Turkiye, PKK must both change for peace: former militant

DIYARBAKIR, Turkiye: “When you try and explain peace to people, there is a very serious lack of trust,” said Yuksel Genc, a former fighter with the PKK, which recently ended its decades-long armed struggle against the Turkish state.

Talking over a glass of tea in a square in Diyarbakir, the biggest city in Turkiye´s Kurdish-dominated southeast, this 50-year-old former fighter with long auburn curls is worried about how the nascent rapprochement between Ankara and the Kurdistan Workers´ Party (PKK) will play out.

“The guerillas are sincere, but they don´t think the state is,” said Genc, her words briefly interrupted by the roar of a fighter jet flying overhead. “They think the government does not trust them.” For years, she was a fighter with the Kurdish rebel group, which on May 12 said it would disarm and disband, ending a four-decade armed struggle against the Turkish state that cost more than 40,000 lives.

The historic move came in response to an appeal by its jailed founder Abdullah Ocalan, arrested in 1999 and serving life in solitary ever since on a prison island near Istanbul.

Genc herself joined the militants in 1995 when she was a 20-year-old university student in Istanbul. “At that time, many Kurdish villages were being burnt down, and we were constantly hearing about villages being evacuated, people being displaced and unsolved murders,” she said. She described it as “a time of terrible repression”.