Turkey Seeks Opening With Kurdish Militants Despite Attack on Aerospace Company

Recent gestures by Turkish leaders suggest the possibility of new peace talks with the group fighting for Kurdish autonomy.

This week, one of Turkey’s most powerful politicians made a surprising offer to the militant leader he has long branded a “baby killer” and “chief terrorist.”

If Abdullah Ocalan, the leader of the main group fighting for greater autonomy for Turkey’s Kurdish minority, would come to Parliament, renounce militancy and disband his organization, the politician said, it could open a pathway to end his life sentence in a Turkish prison.

The offer by the politician, Devlet Bahceli, fell far short of a breakthrough in efforts to end decades of bloody conflict between the Turkish state and Mr. Ocalan’s group, the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or P.K.K. But it was one of several recent gestures suggesting a new openness in the Turkish government to the possibility of revived peace talks.

Then on Wednesday, the government blamed the P.K.K. for a deadly attack on a state-run aerospace company. The attack did not appear to derail the positive momentum.

Turkey has been trying to stamp out the P.K.K. since its founding as an underground militant organization in 1984. Tens of thousands of people have been killed in the years since in P.K.K. guerrilla attacks and the Turkish military’s responses. Turkey and its Western allies consider the P.K.K. a terrorist organization.

Turkish authorities captured Mr. Ocalan in 1999 and sentenced him to life in prison, locking him up on an island in the Sea of Marmara where he was for many years the only prisoner. The government started peace talks with the P.K.K. in 2012, but negotiations collapsed in 2015, unleashing a new wave of violence that washed away any hopes for a truce.

That is why this month’s gestures, though small, have drawn such attention.

Throughout his political career, Mr. Bahceli, 76, has been a staunch Turkish nationalist so opposed to any concessions to the Kurdish minority that he once wielded a noose at campaign rallies to bolster his tough-on-terror image.

His Nationalist Movement Party is now President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s largest coalition partner and has long followed a hard-right line, even refusing to sit next to lawmakers from the main pro-Kurdish party in the parliamentary chamber.

So when Parliament reconvened at the start of this month, Turks took note when Mr. Bahceli’s lawmakers took their seats next to their pro-Kurdish colleagues. They were even more surprised when Mr. Bahceli, who had often dismissed pro-Kurdish politicians as in cahoots with terrorists, walked over to shake their hands.

Making the offer to Mr. Ocalan during a speech to his party’s members on Monday, Mr. Bahceli said the prisoner could come to Parliament and “shout that terror is completely finished and the group is abolished,” referring to the P.K.K.

If he did that, Mr. Bahceli said, a legal pathway could open to end Mr. Ocalan’s incarceration.

The next day, Mr. Erdogan also called for peace, saying he hoped that the “window of opportunity” the governing coalition had opened would not be wasted.

“We want to build a Turkey with no terror and violence all together,” he said.

Then, before the attack on Wednesday, the government allowed Mr. Ocalan’s nephew to visit the jailed leader, his first visit from anyone outside the prison in more than three years.

The nephew, Omer Ocalan, who is also a Parliament member, shared a message from his uncle on social media after the visit. The message had a seemingly conciliatory tone, indicating his uncle’s interest in peace talks.

“Isolation is ongoing,” it said, referring to Mr. Ocalan’s inability to communicate with anyone outside the prison. “If conditions develop, I have the theoretical and practical power to pull this process from the grounds of conflict and violence to the grounds of law and politics.”

Of course, wanting peace is much easier than hammering out the terms to end a long, bitter conflict. And the threat of continued violence was made clear by the attack on the aerospace company, which killed five people, just hours after the prison visit.

The two attackers who carried it out, a man and a woman, were also killed. The government said they were P.K.K. members.

But the attack has not deterred the government, Mehmet Ali Kulat, a pollster based in the capital, Ankara, said in an interview. Turkish officials had been working on new ways to address the P.K.K. issue for a few months and were prepared for such setbacks.

“Although this attack showed that the process should be handled more carefully, I believe it will not have an entirely negative effect,” he said.

Tuncer Bakirhan, the co-chair of Turkey’s main pro-Kurdish party, said in an interview that despite the recent gestures, the government had not reached out to discuss the possibility of new talks.

His party was interested in talking, he said, but many details needed to be worked out.

Turkey would need to allow Mr. Ocalan to communicate with the P.K.K. and his other followers, he said, as well as defining what it would offer the P.K.K. in exchange for disarmament.

“Why should the organization lay down its arms? What steps would Turkey take for those arms to be laid down?” he said. “Those questions are out there and still unanswered.”

Despite their gestures, Turkey’s leaders have not publicly called for peace talks or expressed any willingness to negotiate or grant concessions.

Some Turkish analysts have speculated that the government’s recent moves could be a maneuver by Mr. Erdogan to win Kurdish support for a constitutional change that would allow him to run for president again when his current, third term ends in 2028.

Other regional and domestic dynamics are also encouraging the government to take a new look at its conflict with the P.K.K., said Ozgur Unluhisarcikli, the Ankara office director of the German Marshall Fund, a research group.

Conflicts elsewhere in the Middle East have encouraged Turkey’s leaders to try to ensure stability at home, he said. And there is speculation that the United States could withdraw its forces from northeastern Syria, leaving the American allied P.K.K. affiliate there vulnerable.

Turkey’s military has also seriously degraded the P.K.K.’s military capabilities, potentially making the group more open to negotiations.

Kurdish political activists in Turkey over the years have put forward many demands, including outright separatism, autonomy within a federal system inside Turkey and greater freedoms to express Kurdish culture and use the Kurdish language.

Some of those goals may be more achievable now than they were in the past, Mr. Unluhisarcikli said.

“If they focus on cultural rights, they might be able to get somewhere,” he said. “But if the Kurdish political movement starts with federalism, that is a deal breaker.”

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