28 August, the public follows the process through "leaks of uncertain origin and the denials of those leaks"; the leak is not a malfunction of the regime of secrecy but a working part of it.

Nor do we know who is sitting behind that closed door. At the end of August, Rastinews published, in three parts, the notes of a meeting it claimed had taken place on 1–2 February 2026 between Öcalan and a "Kandil delegation"; the names of Helin Ümit, Duran Kalkan and Sabri Ok appear as participants. On 7 September another site claimed that Cemil Bayık had flown in from Sulaymaniyah at the beginning of August and stayed two days on İmralı, that Duran Kalkan had gone to the island in February 2025 and again in July, just before the framework law vote, and that Mazlum Abdi was also among the visitors. On 26 August security sources described such content as "disinformation, a figment of the imagination" and attributed it to circles seeking to sabotage the process. We cannot verify any of this and we will not write it as if it were verified. But the ground the claims are built on is real: in its statement of 20 July, Kandil said that leaving Öcalan and the organisation's leadership outside the scope of the law would "plainly amount to sabotaging the process"; in other words, the process's own workings make clear that there is coordination between Kandil and İmralı beyond the DEM delegation. The dissolution decision being taken by a congress, the weapons being burned in Sulaymaniyah, the timetable for "cadre releases" being discussed: none of this happens without Kandil and İmralı talking to each other. So how do they talk? Independently of the leak claims, this question remains unanswered.

9. The congress, the "Democratic Republic Movement" and March 2027

The DEM Party brought forward its 5th Ordinary Congress, planned for 20 September, and held it in Ankara on 6 September. Tülay Hatimoğulları and Tuncer Bakırhan were re-elected co-chairs, taking all 535 valid votes cast. Thirty-three of the Party Assembly's 80 members were replaced.

In his congress speech Bakırhan said, "We are launching the Democratic Republic Movement," and repeated three times: "We are contenders to govern Turkey." The speech also contained sentences with a class ring to them, such as "capital and the rentier class ate, the people paid the bill." Before the congress, party sources told Kısa Dalga that this was "the beginning of the restructuring process," and that changes of name and statute would come onto the agenda once the NSC decision and the implementation of the law became clear. According to journalist Sedat Bozkurt's piece in Diken and Yeniçağ's corridor report, the real transformation will come at the March 2027 congress: the party's name may become the "Democratic Republic Party," the programme is said to have been written by Öcalan himself, and there is talk of Pervin Buldan as co-chair and Osman Baydemir's return to the leadership. Demirtaş's place in this picture is unclear.

These are corridor reports. Corridor talk is not fact. But the direction of the corridor talk matches the facts: the party is evolving from being the party of the Kurdish political movement into a "Turkey party," into a "democratic nation" roof that encompasses socialists and social democrats. And what sets the timetable of this evolution is not the party's own will but the date of the NSC's decision.

10. Bakırhan and "those we plucked from the street and made MPs"

Before the congress there was also a major blunder that went beyond a slip of the tongue. In response to the words attributed to Öcalan in the leaked notes about the alliance between Selim I and İdris-i Bitlisî, an "Alevi Intellectuals' Declaration" with 53 signatures was published. The declaration described that alliance as "archaic and bloody" and objected to its being presented as a model.

Bakırhan's answer on television on 2 September was this: "There are names we took from the street and made MPs. I don't even know what intellectual credentials they have." He called Müslüm Doğan, a signatory, former HDP MP and former Development Minister, a "conscienceless fellow," and added, "nobody can test us on Alevism." Doğan's reply was calm and to the point: "Bakırhan is right. I grew up in Ankara's Yenidoğan and Tuzluçayır. I came from the struggle in the street." The next day Bakırhan stepped back, saying "I used an expression that did not fully convey my intention"; he said "bringing from the street" meant opening space in politics.

It is possible to wave this incident away as a gaffe. But we will not wave it away, because there are three separate things inside it, and all three concern not only Alevi intellectuals but also the socialists who have struggled for years under the roof of this movement. First, the sentence "we plucked them from the street and made them MPs," even if it slipped out, is the language of tutelage: it presents a parliamentary seat not as a mandate given by a people but as a favour distributed by a centre. That such a sentence comes from the mouth of the chair of a movement that defines itself as "of the people, democratic" says something about the movement's internal workings. Second, the sentence "I don't know what intellectual credentials they have" shows the limit of the patience extended to the intellectual, that is, to the person who criticises. When a movement starts interrogating its own intellectuals with "are they even intellectuals?", it has begun to close the door on criticism. Third and most important, all this anger was directed at Alevi intellectuals who objected to a sentence in an unverified document; but the same anger was not shown to those who leaked the document, or to the "as solid a leg as the MHP" sentence in it. The direction of the anger shows where the sensitivity of the process lies.

Bakırhan's words also landed in the middle of a wider debate. At the end of August, the lawyer Faik Özgür Erol, a member of the İmralı Delegation, complained that a historic development such as the end of the conflict had been met with "so little intellectual support." The replies were not slow in coming. The constitutional scholar Murat Sevinç recalled that the process had from the outset been framed not as "peace and democracy" but as "ending terrorism"; Mete Kaan Kaynar wrote that academia's silence is "a behaviour learned over years"; and the Academics for Peace, as the people who showed everyone ten years ago what intellectual support costs, went on standing outside the door. Erol later said he was criticising not individual intellectuals but a gap in the theoretical framework of the process. But the complaint itself is telling: intellectuals are asked for support, not participation; for applause, not questions. On 28 August we called this the "hired mind": what is expected from the intellectual is not analysis but a signature, a conceptual varnish for the state's programme; and whoever asks a question is accused of "provocation." Prof. Kenan Engin's piece in Medyascope names this climate "the narrowing space of criticism": criticism is met not with counter-criticism but with personal attack, critics are labelled "digital watchmen," and power decides who has the legitimacy to speak. And Engin's heaviest sentence: an anti-colonial movement can turn into a hegemonic power within its own society.

