After decades of repression, many of Turkey’s Kurds are hopeful that their long struggle for basic rights may finally be nearing a breakthrough. That hope is fueled by newly launched talks between Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s nationalist coalition and the imprisoned leader of the Kurdish Workers Party (PKK), Abdullah Ocalan. The talks have already produced the historic declaration by the PKK to disband and renounce armed struggle. Pro-Kurdish politicians have praised Erdogan’s efforts to pursue a peaceful solution.
But both precedents in other countries and Erdogan’s own record suggest a different outcome. We know from case after case that autocrats—whether they are actual dictators or strongmen at the head of flawed democracies—rarely resolve ethnic conflicts. They often freeze or suppress them, sidestep root causes, and instrumentalize the unresolved conflict as an excuse to tighten their grip on power. The result is rarely peace—just postponed instability.
For a cautionary tale of how such leaders manage ethnic conflict, take Sri Lanka’s military defeat of the separatist Tamil Tigers (the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, or LTTE). Since the 1980s, the LTTE had fought for a Tamil homeland in response to deep-rooted discrimination by the country’s Sinhalese majority, and particularly the suppression of language and religion. The brutal conflict claimed more than 80,000 lives. In May 2009, the government declared victory, and the LTTE announced that it was laying down arms.
Though the guns fell silent, repression persisted. The postwar period saw continued threats and abuses against then-Sri Lankan President Mahinda Rajapaksa’s critics—both Tamil and Sinhalese. Rajapaksa used the victory to consolidate power, elevate his Sinhalese-Buddhist nationalist image, and erode democracy. He won early reelection in 2010, scrapped presidential term limits, and filled key ministries with family members.
Emergency wartime powers were repackaged into permanent tools of authoritarian control. Media, civil society, and the opposition came under attack, and the rule of law weakened. While some Tamil grievances were superficially addressed, discrimination endured. Despite Tamil being an official language, state communication often remained exclusively in Sinhala. The government failed to launch any credible investigations into war crimes, disappearances, or major human rights abuses. Instead of creating independent oversight bodies, it dismantled judicial autonomy—most notably by impeaching the chief justice.
No meaningful steps have been taken toward a lasting political solution to the ethnic conflict, such as devolving power. Meanwhile, the military continued to seize land without due process or avenues for appeal. In the Tamil-majority north, security forces routinely cracked down on peaceful protests, detained students on flimsy charges of LTTE ties, and harassed Tamil politicians with impunity. As one of Rajapaksa’s brothers put it: With the LTTE’s defeat, “an era of ruler-king” had begun. More than 16 years on, the Tamil survivors of Sri Lanka’s brutal civil war still live in fear and disempowerment.
A similar fate may await Turkey’s Kurds as they enter what they call a “peace process” with the country’s strongman. The framing alone signals trouble: Erdogan portrays the talks with Ocalan as a counterterrorism measure, whereas pro-Kurdish leaders see them as a path to meet democratic demands. The disconnect mirrors Sri Lanka, where Rajapaksa used the so-called peace to consolidate power, not share it. Erdogan is using talks with Ocalan not to resolve the Kurdish issue, but to tighten his grip on power.
The Ocalan talks have already served one of Erdogan’s key objectives: dividing the opposition. Many former supporters of dialogue with the Kurds now see the talks as Erdogan’s final move before locking in full-blown autocracy. They accuse the pro-Kurdish party of playing into his hands, eroding support for Kurdish democratic demands even among liberals.
Indeed, throughout his rule, Erdogan has repeatedly exploited the Kurdish question to centralize authority. In a landmark speech given in 2005 in Diyarbakir, Turkey’s largest Kurdish-majority city, Erdogan acknowledged that Turkey had mishandled its Kurdish population. He declared that great nations must confront their past and that the answer to Kurdish grievances was more democracy, not more repression. At the time, Erdogan was courting liberal and Kurdish support to sideline his main rivals, the secularist military elite.
In 2009, Erdogan launched the first “Kurdish opening” amid secret peace talks between Turkey’s intelligence agency and the PKK in Oslo. The initiative was launched just as Erdogan was seeking the backing of Kurdish voters for a constitutional referendum aimed at weakening the military and judiciary, two bastions of the old elite’s resistance to Erdogan’s rule.
Framed as a democratic reform initiative, the Kurdish opening’s stated goal was to ease cultural restrictions and acknowledge Kurdish identity. In response, the PKK declared a cease-fire, and a small group of its members crossed from northern Iraq, home to the PKK’s headquarters, into Turkey as a goodwill gesture. Their celebratory welcome by many Turkish Kurds sparked nationalist outrage, and opposition parties accused Erdogan of legitimizing terrorism.
Facing backlash, Erdogan halted the opening, and the Turkish Constitutional Court soon banned the pro-Kurdish Democratic Society Party. Erdogan had reached his goal: The Kurdish issue helped him pass constitutional reforms that reshaped the judiciary in his favor and pushed the military further out of politics.
By 2012, Erdogan had neutralized his secularist opponents and returned to the table, this time with bigger ambitions—transforming Turkey into a presidential system without any meaningful checks and balances. Once again, this required Kurdish voters. And so a second Kurdish opening—another peace process and promises of limited cultural rights—became a vehicle for his plan to centralize power.
