Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) has taken many steps in the process that started with the “Call for Peace and a Democratic Society” by Kurdish people’s Leader Abdullah Öcalan. As part of the efforts carried out in line with Abdullah Öcalan’s perspectives, the PKK announced on October 26 in Qandil that it had withdrawn from Bakur (Northern Kurdistan-Turkey).

 

Critical pedagogue and academician Peter McLaren gave assessments to the Mezopotamya Agency (MA) on the solution of the Kurdish issue. McLaren described the latest step taken by the Kurdish Freedom Movement as a 'monumental gesture’: “If Ankara continues to meet that gesture with silence, history will record not only the peace that was lost, but the imagination that failed to grasp it.”

 

‘PEACE IS A GRAMMAR AND IT MUST BE LEARNED’

 

McLaren underlined the importance of the steps taken by the Kurdish Freedom Movement along with the Peace and Democratic Society Process: “It is a poem of peace written in the ruins of decades. Yet peace, like democracy, is not a gift but a grammar, it must be learned, practiced, trusted. The challenge now is to craft the legal and moral architecture that can hold Kurdish rights, which is political, cultural, and human, without collapsing under the weight of betrayal." 

 

‘THE MOUNTAINS OF KURDISTAN IS A MORAL COMPASS’

 

“For decades, the mountains of Kurdistan have been a kind of moral compass for the world’s revolutionary imagination,” said McLaren and emphasized the need for peace: “The language of Marx and the poetry of resistance found a new accent, a new grammar of hope in the mountains of Kurdistan. If peace were to take root there, it could reshape the cartography of world socialism. Not in the triumphal way that revolutions once promised, but as a quiet revelation: that peace itself can be an act of class struggle, and that democracy, when liberated from the state, might yet find its truest form.”

 

‘PEACEBUILDING IS THE MOST ADVANCED FORM OF STRUGGLE’

 

Pointing out that historically socialism has stumbled on the question of nations and peoples McLaren said: “Socialism torn between the universal and the particular, between class and culture. Some viewed ethnic self-determination as a bourgeois mirage; others embraced it as the crucible of collective dignity. The Kurdish movement, and especially the vision of Abdullah Ocalan, has offered a third horizon: Democratic Confederalism, the dream of a stateless democracy, where governance flows upward from the commune, where decision-making is as local as breath, and where the idea of power dissolves into the practice of participation. If Turkey’s peace process succeeds, if the guns fall silent and the councils rise in their place, the result would be nothing less than a new grammar for socialism. A decentralized socialism, not of party or parliament, but of neighbourhood, of assembly, of soil and shared autonomy. It would offer the left an alternative to the exhausted model of state power, one that recognizes diversity not as a problem to be solved but as the lifeblood of democracy itself. For too long, many socialists have treated internal conflicts as distractions from the ‘true’ struggle of class. Yet the Kurdish example exposes the error in that orthodoxy. Peacebuilding, especially one born from below, nurtured by women, ecological thought, and communal decision, is not a retreat from struggle but its most advanced form.”

 

‘DIGNITY WITHOUT DOMINATION GOVERNANCE WITHOUT GOVERNORS 

 

McLaren stressed that a living example of Democratic Confederalism could remind the world that socialism was never meant to be a structure of power, but a practice of freedom. He concluded: “If the Turkish government doesn't deliberately sabotage the peace process, the reverberations of such a peace would not stop at the Turkish border. They would very likely echo across oceans, through the jungles of Chiapas and the plazas of Barcelona, through the occupied factories of Buenos Aires and the municipal assemblies of Naples. For what the Kurdish movement has offered, and what a lasting peace could crystallize, is not merely a local settlement, but a theological shift in the grammar of emancipation. 

 

In Latin America, the resonance would be immediate. Zapatismo, long a spiritual cousin to Democratic Confederalism, already speaks a similar language — of dignity without domination, of governance without governors. The Zapatistas, too, built their world from below, their caracoles spiraling outward as symbols of decentralized power, of listening and learning rather than commanding. A Kurdish peace rooted in confederalism would reinforce this lineage: the notion that socialism is not an empire of the proletariat but a federation of the oppressed, each autonomous yet interconnected.  It would remind the hemisphere that the task of liberation is not only to capture the state but to transcend its logic, to weave power horizontally, through councils, cooperatives, and communes.”

 

‘ALL EYES ON ANKARA’ 

 

“For the international left, all eyes now rest upon Ankara,” McLaren said, “If the government can rise to the occasion, if it dares to recognize the Kurdish Freedom Movement as a legitimate interlocutor in the making of democracy, then the meaning of socialism itself may be renewed. For such a peace would testify that the struggle for justice is not exhausted by the seizure of power, but fulfilled in the reconciliation of differences. The choice before Turkey, then, is also a choice before the world: whether socialism in the twenty-first century will remain an ideology of defiance or mature into an ethic of coexistence. But if Ankara’s silence hardens into policy, if the old reflexes of repression return, then the damage will not be confined to Turkey. It will ripple through every movement that dreams of emancipatory politics, teaching cynicism where once there was solidarity, despair where once there was faith. The global left, already fractured by exhaustion and nostalgia, would lose yet another beacon of possibility.”

 

‘THE KURDISH PEACE COULD SERVE AS A PEDAGOGY FOR GLOBAL SOCIALISM’

 

McLaren stated that the peace would also unsettle the old hierarchies of solidarity and added: “For decades, the international left has extended symbolic sympathy to the Kurds while remaining largely immobilized, fragmented by sectarian rivalries and theoretical fatigue. A peace built on confederal principles could turn that passive solidarity into active learning. Instead of projecting revolution onto the ‘Third World’ as a romantic spectacle, Western movements might finally listen and learn how to reconstruct democracy from below, not as abstraction but as daily labour. 