The concrete examples are there. To Alevi intellectuals, "I don't know what intellectual credentials they have"; to Müslüm Doğan, "conscienceless fellow"; in June, from Ahmet Türk to Erkan Baş, "unbecoming of a socialist and a revolutionary." In each of these, what is targeted is not the content of the criticism but the right to criticise. When supporting the process is coded as an obligation and questioning it as a form of betrayal, what emerges is not a debate about peace but a loyalty test; and whoever fails the test is called, in the old vocabulary of Kurdish political culture, a "liquidationist," a "provocateur," or simply the one left outside. If the first product of a peace process is excommunication, then the question of how much peace there is in that process must be asked — even if asking it is the shortest way to earn the excommunication.

11. The "Turkish left" and parliamentary seats as favours

What really compounds Bakırhan's sentence is that it was not said in isolation; it is the voicing of a climate. Ever since the HDP, this roof was built on the claim of being "the joint party of Turks and Kurds." Socialist parties, labour organisations, ecology and women's movements were founding components of that roof; the MPs they sent to the Assembly went there as the representatives of that founding role, not by anyone's favour. But over time, in certain Kurdish political circles, these components were given a name uttered with a mild condescension — "the Turkish left": as though they were a community outside the Kurdish movement, a guest of it, without votes or strength, carried in on a quota. Ruşen Çakır's comment from June 2026 sums up this climate in two sentences: on the socialist left, the worry that "the Kurdish movement is using us" is growing, while in Kurdish circles the question "what do these people add to us?" is growing. Çakır's warning matters: if the movement starts to see socialists as a burden in its negotiations with the state, it will push the relationship into the background.

The sentence "we plucked them from the street and made them MPs" exploded in exactly this climate. The sentence was said to Alevi intellectuals; but the shadow of that same sentence fell on every socialist MP elected from HDP-DEM lists. Because the logic is the same: a seat in parliament is a favour distributed by a centre; whoever receives it should be grateful and should not criticise. Yet if these MPs came "from the street," that is their honour; the street is not a place a workers' party should be ashamed of, it is its source. Bakırhan was right to say in his walk-back statement that "the street is our field of struggle"; but the first sentence had already told us who owns that field, who is doing the carrying and who is being carried.

From a Marxist standpoint the issue here is not one of courtesy but one of alliance. Class alliances are built between equals; an alliance that says "we are carrying you" is not an alliance but a patronage. The moment the relationship between the Kurdish movement and the socialist movement turns into patronage, both sides lose: the socialists lose their capacity for independent class politics, and the Kurdish movement loses its only bridge reaching into the west of Turkey. And in a process running between the state and two centres, the side most easily written off is precisely these components counted as a "burden." If a movement aiming to become a "Turkey party" belittles Turkey's socialists, we need to ask again what it means by the word "Turkey."

12. TİP and EMEP: the "yes" of those not at the table

Let us look at the stance of the socialist components too, because the picture is completed here. Both TİP and EMEP voted "yes" when the framework law was put to the vote; but both described this not as support but as a conditional open door.

In his statement of 10 August, Erkan Baş said he had objections to every article of the law, both in substance and in procedure; he criticised the squeezing of peace behind closed doors, its being tied to the electoral calendar, and the government's sole concern being to protect its seat. But his concluding sentence was this: peace is too important to be left to the mercy of the Palace; "despite all this injustice, all this wrongdoing, all this shame, we will say yes to this bill." His conditions were clear too: politicians held unlawfully must be freed, and the process must not prolong the life of the Palace regime.

EMEP's position was voiced in the Assembly as well. On 6 August, the day after the law was submitted to parliament, MP İskender Bayhan said the regulation brought not lasting peace but "hostage politics": the law does not implement the judgments of the Constitutional Court and the ECtHR, it leaves a ten-year sword of Damocles hanging over those released, it makes participation in politics conditional, and it keeps Demirtaş and Can Atalay outside its scope; against the justification of "social sensitivity" he cited the trustees: does the public really support the appointment of trustees in place of elected mayors? He listed four demands: accountability for the past, the removal of the trustees, constitutional guarantees for Kurdish-language education and identity, a general amnesty for political prisoners and the implementation of court judgments. In his 11 August speech in the General Assembly he described his party's vote like this: "We give this support while also making our warnings, our criticisms and our objections." And he ended with a warning: implementation will show whose interests the law serves; the need for a workers' movement around bread, peace and freedom will grow.

Ahmet Şık's speech in the Assembly on 10 August on behalf of TİP was the text that drew the limits of his party's "yes" most clearly. Şık said the content and scope of the law had been concealed and that a political and historical reckoning with the problem was being avoided; he pointed out that the word "Kurd" does not appear in a law regulating the Kurdish question; and he said that in a country where prosecutors work on orders, a law cannot be a guarantee on its own, and that "the guarantee of a real peace is a legal order applied equally to everyone." In his interview with T24 in the following days he was even more explicit: this is not a peace but a "ceasefire text"; what distinguishes it from the "not enough, but yes" of 2010 is that it contains no promise of democratisation at all; "if the warring parties say yes to this text, I have no right to say no," but "we do not underestimate its cost and its risk"; and "Turkey will not democratise under this government; democracy comes through organised social pressure around concrete demands for rights." Şık said two more things that bear directly on the questions of this piece: he criticised DEM's communication about the İmralı meetings, and he said he believes the leaked documents are genuine; and he argued that Demirtaş and Kavala must be included in the debate about democratisation. In other words, an MP from an allied party believes the İmralı notes are real and says so publicly; DEM's answer is that the notes were "tampered with." When two allies publicly disagree about the authenticity of the same document, the question of how information flows within the alliance is before us once again.

