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In Deepest Kurdistan: A Wary Welcome for Peace with the Turks

Tucked into Turkey’s south-easternmost corner, between Iran and Iraq, nestled by mountains studded with ghost villages, Hakkâri, a town of 70,000, is forlorn, violent and cold. It is March 21, the day local Kurds celebrate their new year and the coming of spring, but thick sheets of snow still cling to the mountains and fields. Usually, it’s after the snow melts that the fighting begins: when militants of the outlawed Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), ensconced in the mountains here or across the border in northern Iraq during the winter months, begin to launch attacks against Turkish military outposts. Last summer, PKK fighters attempted, in vain, to take control of parts of the province, inflicting significant casualties on Turkish troops and suffering tens if not hundreds of losses themselves, helping to make 2012 the bloodiest year on record in Turkey’s Kurdish conflict in more than a decade. This spring may yet turn out to be different. For once, the melting snow may herald peace, not war. At the local headquarters of the Peace and Democracy Party (BDP), Turkey’s main legal Kurdish party, dozens of men gathered to wait for a statement from the PKK’s jailed leader, Abdullah Öcalan, or Apo, as he is referred to by most Kurds. Öcalan, who was captured by Turkish special forces in 1999 and is serving out a life sentence on an island prison near Istanbul, had been in talks with Turkish intelligence officials for the past half year, prompting anticipation of a ceasefire deal. Even here in faraway Hakkâri, as Kurds waited for his words, there was hope, moderated by past experience and caution, that an end to a conflict that has spanned three decades and claimed more than 40,000 lives was finally within reach. (MORE: New Day for the Kurds: Will Ocalan’s Declaration Bring Peace With Turkey?) And so came the news. Onscreen, a pair of BDP deputies read Öcalan’s statement to a crowd of over 200,000gathered in Diyarbakir, one of the largest cities in Turkey’s Kurdish southeast. In front of the TV in Hakkâri, all was silence, except perhaps for the steady click clack of prayer beads turning betweenImage may be NSFW.
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