 

In this sense, the Kurdish peace could serve as a pedagogy for global socialism, a lesson in coexistence amid plurality, a curriculum of disarmed struggle. It could bring together the dispersed traditions of Marx and Mariátegui, of Öcalan and Subcomandante Marcos, of the commune and the base community. The convergence of these visions would not erase their differences but harmonize them into a new dialect of liberation, one where the slogan is no longer ‘Workers of the world, unite’ but rather ‘Communities of the world, confederate.’

 

‘PEACE CANNOT BE NEGOTIATED IN STAGGERED WHISPERS’

 

McLaren indicated that the process is progressing slowly and ‘wounded’ due to the silence on the government side and said: “If the silence persists it appears that it is deliberate, cynical, unseemly. It is the silence of a nation uncertain whether to believe in its own capacity for transformation.  The government, if it truly seeks peace rather than pacification, must now act not as a sovereign granting favor, but as a participant in history’s unfolding. It must dismantle the machinery of suspicion that has long defined its relationship with the Kurds, repeal the laws that criminalize expression, recognize Kurdish cultural and linguistic rights, open its prisons to sunlight, and invite the architects of Democratic Confederalism to the table not as insurgents, but as interlocutors of democracy. 

 

Peace cannot be negotiated in staggered whispers. It requires the architecture of trust, built from truth commissions, from inclusive dialogue, from the release of political prisoners whose only crime was to dream of self-determination. The Turkish government’s failure thus far lies not only in its hesitation, but in its inability to imagine peace as a political act of strength rather than concession.  To address this shortcoming is to understand that reconciliation is not a transaction but a transformation. The state must learn, as the Kurdish movement has learned, that the future cannot be governed by fear.”

 

‘A GENUINE PEACE…’

 

“A genuine peace process would mean reweaving the fabric of the republic itself, a new constitutional covenant that recognizes diversity as foundation, not fracture” said McLaren and added: “The moment is fragile, but it is also luminous. The Kurdish withdrawal of its forces is an offering, a test of the state’s capacity for courage. If Ankara continue to meet that gesture with silence, history will record not only the peace that was lost, but the imagination that failed to grasp it.”

 

‘THE VOICE OF ABDULLAH OCALAN IS THE GUIDING PRINCIPLE’

 

McLaren pointed out that freedom of Abdullah Öcalan is the linchpin of the entire peace process and added: “He is not simply a leader of the Kurdish Freedom Movement,  he is the architect of its political vision, the moral compass of Democratic Confederalism, and the conscience of a struggle that has endured decades of war and exile. To deny his liberty is to deprive the process of its voice, to speak of negotiation while leaving the key interlocutor in chains. The process would acquire coherence and legitimacy when Öcalan was released. His presence would transform gestures of compliance into acts of trust, turning a fragile sequence of concessions into a genuine dialogue. It would signal that the state is prepared to meet its partners not as subjects to be subdued, but as equal agents of a political covenant. Ocalan’s freedom would also send a message to the region and the international left: that dialogue, accountability, and ethical courage are the true instruments of lasting peace. Yet the commission’s refusal or delay in speaking with him is a critical failure, a moral and strategic vacuum at the heart of the negotiation.”

 

Criticizing the commission's silence and said that it reflected the logic of domination that Paulo Freire warned against McLaren said: “The imposition of authority over dialogue, the privileging of procedure over conscience, the refusal to learn from the lived knowledge of those who bear the burden of conflict are the biggest obstacles to the process. To move forward, the commission must not merely meet Ocalan; it must listen to him, engage him as a partner in shaping the process, and treat his vision not as a threat but as a curriculum for peace. In short, Ocalan’s freedom is the necessary condition for the process to breathe; without it, every step risks becoming a hollow gesture. His voice is not an obstacle to be circumvented, but the guiding principle that can transform a long history of violence into a possible future of reconciliation, justice, and democratic coexistence. If Abdullah Ocalan were to step once more into the light, his freedom would not belong to him alone, it would belong to history’s unfinished pedagogy. It would stand as testimony to what Paulo Freire called ‘conscientização’ (awareness) the awakening of the oppressed to their own power to name the world. It would echo José Porfirio Miranda’s conviction that liberation is the concrete work of love, that the measure of faith is not belief but justice. In Ocalan’s release, one could glimpse the resurrection of this moral lineage, a reminder that the struggle for freedom is not only political but ontological, the reclamation of being itself from the machinery of domination.”

 

‘THE DENIAL OF MOTHER-TONGUE IS A CRIME’

 

As one of the leading figures in critical pedagogy, McLaren also reacted to the fact that schools in Turkey are monolingual: “The language of a nation is not merely a tool of communication; it is the architecture of its soul. In Turkey, as in so many states carved from the empire, the school has become the workshop of forgetting. Though the land resounds with many tongues; Kurdish, Arabic, Armenian, Laz, Circassian… but the classroom admits only one: Turkish. The result is not unity but erasure, a silent violence disguised as education. For Kurdish children, this is not simply a linguistic injustice; it is a daily psychological dispossession. From the perspective of critical pedagogy, the denial of mother-tongue education is both a political and an ontological crime. Language is the medium through which consciousness becomes visible; it is how we name the world and, in naming, begin to transform it. To strip a child of her language is to sever the bond between word and world, to render her voiceless in the very act of learning. In Turkey’s classrooms, fascism does not only reside in the textbooks but in the silence between sentences, in the erasure of Kurdish vowels, in the punishments for speaking one’s own name.”

 

MA / Deniz Karabudak