Seyit Aslan, for his part, spoke in Diyarbakır: "Our yes is meant to open a path for struggle." EMEP's objections were even more concrete: the undemocratic way the law was drafted; the absence of a single line about Kurdish or about Kurds' demands in February's commission report; and Article 7 leaving implementation to the discretion of the security apparatus. Aslan demanded the release of Demirtaş and Kavala, accountability for unsolved political murders, and education in the mother tongue; he described the proposal for a regional minimum wage as a "cheap-labour paradise" and said the real solution runs through "the united struggle of the Turkish and Kurdish working class."

Both stances are internally consistent and defensible by class criteria. The problem is not the stance but the position. Let us ask this: did TİP and EMEP know the content of the negotiations behind the law they voted "yes" to? Who told these parties, and when, what was discussed at the İmralı meetings of 20 July and 2 August, whether sentences such as "as solid a leg as the MHP" or "we will take our place in the constitution" were uttered, and if so in what context? Every sign we have points to a single answer: nobody, ever. The socialist parties, just like the public, learned the content of the meetings from a leak on 17 August. So the "yes" vote was given to the outcome of a bargain whose content was unknown; and the conditions were announced to the public rather than to that bargain's table. Setting conditions without sitting at the table does not get the conditions met; it only gets them on the record.

Let us also recall June. Erkan Baş's remark that "we might not converge on a candidate whose mother tongue is Kurdish" was met with justified criticism; Baş corrected his words and expressed his regret to those hurt. That day Bakırhan criticised him, saying "the wounded know their own wound", but also said the alliance must not be damaged by electoral calculations: "This debate is closed as far as we are concerned." Right words. But the fact that the same Bakırhan told Alevi intellectuals three months later that "we plucked them from the street and made them MPs" shows there are two measures: a socialist leader's slip of the tongue counts as a wound to the alliance; the slip of the tongue of the movement's own leader is closed with "an expression that went beyond my intention." The socialist parties, on the one hand, feel the criticism is aimed at them, and on the other are not informed about the negotiations; and still they say "yes." The name of this position is not alliance; it is responsibility without information. And responsibility without information means being the side whose signature is on the bill when it comes due, but who had no place at the table.

13. A question and an answer in Karaburun

Last week at the Karaburun Science Congress, in a session where the peace process was being discussed, DEM Party MP Gülistan Kılıç Koçyiğit was asked this: what happens if the process is tied to a constitutional amendment that makes it possible for Erdoğan to run again? The answer was clear: if there is such a vote, we say no. Koçyiğit is not saying this for the first time; in May 2025 she also said "we did not struggle for the AKP's future", stating that saying yes to a constitution serving only Erdoğan's re-election would be "contrary to their fundamental principles."

We do not doubt Koçyiğit's sincerity. Our question is a different one: do the DEM Party MPs in the Assembly know what is being discussed on İmralı? Even if the leaked notes are fake, the İmralı Delegation's statement does not reject all of them. Party sources speaking to Kısa Dalga say that Öcalan's "access to current information is limited because of his long imprisonment" and that cadre decisions require a "process of consultation." So the party does not fully know what its own leader knows; and the leader does not fully know what the party is doing. In this picture, an MP's "we say no" may be the voice of her own conscience; but who guarantees that it is the party's binding commitment?

14. London: Kurdish politicians, Israeli academics and an award

And the last fact, from outside the geography. On 6–7 September in London, the International Jewish-Kurdish Conference, organised by the Tel Aviv-based Jewish-Kurdish Network together with Tel Aviv University's Moshe Dayan Center, convened. The previous one had been held in Berlin in September 2025. Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Sa'ar joined by video message and said the Kurds are "a people living in four countries who have not yet won their political independence." Among the session titles was "Zionism and Kurdish nationalism." And former Sur Mayor Abdullah Demirbaş, while presenting an award to Prof. Ofra Bengio — who defends the attacks on Gaza and describes 7 October as a "pogrom" — called her "the mother of the Kurds."

We have no evidence to link this directly to the process in Turkey. But that Israel, at a time when it is carrying out genocide in Gaza, is trying to institutionalise a "Jewish-Kurdish rapprochement" covering all the Kurdish political currents of the Middle East, is a fact. And that one wing of Kurdish politics in Turkey has chosen to sit at that table is also a fact. These two facts show that "the solution of the Kurdish question" is being discussed not only on the Ankara-İmralı line but also at a table of regional redistribution.

Part Two: Open Questions

Now let us set the facts aside and ask the questions. These are not rhetorical questions; they are questions whose answers we do not know and want to know.

What is the name of this process?

You name a process by looking at who gains what. What has concretely happened so far? The organisation was dissolved, the weapons were burned, a law was passed but does not yet operate. What was given in return? Fewer trustees, that is all. Demirtaş is inside, Mızraklı is getting out by serving his sentence, İkra Avcı is jobless, 388 academics are at the door. Should we call this picture a "peace process," or, in Demirtaş's implicit question, the security-driven liquidation of an armed movement? Both may be true at the same time; but we have to measure which one weighs heavier by looking at who received what.

Who is sitting at the table?

The official picture: the state and Öcalan; the DEM Party delegation in between. Well, is Demirtaş at this table? Are the other prisoners of the Kobani case at this table? Are the Academics for Peace, İkra Avcı, the teachers dismissed by decree-law, the exiled Eğitim Sen members, the municipal councils removed by trustees at this table? The answer is plain: they are not. The table has been set between two centres. All the others are objects awaiting the table's decisions. Those who ought to be the subjects of a peace process are not even its subject matter.

Is there an agreement between Öcalan and the state that we do not know about?

We ask this not as a conspiracy theory but as political analysis. Here are the signs we have: notes that were leaked and not wholly denied; DEM's transformation into a "Turkey party" being tied to the NSC's timetable; the constitutional debate never closing; and journalists who know the process from the inside, such as İlhami Işık, saying that "even if Erdoğan says 'we are not meeting,' meetings are being held." If there is an agreement, what is in it? The prolongation of the regime's life in exchange for constitutional recognition of Kurdish identity? Becoming "as solid a leg as the MHP," that is, the Kurdish political movement turning into a component of the regime? We do not know. But we know that we do not know, and that is a more honest position than saying "everything is fine."

