It was Abdullah Öcalan’s idea to set up the Committee of Wise Persons, which was involved in peace talks between the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) and the Turkish government from 2013 to 2015, said Kadir İnanır, one of Turkey’s most prominent actors, also a committee member at the time.
The Committee of Wise Persons was officially established by the Turkish government in April 2013 as part of the peace efforts to resolve the long-running Kurdish conflict. Influential figures were chosen as members who could bridge the gap between the conflicting parties through their moral authority held in the public eye.
In an interview with the T24 news portal on Monday, the veteran actor said official records confirmed that the idea to form such a group originally came Öcalan, and recalled that Selahattin Demirtaş, the imprisoned former co-chair of the Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP), also referred to the fact, during a trial in 2018.
Demirtaş had met with imprisoned Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) leader Öcalan in İmralı Island prison in 2013, as part of a delegation sent during the resolution process.
During the trial, Demirtaş pointed out that although the Wise Persons committee had been established with the intention of supporting the peace process, there was a lack of concrete action and political will on the part of the Turkish government to address core issues at stake, including the demands of the Kurdish community. He had criticised the government for not taking the committee’s recommendations seriously and for failing to implement measures that would lead to a lasting peace.
In line with Demirtaş’s comments from 2018, İnanır said that Turkish President Erdoğan himself had not facilitated the process of resolving the Kurdish conflict in Turkey, which began in late 2012, but rather had only offered brief support from his government.
İnanır lamented the eventual abandonment of the peace process and the shift towards a more repressive post-2015 policy. After the collapse of the talks, “the steering wheel was turned to a completely opposite policy,” the actor noted.
The concept of a ‘committee of wise persons’ or similar bodies has been used in several countries as part of conflict resolution or peace processes. Perhaps one of the best-known examples is South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), established after the end of apartheid. The TRC was a crucial part of the transition from apartheid to democratic governance.
Northern Ireland’s Independent International Commission on Decommissioning (IICD), established in 1997 to oversee the decommissioning of paramilitary weapons, had also been instrumental in the success of the peace process.
The primary role of the Wise Persons Committee, consisting of 63 intellectuals, artists, journalists, former politicians and civil society leaders from different political and social backgrounds in Turkey, was to promote dialogue and understanding between the government and Kurdish community, facilitate communication and build support for the peace process among the wider Turkish public.
However, during the short-lived peace talks in Turkey, despite initial optimism and some positive steps towards a ceasefire and negotiations, the process ultimately collapsed in 2015 due to regional dynamics affecting the Turkish government’s policy on the Kurdish issue.
During the interview, İnanır not only highlighted the significant but thwarted efforts towards peace in Turkey, but also drew attention to the broader challenges of authoritarianism affecting the country’s cultural landscape, and, as a lifelong contributor to the film industry, the issue of censorship.
İnanır referred to forms of censorship against the Kurdish community and highlighted the serious bureaucratic hurdles to obtaining permission from the Turkish Ministry of Culture to screen certain films. Producers are under pressure to shape content to avoid potential censorship issues, he warned. İnanır also said cinema owners are fearful of repercussions for screening prohibited or controversial films.
“In the end, I think we hit the hardest part of censorship. Do you know what it is? The governorship,” he said, referring to the authority held by governors to ban cultural activities.
İnanır said that if it weren’t for the intense censorship in the country, he would have made a film about Ali Rıza Arslan, a Kurdish father who received his son’s remains in a plastic bag seven years after his murder. “Can such a film be made without saying whose bones are in the plastic bag?”
Arslan’s story, which İnanır believes is too dangerous to produce in today’s Turkey, marked a significant turning point in the peace process in 2015.
The son, Hakan Arslan was killed when the Turkish government deployed military forces to crack down on towns in the Kurdish-majority southeast in 2015, following the collapse of peace talks. He was one of many casualties of the militarised security operations, which also saw 24-hour curfews imposed in large parts of the Kurdish-majority cities. Escalating violence led to the total breakdown of negotiations and a return to open conflict.
However, İnanır reiterated his unwavering commitment to peace, responding to a question about the possibility of a renewed peace process. He expressed a willingness to support future peace initiatives, regardless of who initiated it.
“I would take part as long as it’s for peace. We have to, we have no other chance. We have to believe in it,” İnanır said, adding, “I would go with whoever calls for it, including Erdoğan. I would say: ‘Come on, let’s try, let’s hurry.'”