“Are we ready to build a new Turkey, adopt a new constitution, shift to a presidential system, and resolve the Kurdish issue? Give us 400 seats and we’ll solve it peacefully,” Erdogan told a crowd after launching the peace talks. What he wanted was clear: a parliamentary supermajority to rewrite the constitution and establish a powerful presidency—with the Kurdish vote as the crucial lever.
Talks resumed with Ocalan in prison, and the PKK again declared a cease-fire. In 2013, a letter from Ocalan was read to a massive crowd in Diyarbakir, calling for peace, a withdrawal of PKK fighters from Turkish soil, and disarmament. The government responded with a reform bill and dispatched commissions to promote the peace process nationwide. Symbolic steps followed: Kurdish-language broadcasting expanded, Kurdish became an elective in schools, and some Turkified place names were restored to the original Kurdish. The controversial pledge recited by students at the beginning of each school day, “How happy is the one who says I am a Turk,” was abolished.
By spring 2015, however, it was clear that Kurdish politicians and voters wouldn’t support Erdogan’s push for one-man rule. They had grown too confident to accept the president’s limited offers. Erdogan’s refusal to open the border to Syria when the Islamic State threatened a massacre in the Syrian Kurdish stronghold of Kobani—within sight of the border—only deepened Kurdish distrust, making it even harder for him to win their backing for his presidential ambitions.
On March 17, 2015, Selahattin Demirtas—the leader of the Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP), a pro-Kurdish political party—delivered a defining blow, declaring: “As long as the HDP exists, we will not let you become president.” Just hours later, Erdogan dismissed reconciliation efforts entirely, claiming, “There is no Kurdish problem.”
In the June 2015 general elections, the HDP won 13 percent of the vote and entered parliament in force. It blocked Erdogan’s path to a presidential system and helped strip his Justice and Development Party of its majority for the first time in 13 years.
The coalition that Erdogan had hoped would usher in his executive presidency had collapsed. Erdogan shut down the second Kurdish peace process and struck an alliance with the ultranationalist Nationalist Movement Party—a party fiercely opposed to Kurdish rights. What followed was an unprecedented crackdown not just on the PKK, but also on legitimate Kurdish political actors and civil society. Parliament swiftly lifted HDP lawmakers’ immunity, triggering a wave of prosecutions. Demirtas and other HDP leaders were hit with hundreds of court charges over alleged PKK ties. Within two years of defying Erdogan, Demirtas was in jail, and earlier reforms that had granted Kurds limited cultural rights were rolled back.
Erdogan’s anti-Kurdish alliance delivered exactly what he wanted. With the Nationalist Movement Party’s support, Erdogan regained his parliamentary majority and pushed forward his long-sought presidential system. In 2017, Erdogan claimed a narrow win in a controversial referendum—tainted by fraud allegations—that vastly expanded his powers and tightened his grip on the state.
For years, Erdogan has exploited the Kurdish issue as a political tool—sometimes dangling the promise of peace, at other times waging war. Resolving the conflict was never the goal; consolidating power was. The core of the Kurdish question—Turkey’s democratic deficit—has been consistently ignored.
Today, Erdogan stands at another crossroads. Years of conflict helped him build an autocratic regime, but the current constitution bars him from running again in 2028. His solution? A new constitution that could remove term limits. And to make it happen, he needs the pro-Kurdish votes in parliament. That’s the real motive behind renewed talks with Ocalan.
Erdogan’s clear track record should leave no room for illusions. Yet HDP politicians seem hopeful that this round of dialogue will finally yield democratic progress. They view the ruling bloc’s push for a new constitution and renewed talks with Ocalan as a chance to finally press for core Kurdish demands—such as Kurdish-language education and a more inclusive civic—rather than ethnic—definition of Turkish citizenship.
That hope is dangerously misplaced. Erdogan isn’t seeking peace—he’s seeking permanence. His jailing of the Republican People’s Party presidential candidate and strongest opposition contender, Ekrem Imamoglu, makes clear where he’s headed: a Russian-style autocracy where elections are hollow rituals, a tame opposition is handpicked, and serious rivals are imprisoned. Even if Erdogan agrees to include some Kurdish demands in a new constitution, there’s no reason for anyone to believe that he’ll honor them once he gets what he wants.
Global examples—such as former Sri Lankan President Rajapaksa’s defeat of the LTTE—demonstrate that authoritarian leaders rarely solve the root causes of ethnic conflict. More telling is Erdogan’s own record: For years, he’s ruled by decree, routinely ignoring the constitution. Why should we expect him to act differently now? If Erdogan pulls off his plan with Kurdish support, then the long-term cost for Kurds will be steep: deeper isolation and a renewed backlash against their legitimate demands, even after Erdogan eventually exits the stage.
Kurds and Turks face a defining moment. Erdogan’s ultimate goal is to strip away even the most fundamental democratic right to choose by whom we are ruled. Kurds have long fought for a democratic Turkey. To stay true to that struggle, they must see Erdogan’s renewed overture to Ocalan for what it really is—a calculated power grab.