Why is Demirtaş still inside?

There is no legal answer to this question, because the law has already spoken. The answer is political. There are two hypotheses. First: the state sees Demirtaş as a figure who is "against the trenches, in favour of legitimate politics, and able to win votes in the west of Turkey too," and finds him dangerous precisely for that reason; because Demirtaş is a source of legitimacy that offers an alternative to running the process from a single centre. Second: Demirtaş's staying inside suits not only the state but also the other side of the process; because in the party to be founded in March 2027 "Demirtaş's place is unclear." Which is true? Perhaps both. But we can say this plainly: in a process that opens the way for those who laid down their arms while keeping inside someone who never took them up, what is being rewarded is not a love of peace.

Is there a long-running relationship of equilibrium between Erdoğan and Öcalan?

This question has to be asked, because there is a reading that is spreading among non-Kurdish opposition circles: that between Erdoğan and Öcalan there is a long-running relationship, escalated in certain periods and calmed in others, which both sides use to build their own balances; and that war and peace work like the two settings of this relationship. Let us take this not as a conspiracy theory but as a hypothesis, and test it against the facts.

Here are the facts. The Oslo talks of 2009–2011: the state and the PKK sat down directly for the first time, the talks were leaked, the process collapsed, and then 2011–2012 became one of the bloodiest periods. 2013: Öcalan's letter was read out at Newroz, the "resolution process" began, and for two years the guns fell silent. 28 February 2015: at Dolmabahçe, the HDP delegation and the government announced a joint agreement; Öcalan called for a congress on laying down arms. 17 March 2015: Demirtaş said three words from the parliamentary rostrum: "We will not let you become president." End of March: Erdoğan announced that he did not recognise the Dolmabahçe agreement and would not accept a "monitoring committee." 7 June 2015: the HDP passed the threshold with 13 per cent and the AKP lost its single-party majority for the first time in thirteen years. July: Suruç, Ceylanpınar, the trenches, the operations; war returned. 1 November 2015: the AKP took back its majority. November 2016: Demirtaş was arrested. 2017: the presidential referendum. October 2024: Bahçeli extended his hand to the DEM benches in the Assembly and issued a call to İmralı; the process reopened. 2026: dissolution, law, congress.

Is there a pattern in this calendar? There is: the process was cut off at every point where Kurdish politics rose as an independent centre of power outside İmralı, and reopened at every point where İmralı was the sole interlocutor. In 2015 the independent centre of power was the HDP; Demirtaş's sentence showed that the Kurdish vote could by itself stop Erdoğan's regime project, and it turned the HDP into a Turkey party that socialists, Alevis and secular constituencies in the west of the country voted for. This was something neither centre could accept: for Erdoğan it was the obstacle in the way of the presidency, for İmralı a source of legitimacy that exceeded it. Erdoğan's rejection of Dolmabahçe came days after Demirtaş's sentence; and accounts of the İmralı meetings of that period, published later, suggest that the weight Öcalan gave to that agreement did not coincide with Demirtaş's electoral strategy. So did the sentence "we will not let you become president" ruin a plan? The hypothesis is this: it did, but not only Erdoğan's plan; it ruined the two centres' shared assumption that legitimate Kurdish politics is subordinate to the İmralı-Ankara line. That may also be what turned Demirtaş into a declared enemy: an objection to the presidency for Erdoğan, and to sole interlocutorship for İmralı.

Now let us draw the limits of this hypothesis too, because Marxist analysis does not look for secret deals between individuals; it looks for structural convergence. There is no need to imagine Erdoğan and Öcalan sitting in a room making plans. What is needed is this observation: when a state wants to come to terms with a movement waging armed struggle against it, it wants a single interlocutor; that interlocutor must be controllable; and a leader held on an island for twenty-seven years is the ideal form of a controllable interlocutor. Likewise, the leader of an armed movement does not want a legitimate politics growing outside himself to surpass him, if he is to preserve his political weight. The interests of the two sides converge spontaneously in keeping an independent, elected Kurdish politics weak. There is no need to call this a conspiracy; it is called structure. And within this structure the war-peace cycle works like a dial that each of the two centres uses to set its own internal balances: in 2015 war brought Erdoğan the majority; in 2026 peace brings Erdoğan the hope of a constitution and İmralı the party.

And what changes if this hypothesis is true? This changes: the weakest link of today's process is not the possibility that the guns will start firing again, but that the process is accountable to no force outside the two centres. What cut the process short in 2015 was a force coming from below: six million voters going to the ballot box on 7 June. No such force is visible in 2026; the DEM congress was 535 to 0, the socialist components are uninformed, Demirtaş is inside. If the process is not cut short this time, that may show not that it is sounder but that no independent centre capable of objecting to it remains. We do not regard this hypothesis as proven; but what those who wish to disprove it must do is obvious: release Demirtaş, hold the congress with debate rather than a single bloc vote, open the meeting notes to the public. As long as these are not done, the hypothesis will stand there not as a conspiracy theory but as an unexplained regularity.

What do DEM's MPs know?

Koçyiğit said "we say no." Bakırhan said "we are contenders to govern Turkey." The congress endorsed the existing leadership with all 535 votes; not a single dissenting vote. Is this unity the product of a genuine consensus, or of a waiting period before a transformation that has not yet been discussed? Party sources say Öcalan's access to current information is limited. In that case, who is writing the programme? When will the programme being written be shown to the MPs in the Assembly? And do the MPs have the freedom to say "no" to the programme shown to them? Bakırhan's "we plucked them from the street and made them MPs" is a bad sign as to the answer.

What is to be done with the intellectual?

