TRIAL SEEN AS PART OF INCREASED BILATERAL COOPERATION BETWEEN THE UK AND TÜRKIYE ~ Tom Anderson ~ The trial of six members of London’s Kurdish community, charged with membership of the proscribed Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), is ongoing at the Central Criminal Court (Old Bailey) in London. They have all pleaded not guilty to the charges of being members of the banned organisation and some face additional allegations relating to arranging and addressing meetings in support of the PKK. On the day hearings started (5 January), the London Kurdish Community and their supporters demonstrated with banners outside the Old Bailey. The trial is due to take up to three months and the defendants are Ercan Akbal (56), Ali Boyraz (63), Agit Karatas (24), Berfin Kurban (31), Turkan Ozcan (60) and Mazlum (also known as Mucahit) Sayak (28). The home raids and arrests coincided with a simultaneous police raid on the Kurdish Community Centre (KCC) in Haringey, sparking protests and hunger strikes. A number of high profile arrests of Kurdish people had preceded this, as well as raids on Kurdish Community Centres and media organisations across Europe during 2024. This heightened repression of Kurdish movements in Europe came at a time when Türkiye was stepping up its air and ground assaults on the PKK in Iraqi Kurdistan and drone attacks on North and East Syria. The arrests also took place just two days before the 29 November assault on Aleppo by Hayat Tahrir Al-Sham (HTS). Türkiye hoped to use this assault and subsequent takeover of power from Bashar Al-Assad to strengthen their influence in Syria and further the role of its Syrian National Army (SNA) proxies in efforts to destroy the Rojava revolution.  PKK has been a banned organisation in the UK since 2001, when the Blair government added it to the list of proscribed organisations following pressure from the Turkish state. The arrests came in the wake of a meeting in London between Turkish Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan and British Foreign Secretary David Lammy, when they announced new UK/Türkiye bilateral cooperation and trade ties. The PKK was founded in the 1970s as a Marxist-Leninist anti-colonial party aiming to end the Turkish state’s violence, discrimination, denial of identity and forced assimilation policies aimed at Kurdish people. In 1999, the movement embarked on a path toward its new paradigm based on three concepts: Women’s freedom, an ecological society and democratic confederalism, a form of stateless direct democracy. These ideas have inspired the movement ever since, and built a foundation for the Rojava revolution in North and East Syria, which began in 2012, and the struggle for democratic autonomy within Türkiye’s borders.  WHY NOW? The PKK and its imprisoned leader Abdullah Öcalan have been trying to make peace with the Turkish state over the last year and the Party officially disbanded itself and ceremonially destroyed some of its weapons in 2025. The movement has never carried out any sort of armed operation on UK soil, and the Kurdish-aligned Syrian Democratic Forces received tactical support from the UK armed forces during their fight against the Islamic State (ISIS). In 2020, the Belgian Supreme Court ruled that EU anti-terrorism legislation cannot be applied to PKK.  The fact that the Crown Prosecution Service puts resources into criminalising members of the UK’s Kurdish community can be explained, just like in the case of last year’s proscription Palestine Action, in geopolitical terms. The complicity of the British police with the Israeli embassy over Palestine action is well documented, and details are still emerging. Türkiye, for its part, is a NATO member and a key UK and EU ally, despite Erdoğan’s efforts to strip away the vestiges of liberal democracy within Turkey and to centre authoritarian power around himself as President. The Turkish state wants to crush the Kurdish freedom movement, both within its borders and across the border in North and East Syria, whereas Keir Starmer appears to be keen to enact repressive policies at home to further what he sees as UK foreign policy interests. At the same time, Starmer’s Labour government has presided over a shift in the way dissent is being dealt with in the UK. For decades euphemisms like ‘domestic extremism’ or ‘aggravated activism’ have been used to criminalise radicals while differentiating them from those they dub terrorists. However, since the proscription of Palestine Action last year the state has seemed ready to straight-up call people terrorists. Obviously, the PKK has been on the proscribed list for a quarter of a century already, but there haven’t been many actual prosecutions related to it. The state’s readiness to use terrorism legislation to counter dissent is likely to have fed into the CPS decision to prosecute.  The Kurdish People’s Assembly of the UK in a public statement is calling for “sustained solidarity” as “a refusal of isolation and criminalisation, and an affirmation that political identity, association, and community organisation are not crimes.” The post Kurdish community members plead ‘not guilty’ to PKK charges appeared first on Freedom News.