Are Bakırhan's words about Alevi intellectuals an isolated outburst of anger, or the measure of the process's tolerance for criticism? A peace process, if it really is a social peace, should widen precisely the space of intellectuals, academics and trade unionists — that is, of those who produce criticism. In this process, however, the Academics for Peace are at the door, Alevi intellectuals face the question "are they even intellectuals?", and Demirtaş's letters have to speak in metaphor. We should not rush to call a process in which criticism is this costly a "peace."

And a counter-question to the call for "intellectual support": support for what? For a negotiation whose content we do not know, for an agreement we learn about from leaks, for a law waiting on an NSC decision? If an intellectual is not told what it is they are being asked to support, what is being asked for is not support but obedience. In 2016 the Academics for Peace did exactly the opposite: they spoke in their own concepts without waiting for the state's framework, and they paid the price. If intellectuals who show that same independence towards the process today are excommunicated, then what the process wants from the intellectual is the same as what the state wanted in 2016: to keep quiet or to applaud.

Under whose guarantee do those coming from Kandil travel?

We cannot verify the claims that visitors from Kandil have gone to İmralı; security sources denied them. But even if the claims are untrue, there is a question that needs answering: how is the coordination between Kandil and İmralı — which took the dissolution decision, had the weapons burned, and discusses the release timetable — actually maintained? There are three possibilities. First, through the DEM delegation; but every meeting of the delegation is recorded and a short note is given to the public after each one, and the notes leak too; it is hard to believe Kandil would settle for such a narrow channel. Second, through the MİT; the existence of this channel since Oslo in 2009 is an open secret. Third, directly, as alleged; in which case wanted individuals enter and leave Turkey on a state plane or with a state guarantee. In all three possibilities the question is the same: under whose guarantee? For someone from Kandil to spend two days on İmralı and return, an authority guaranteeing that they will not be touched is required; if that authority is the MİT, then the process is the MİT's process; if it is the Presidency, then it is the Presidency's — not the Assembly's. And what are they discussing? If it is the dissolution and weapons timetable, then even that alone the public should know; if it is the constitution, then the Assembly should know; if it is the regional line-up, Syria, Iran, then this is no longer an internal peace process but a regional security bargain. The state denies these claims without explaining how the coordination is maintained; DEM does not explain either. That both of them are silent does not show the claims are true; but it does show that both have decided the public should not know.

Where are the socialists in this process?

Do the components have a place in the new party, and if so with what status: founder or guest? Corridor reports call the March 2027 congress "Öcalan's party" and write that the left components may be dispersed. If that is true, it means a twenty-year alliance is being liquidated as a by-product of the process; and without sitting at the table, indeed without even knowing about the table. When TİP and EMEP said "yes" to the framework law, they learned the content of the negotiations behind it at the same moment as the public, from the same leak. If there is no interlocutor to hear the conditions of a conditional "yes," the "yes" remains unconditional. The question the socialist movement must ask itself in this picture is clear too: the tension between gaining visibility under the roof of the Kurdish movement and building an independent class politics has been deferred for twenty years. The period of deferral appears to be ending. Will that bloc, belittled as "the Turkish left," give itself its own name, or go on being known by the name given to it?

What is the European left asking?

The questions of those looking at the process from outside are worth noting too; because what is invisible from within is sometimes seen from outside. Europe's mainstream left press has taken surprisingly little interest in the process; the interest has largely come through Rojava and the Iran war. But the questions asked by those who did take an interest overlap with ours. In Germany, taz asked three questions the week the law was submitted to parliament: why is Öcalan's legal status still undetermined; why is Erdoğan so hesitant after the previous process; and what kind of "democratisation" is this while opposition politicians continue to be arrested? Perspektive, the platform of the German revolutionary left, asked harder questions in two pieces. On 18 August, "A staged victory or a warning sign?": Öcalan is inside, the leadership is out of scope, the law regulates not the Kurdish question but only disarmament; those looking from within the movement read this as "a first step of historic importance," while revolutionaries looking from outside read it as "the liquidation of the movement and a retreat from the women's revolution." On 27 August, "Peace without rights": the constitutional recognition of collective rights does not appear in the framework at all; a national liberation struggle is being reduced to a "terrorism problem," to criminal law and individual reintegration; because it is deferral rather than amnesty, the state keeps its disciplinary power in hand; in the author's formulation, "the reproduction of relations of domination under changed conditions."

We relay these questions, but with one difference. One wing of the European left reads the laying down of arms itself as a loss, a "renunciation of the right to armed resistance." We are not there; we consider the silencing of the guns unhesitatingly good, and as we said at the outset, standing against it means signing up to the war party. Our question is not why the weapons were laid down but what was received in return and who was asked. What the European left really adds to this piece is this observation: those watching the process from within and those watching from outside see the same void. Where there are no rights, peace is a new form of domination. That diagnosis looks the same from Berlin as it does from Diyarbakır.

What is being discussed at the London table?

To ignore the regional context would be to see the Kurdish question as merely an internal matter; and that is a mistake. The debates over the US withdrawal from Syria, Iran's weakening, Israel's effort to redesign the region and Turkey's claim to regional power are all at the same table. In one sense, the process in Turkey can also be read as an effort to detach the Kurdish political movement from the Israel-US axis and attach it to the Ankara axis. Is the London conference a counter-move to that effort? Or the natural consequence of different wings of Kurdish politics leaning on different imperialist centres? We do not know. But we do know this: the liberation of a people does not run through the video message of the foreign minister of a state carrying out genocide in Gaza.

Has the Kurdish movement, having won its concession, abandoned Turkey's struggle for democracy?

This question needs to be written openly, because it is now being asked out loud by a large non-Kurdish constituency that voted for the HDP and DEM for years. It is formulated like this: even if only as a small piece in a large NATO-US-Israel plan redesigning the region, the Kurdish movement has taken a concession for its own share; status in Rojava, a law in exchange for dissolution in Turkey, and the promise of a place in the constitution. Having taken that concession, has it begun to treat the struggle for democracy in Turkey — the trustees, the jailed journalists, the strike bans, Saraçhane, Kavala, İmamoğlu, even Demirtaş — as a secondary matter? Does the movement that said "we will not let you become president" in 2015 now aim in 2026 to be "as solid a leg as the MHP"?

We must also write down honestly the answers the Kurdish movement and DEM supporters would give to this question; because a question is not properly asked until the other side's strongest answer has been heard. The answers we expect are these. First: "An opportunity arose to solve without weapons a problem that forty years of armed struggle could not solve; we cannot sacrifice that opportunity to the Turkish opposition's calendar. Kurds do not have to postpone a peace they paid for with their own blood for other people's electoral arithmetic." Second: "We are not the ones who abandoned the struggle for democracy; the Turkish opposition never saw the Kurdish question as its own. Where was the CHP standing while trustees were being appointed, while Demirtaş was being jailed, while the trench cities were being destroyed? To say 'you sold out democracy' now that we have sat down at the table is to demand unpaid loyalty from us once again." Third: "The Democratic Republic Movement is precisely the answer to this criticism; we are ceasing to be a Kurdish party and trying to encompass all of Turkey's oppressed. That is what Bakırhan means by 'we are contenders to govern Turkey.'" Fourth, and the sharpest: "Kurds do not have to obtain the approval of the Turkish left and opposition while solving their own national question; to demand that is the old tutelary reflex of the Turkish left."

There is a kernel of justice in each of these answers, and a criticism that ignores it reproduces exactly what it accuses others of: making the Kurdish question an instrument of its own agenda. The Kurdish movement owes no unpaid loyalty; and the Turkish opposition's record on the Kurdish question is indefensible. But none of the answers meets the real question. The real question is this: from whom was the concession taken, and what was given to whom in return? If the concession was taken from the regime in Turkey and what is being given in return is a constitution that prolongs that regime's life and a promise to be "a solid leg" of it, then this is not the solution of a national question but a class compromise with the regime; and the bill for that compromise is presented to Kurdish and Turkish working people together. The Kurdish movement owes no debt to a democracy struggle; but it does owe a debt to its own working-class base. If the sentence "we are contenders to govern Turkey" is uttered in a week when Demirtaş is kept inside despite an ECtHR judgment, when İkra Avcı is out of work, when academics are waiting at the door, then the question of which Turkey's government is being contended for is legitimate.

And let us add this: the constituency asking this question owes itself a question too. To tell the Kurdish movement "you abandoned the struggle for democracy," that struggle must have a body outside the Kurdish movement. Is there a Turkish opposition taking to the streets against the trustees, collecting signatures for Demirtaş, resisting strike bans, such that the Kurdish movement could have "abandoned" it? If the struggle for democracy is loaded onto the back of one movement and then treated as a betrayal the moment that movement sits down at the table, the problem must be sought not only in the one who sat down but also in those who left the load on someone else's back. This is said not to exonerate the Kurdish movement, but to see that both ends of the problem point to the same void: the absence of an organised and independent labour movement.

Have the Kurdish movement and Turkey been assigned a role in the Iran war?

It is no longer possible to ask this as a question about "a possible war"; the war is under way. The US and Israel attacked Iran on 28 February 2026; Khamenei was killed in the first wave, Hormuz was closed, the April ceasefire collapsed, and the June agreement broke down in July. And the Kurdish leg of this war is directly related to our process. Six days before the war, on 22 February, five armed parties of Iranian Kurdistan formed a coalition: the KDP-I, PAK, Komala, Hebat and PJAK. PJAK is the PKK's Iranian branch; a member of Öcalan's ideological family. Reports have appeared in the press that Trump promised this coalition "extensive air support", that weapons have been moved into western Iran since 2025, and that there is CIA-Mossad coordination. So while the PKK was burning weapons in Turkey, the Iranian branch of the same ideological family entered the war alongside the US-Israel coalition. That these two facts occurred in the same year may be a coincidence; but it is not a coincidence to be passed over without asking about it.

Let us look at Turkey's role too. In July, Iranian Foreign Minister Araghchi said that "Turkey played an active role in the failure of the US-Israel plan to partition Iran"; he related Fidan's warning to Washington that "it would be a great mistake to start a civil war in Iran through ethnic and sectarian division." In the same weeks Ankara was sending Tehran a warning in exactly the opposite direction: "Stop the attacks on Kurdish groups, this pushes them closer to Israel." And according to Manara magazine's April analysis, Erdoğan told Trump: "You saw what happened in Syria. The reaction would be swift."

Put these three facts side by side and read the role Turkey is playing: Ankara is trying to prevent the Kurdish card in Iran from passing into US-Israeli hands; and it is doing so both by pressing Washington and Tehran, and by dissolving the PKK at home. In this sense "Terror-Free Turkey" is as much a regional pre-emptive move as it is a project of internal peace: to attach the Kurdish political movement to its own axis before the Israel-US axis uses it as a pawn once again. Here is one explanation for the weight of security in the process, for the NSC's key role, for the constant deferral of reforms: for Ankara, the real function of the process is to fix the Kurdish movement's regional position; internal democratisation is secondary to that function. As Manara puts it, when the war began Ankara inverted the formula of "reform first, weapons later."

And what role is assigned to the Kurdish movement? There are two scenarios here, and both are written outside the movement. In the US-Israel scenario the Kurds are the ground force for breaking Iran apart; Sa'ar's sentence at the London conference about "a people living in four countries who have not won their independence" is the ideological preparation for it. In the Ankara scenario the Kurds are the partner within a "two-legged republic" of Turkey's claim to regional power; the "as solid a leg as the MHP" sentence in the leaked notes is the preparation for that one. In both scenarios the Kurdish worker is not consulted; in both, the Kurdish movement is a piece in someone else's plan. And PJAK fighting alongside the US in Iran while the PKK burns weapons in Turkey suggests that the movement may not have made a single choice between these two scenarios, and may be keeping both doors open. This must be what Manara calls "strategic ambiguity."