THE MOVE REFLECTS A BROADER STRATEGIC VISION EMBRACING GENDER LIBERATION, PLURALISM, AND LOCAL DEMOCRACY ~ Blade Runner ~ The formal announcement of the PKK’s dissolution has sparked mixed reactions among Turkey’s Kurds and international supporters. However, it has been years in the making and comes as no surprise to long-term observers of the Kurdish movement and readers of Abdullah Öcalan‘s theory of Democratic Confederalism. The shift had been indicated months earlier and signifies a strategic transformation aligned with a broader vision of autonomy beyond the state, the party, and the armed struggle. The PKK was founded in 1978 and launched an armed struggle in 1984, demanding Kurdish autonomy. Turkey responded with harsh military repression, and the two sides became entangled in a bloody conflict that lasted for decades. Over the course of this war, between 40,000 and 50,000 people were killed, including civilians, PKK fighters, Turkish soldiers, police, and village guards. The 1990s were particularly brutal, marked by widespread village burnings, forced displacements affecting up to 3 million people, and systemic human rights abuses. Despite several attempts at ceasefires and peace talks, the violence periodically escalated—especially after the collapse of negotiations in 2015, when renewed urban warfare brought heavy casualties to cities like Cizre and Sur. Since Öcalan’s capture in 1999, the Kurdish freedom movement has gradually shifted away from traditional models of armed vanguardism, nationalist statism and Stalinist rigidity. While the PKK maintained its armed forces—particularly in the mountains of Iraqi Kurdistan—its ideological orientation increasingly prioritised social transformation over military confrontation. This shift found structural expression in the formation of the Kurdistan Communities Union (KCK) in the early 2000s: an umbrella of organisations with a decentralised and horizontal character. The KCK encompasses a wide array of communities, political parties, citizen initiatives, committees, and grassroots institutions across Turkey, Syria, Iraq, and Iran. It represents a deliberate move away from the rigid, centralised model of the vanguard party, in favour of a networked configuration grounded in direct participation and local autonomy.  In Turkey, the KCK has been politically active in coordinating cultural, social, and municipalist initiatives. It has succeeded in winning local councils and electing candidates to mayoral positions. The Turkish state has responded with sustained repression, including mass arrests of alleged “KCK members” over the past decade. In this new worldview, the space for a hierarchical party structure like the PKK has been steadily shrinking. Öcalan’s February 2025 call for the PKK to formally dissolve was met with support from officials within Kongra-Gel, the legislative body of the KCK that claimed that this step “marks the beginning of a broader democracy movement—one that includes women, workers, and environmental activists”, thus being more aligned with the framework of Democratic Modernity. Democratic confederalism was first articulated within the PKK and then fully implemented—most visibly—in Rojava. Where the PKK once contributed to ethnic polarisation within Turkey and even among Kurds, the Rojava model now emphasises the transition to plurality, feminism, and decentralisation. For over a decade, the region has resisted Turkish invasions, ISIS offensives, regime hostility, and international neglect, all while pushing the social and political revolution. Like the Zapatistas—whose influence is evident across the movement—Kurdish cadres have redefined and demystified the idea of armed struggle. Central to this paradigm is Jineology—the “science of women”—which frames women’s liberation as the foundation of any meaningful revolutionary process. TURNING POINT The decision to end the cycle of armed polarisation with the Turkish state could signal a turn toward a more contemporary revolutionary horizon—one grounded not in elite substitution, but in mass participation. Rojava, too, is entering a new phase. The Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) have signed an initial agreement with Syria’s central government to initiate negotiations for formal recognition of the region’s autonomous status—not as an independent nation-state, but as a decentralised component of a reimagined Syrian polity. Though past efforts were blocked under Assad, shifting power dynamics have reopened the possibility of dialogue. The ideas of confederalism and gender liberation may now be closer than ever to broader realisation and territorial grounding. Despite the grave dangers from negotiating with the jihadist Syrian regime, the Kurdish administration continues to push forward, seeking recognition as a self-governing entity within a fractured and centralised region. This evolution naturally coincides with the PKK’s disbandment. In Turkey, these developments may challenge the regime’s foundational narrative. For decades, Ankara has used the PKK’s designation as a terrorist organisation to justify military operations, political repression, and the targeting of Kurdish organisations, journalists, and international allies. It has claimed that all Kurdish structures—from the PYD to the YPG/YPJ and the SDF—are fronts for the PKK. With the PKK now dissolved, the legal rationale for this strategy is weakened. Though state discourse may persist, its credibility—especially internationally—could erode. This could offer Erdoğan the opportunity to pivot toward a political approach that acknowledges Kurdish autonomy in exchange for domestic stability and constitutional leverage. Ankara’s recent pledges of financial support to Kurdish-majority regions—which comprise roughly 15–20% of Turkey’s territory and are home to an estimated 12–17 million people—may be signs of this shift. The big question is whether the Turkish authoritarian regime will allow such a democratic approach, or whether it will force the Kurdish movement back into armed insurgency. In the past, the PKK attempted several times to withdraw its forces from Turkey, but each time the process was disrupted by the Turkish state. What comes next is uncertain. The history of betrayal runs deep, and the risks of co-optation or renewed repression remain. Yet the Kurdish movement has demonstrated extraordinary adaptability, rooted in lived resistance and revolutionary imagination. If this is the end of the party, it may well mark the beginning of something deeper: a stateless alternative struggling to survive amid the ruins of the patriarchal nation-state. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Image: Montecruz Foto CC BY-SA 3.0 The post PKK dissolution: The long goodbye to vanguardism appeared first on Freedom News.