Is all this being planned? It would be naive to think such plans are not made in imperialist centres; part of the CIA-Mossad allegations has reached the press, and Trump's promise of air support is on record. But a plan being made does not mean the plan works; Araghchi's thanks show that the plan to partition Iran did not work, at least in this round. The real question for us is this: if the peace process in Turkey is one of Ankara's moves in this regional chess game, then what becomes of the process's domestic promises once the move achieves its aim — that is, once the Kurdish card has been taken out of the hands of the US and Israel? A state tends to take back the concession at home once the threat abroad recedes; we saw this in 2015. And the reverse holds too: if the war widens and Turkey is drawn directly into it, whose heads does the justification of "national security" come down on first? Strike bans, protest bans, decree-laws: we know the address of all of them. The bill for war, like the bill for peace, is always charged downwards.

Part Three: A Class Framework

Now let us place these questions in a framework. Because taken one by one, the questions can turn into a story of "bad intentions"; whereas the issue is not intention but structure.

The state is the apparatus of a class; peace is made accordingly

Let us recall the most basic proposition of the Marxist theory of the state: the state is not a neutral referee above society but the organised force of the ruling class. In our 11 August piece we unpacked this with Poulantzas's concept of relative autonomy: the state protects capital's collective and long-term interest against the daily interests of individual capitals and individual politicians; this is why a peace process cannot be reduced to Erdoğan's personal calculation, yet is not independent of that calculation either. And, again in the vocabulary of that piece, the process is a passive revolution: it tames the radical dynamics that might come from below and draws them into the system — in Gramsci's language, a molecular restoration. This proposition holds for peace processes too. When a state makes peace with an armed movement that threatens it, it does so to the extent and in the form that its own class interests require. The silencing of the guns is in capital's interest: the investment climate, the risk premium, the regional market, border security. But the academic returning to work, the nurse being reinstated, Demirtaş being released, the right to strike being expanded — these are not in capital's interest; on the contrary, because they widen the space for criticism and organisation, they narrow capital's capacity for control.

That is exactly why the process is fast in everything to do with weapons and slow in everything to do with freedom. This is not an inconsistency; it is class consistency.

Peace from above turns those below into objects

A peace made between two centres, by definition, turns everyone outside those two centres into an object. The Kurdish worker, the Turkish worker, the academic, the nurse, the teacher: all are spectators waiting for the outcome of the process. The language of the process reflects this too. The sentence "we plucked them from the street and made them MPs" speaks precisely in the language of this objectification: the people are not those who grant a mandate but a mass to whom mandates are distributed.

This objectification is the weakest point of the process. Because a peace lasts only to the extent that it is owned from below. A peace made from above collapses when the balances above change. We have not forgotten how the 2013–2015 process collapsed.

Being a "Turkey party" — whose Turkey?

DEM's transformation from a Kurdish party into a Turkey party is not in itself a bad thing. We too hold that the solution of the Kurdish question is the problem of all of Turkey's working people. But the question is: which Turkey? In his speech Bakırhan says "capital and the rentier class ate, the people paid the bill." Good. But the same movement, if the leaked notes are true, aims to become "as solid a leg of this state as the MHP." These two sentences cannot stand in the same programme. Being a leg of the regime and changing the class character of the regime are two mutually exclusive paths. The party to be founded in March 2027 will be forced to say openly which of the two it is choosing.

The Kurdish bourgeoisie and the Kurdish worker

We should also ask this: the class sides of this process are not only "the state" and "the movement." There are classes within Kurdish society itself. The silencing of the guns means a new period of accumulation for construction, energy, mining and agricultural capital in the region. Who will get the "regional development" tenders, whose hands the lands of emptied villages will pass into, who will monopolise cross-border trade — these are the unspoken agenda of the process. If a peace process gives the Kurdish worker their mother tongue while giving the Kurdish bourgeoisie the tender, then this peace too has a class content, and that content is not in the worker's favour.

Regional redistribution

And finally, imperialism. The Kurdish question is the question of a people living within the borders of four states, and just as much the business of the imperialist centres waging a struggle for influence over those four states. The London conference is the proof. Israel's promise of "independence" to the Kurds comes not from any love of Kurdish liberation but from a strategy of weakening Turkey, Iran and Iraq. In the same way, Ankara's promise of a "democratic republic" to the Kurds is a strategy of detaching Kurdish politics from the Israel-US axis and articulating it into its own regional power project. The Kurdish worker does not have to choose between these two strategies. The third path is the common struggle of all the working people of the region; but the table for that path has not yet been set.

Reading the Ruler Again

	Visible	Invisible
Who is at the table?	The state and Öcalan; the DEM delegation in between	Demirtaş, the Kobani prisoners, the academics, the dismissed, the workers
What is being discussed?	Dissolution, laying down arms, deferral	The constitution, the future of the regime, the regional line-up
Who sets the timetable?	The Assembly passed a law	The NSC decision; the March 2027 congress
Who got out?	Mızraklı (by serving his sentence)	Demirtaş (inside despite the ECtHR judgment)
The war-peace cycle	The 2013 process, the 2024 outstretched hand	What cut the process short in 2015: an independent Kurdish politics rising outside İmralı
Who returned?	18 academics (in ten years)	388 academics; İkra Avcı
Court judgments	The discourse of the "rule of law"	Kavala (ECtHR, 3,232 days), Atalay (Constitutional Court, 1,596 days), Demirtaş (ECtHR) still inside
Response to criticism	"An expression that went beyond my intention"; the call for "intellectual support"	"We plucked them from the street and made them MPs"; excommunication, the loyalty test
The Kandil-İmralı line	The DEM delegation's notes	The channel of coordination and the guarantor are not disclosed
Socialist components	A conditional "yes" (TİP, EMEP)	Unaware of the negotiations; belittled as "the Turkish left"; their place in the new party unclear
The European left's question	"A first step of historic importance"	"Peace without rights": the reproduction of domination under changed conditions
Regional context	"Terror-Free Turkey"	PJAK in the US coalition in the Iran war; a session on Zionism and Kurdish nationalism in London
The voter's question	"A Turkey party," "we are contenders to govern Turkey"	From whom was the concession taken, and what was given to whom in return?
Class content	"The rentier class ate"	Regional development tenders to whom?

This table is not there to reject the process. The silencing of the guns is good; we say so once again, without hesitation. The table is there to show the gap between the visible and the invisible. And as the gap widens, trust shrinks.

Concrete Tasks

Make the questions public. Saying "we do not know" is not a weakness; it is a demand. In every meeting, every union board, every panel, ask this question: who is at the table, what is being discussed, how are we supposed to know? Forcing the process into transparency is a way of taking ownership of it.
Keep the release of Demirtaş, Kavala, Atalay and the Gezi convicts on the agenda as a single demand: the demand that court judgments be implemented. Keeping inside a politician with a final ECtHR judgment is the problem of the whole opposition; tomorrow the same formula will be used for a CHP mayor too. It is already being used today.
Tell the İkra Avcı case together with the case of the Academics for Peace. The same scissors, the same formula: the criminal courts clear you, the administration dismisses you. Unless this formula is broken, however many people the framework law releases, every civil servant, every teacher, every nurse remains under threat.
Follow the DEM Party's transformation with class criteria. In the March 2027 programme, look for the answers to these questions: is there the right to strike, is there a minimum wage, is there a ban on trustees, is there reinstatement for the dismissed, is there anything about who will receive "regional development" resources? If the "democratic republic" does not answer these questions, it is no more than a change of adjective.
Read the regional context. Follow what is being said in London and what was said in Berlin. Reducing the solution of the Kurdish question to the Ankara-İmralı line means failing to see the imperialist dimension of the process. And never forget that Israel's "friendship with the Kurds" comes from the same hand as Gaza.
Do not allow the alliance to be turned into patronage. The socialist movement must redefine its relationship with the Kurdish movement as the side that "builds" rather than the side that is "carried." This is not a call for separation; it is a call for equality. A component without its own programme, its own class base and its own word will be the first to be written off in every process.
Answer the call to "give support" with "we want participation." Demand that the meeting notes be published, and that the Assembly be told through which channel and under whose guarantee the Kandil-İmralı coordination runs. A monitoring mechanism open to the forces of peace and democracy, of the kind proposed by the Peace Foundation, is the concrete form of this demand.
Ask others for patience with intellectuals, and as intellectuals be impatient. A language that asks everyone who criticises "what intellectual credentials do you have?" is the language of tutelage, whoever's mouth it comes from. To stand against it is not to stand against the process; it is to stand for the process becoming social.

Dear Young Comrades,

Someone reading this piece may ask, "fine, but what are you proposing?" Our answer is clear: we are proposing that we see. A peace process is a peace process only to the extent that the public can see it. We cannot defend what we cannot see; nor can we oppose what we cannot see. That is why the first demand is transparency: who is at the table, what is being discussed, what is being given in return?

Demirtaş wrote a letter, and he had to write it in metaphor. Mızraklı is getting out after seven years and owes no one any thanks; he served out those days himself. İkra Avcı braided her hair and lost her job. Three hundred and eighty-eight academics have been at the door for ten years. Alevi intellectuals wrote a declaration and were met with the interrogation "are they even intellectuals?" The socialist components of a twenty-year alliance are called "the Turkish left" and learn their place in the new party from corridor gossip. And in London, an academic who defends what is being done to Gaza was called "the mother of the Kurds."

To look at this picture and say "everything is fine," you would have to know either a great deal or nothing at all. We are neither. We, as those who know that we do not know, will go on asking.

Because peace is not a decision to be communicated to us; it is a process we too will be part of. A peace we are not part of goes by another name. We are in no hurry to give it that name; but nor do we accept being blind in order to avoid giving it.

And one last word, because asking questions is not enough; one must also say from what ground the questions are asked.

Every table we have discussed in this piece was a table that divides peoples: Ankara and İmralı; Tel Aviv and Kurdish politicians in London; the US and Iran's Kurds in Sulaymaniyah; Turkey between Washington and Tehran. At none of these tables are the working people present; they are summoned to the front as soldiers, to the ballot box as voters, or to the building sites of "regional development" tenders as workers. For forty years the son of the Turkish worker and the son of the Kurdish worker were made to kill each other; now, in the Iran war, Kurdish youth are being pushed forward as the ground force of the United States, while Arab working people are under a genocide in Gaza and in the wreckage of fifteen years of war in Syria and Iraq. And the profits of all these wars are booked to the same addresses: arms companies, energy monopolies, contractors, the owners of post-war "reconstruction" tenders.

Seyit Aslan was right in Diyarbakır: the real solution runs through the united struggle of the Turkish and Kurdish working class. We take that sentence one step further, because the region makes it necessary: the common unity of Turkish, Kurdish and Arab working people. This is not a slogan but an observation. The Kurdish question is lived within the borders of four states, and in three of them the Kurdish worker is in the same factory, the same field, the same building site, the same migration route as the Arab and Turkish worker. What divides them is not language but the domination built upon language. Israel promises the Kurds "independence" while destroying Gaza; Ankara promises the Kurds "brotherhood" while inviting the Kurdish worker into a cheap-labour paradise on a regional minimum wage; Washington promises the Kurds "air support" while driving young Kurds to the front in Iran. What all three have in common is using the Kurd by separating them from their neighbour.

This is why peace begins with the silencing of the guns but becomes real on the day the Turkish worker, the Kurdish peasant and the Arab refugee sit at the same table — their own table. That table has not been set yet. If it is to be set, no one will set it from above; as Liebknecht said a hundred years ago, it will be set by working people who know that the main enemy is in their own country. Our job is to put our shoulder to the setting of that table; and our questions belong to it.

The questions are open. We await the answers.