The walls of F-type High-Security Prison No. 1 in Edirne, Turkey, are painted a sterile, institutional gray. They absorb sound. If you sit perfectly still in Room Number Two, the cell belonging to Selahattin Demirtaş, you can hear the faint hum of the highway cutting through the Thracian countryside toward Europe. It is the sound of a world moving fast, a world with no time to spare.
For nearly a decade, this cell has been the center of gravity for millions of Turkish citizens. Demirtaş, the charismatic former co-chair of the pro-Kurdish Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP), does not look like a man frozen in time. Despite the graying hair and the weight of a 42-year prison sentence handed down in 2024, his words still travel through the thick concrete, carried out by his lawyers, typed onto social media, and splashed across the front pages of opposition newspapers. Recently making waves in this space: The Evacuation Myth: Why Fleeing Chemical Fires Is Often a Lethal Mistake.
Recently, those words have taken on a desperate, rhythmic urgency. Turkey is flirting with an old ghost: the Kurdish peace process. And from his bunk, Demirtaş is hammering on the glass, warning anyone who will listen that the clock is ticking down to zero.
Peace is a dry word on a diplomatic briefing sheet. It sounds like handshakes in carpeted Ankara boardrooms. But in the southeast of Turkey, in the ancient, basalt-walled city of Diyarbakır, peace is a matter of breath. Further information on this are detailed by NBC News.
To understand why Demirtaş is shouting from his cell, consider a hypothetical family living in the Mesopotamian plain—let’s call them the Yılmaz family. For forty years, their lives have been dictated by a low-intensity conflict that has claimed over 40,000 lives. They have seen cousins disappear into the mountains, uncles arrested under sweeping anti-terror laws, and local shops shuttered by economic stagnation. For the Yılmazes, a "peace process" isn't a political calculus. It is the difference between sending a son to university or sending him to a cemetery.
The conflict between the Turkish state and the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) is one of the longest-running insurgencies in modern history. It is a knot of identity, sovereignty, and blood. Every few years, someone tries to untie it. Every few years, the knot tightens.
The latest attempt began not with a grand declaration, but with a handshake. Late last year, Devlet Bahçeli—the fiercely nationalistic leader of the Nationalist Movement Party (MHP) and a key ally of President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan—did the unthinkable. He walked across the parliament floor and shook hands with pro-Kurdish lawmakers. Weeks later, Bahçeli suggested that Abdullah Öcalan, the imprisoned founder of the PKK who has been held in isolation on Imralı Island since 1999, could be allowed to speak in parliament if he declared an end to the insurgency and dissolved the group.
The political Richter scale off the charts. It was an astonishing pivot from a man who had spent decades calling for the total eradication of Kurdish political entities.
From Edirne Prison, Demirtaş watched this political theater with a mixture of hope and profound skepticism. He knows the machinery of the Turkish state better than most. He ran for president from a prison cell in 2018, securing millions of votes without ever stepping foot on a campaign trail. He understands that in Ankara, words are cheap, but time is expensive.
Through his legal team, Demirtaş issued a stark directive: there is "no time to lose."
He isn't merely asking for haste; he is diagnosing a systemic fragility. Turkey is currently navigating an economic tightrope, with inflation battering the middle class and geopolitical fires burning on its borders in Syria and Iraq. The window for internal reconciliation is narrow. If this moment is used merely as a tactical play to rewrite the constitution or secure electoral advantages for the ruling coalition, the backlash could be catastrophic.
The real problem lies elsewhere. It rests on the question of who actually holds the keys to peace.
Imagine a three-legged stool. If you shorten one leg, the entire structure topples. The Turkish peace process requires three distinct pillars to stand. First, there is the state, led by Erdoğan and his nationalist allies, who possess the executive power to change laws and grant clemency. Second, there is Öcalan on Imralı Island, who commands historical, symbolic loyalty among the armed militants. Third, there is the democratic Kurdish political movement—embodied by Demirtaş and the DEM Party (formerly HDP)—which holds the democratic mandate of millions of voters.
Ankara has historically tried to play these pillars against one another. They talk to Öcalan while imprisoning Demirtaş. Or they praise the elected lawmakers while launching military operations against the mountains.
Demirtaş’s recent statements are a masterclass in political humility and strategic clarity. He did not demand that he be the sole protagonist of the story. Instead, he explicitly backed Öcalan as the primary interlocutor for the disarmament talks, while insisting that the Turkish parliament must be the venue where the legal and democratic foundations of peace are codified. He is trying to weld the stool together before the state can break it apart again.
It is easy to get lost in the nomenclature of Turkish politics—the acronyms of parties that change every few years due to state bans, the shifting alliances, the Byzantine legal maneuvers. But strip away the jargon, and the core issue is profoundly simple: recognition.
Can a state built on fierce, singular nationalism find a way to incorporate the identity of its largest minority without feeling like it is tearing itself apart?
For a brief period between 2013 and 2015, it felt possible. Those were the years of the "Solution Process." The guns went silent. Economists poured money into the impoverished southeast. Diyarbakır’s historic Sur district, a labyrinth of narrow alleys and black stone houses, began to fill with tourists. Young people sat in cafes drinking wild terebinth coffee, talking about the future without looking over their shoulders.
Then, the geopolitics of the Syrian civil war bled across the border. The peace process collapsed into ruin. The state launched massive security operations; trenches were dug in the streets, and entire historic neighborhoods were reduced to rubble. The psychological scar of that collapse still throbs.
That is why the current rhetoric feels so heavy. The people of Turkey, both Turks and Kurds, are being asked to hope again. And hope, when you have buried children, is a terrifying thing. It requires a vulnerability that many are loath to give.
Consider what happens next if this window slams shut. The regional dynamics of 2026 are far more volatile than they were a decade ago. The borders are porous, and the patience of a generation raised in the shadow of the Syrian conflict is wearing thin. If the government’s recent overtures prove to be a mirage—a mere political maneuver to disorient the opposition—the disillusionment will be total. You cannot offer a glimpse of water to a man dying of thirst and then pull it away without expecting a reckoning.
Demirtaş knows this. His urgency is not born of a personal desire for freedom, though no one would blame a man for wanting to leave a ten-by-ten cell. It is born of the knowledge that peace processes do not keep. They are like fruit left out in the sun; they rot if they are not consumed.
The legal labyrinth keeping Demirtaş behind bars is complex, filled with accusations of terrorist propaganda and instigating violence during the tragic Kobane protests of 2014. The European Court of Human Rights has repeatedly ruled that his detention is politically motivated and ordered his immediate release. Turkey has ignored those rulings.
Yet, from Room Number Two, the prisoner remains more grounded than the politicians in their palaces. He isn’t offering grand, utopian visions. He is offering a blueprint. He is demanding clear metrics, open debates in parliament, and an end to the isolation of political prisoners. He is asking the state to treat its citizens like adults.
The sun sets early over the Edirne plains in the cooler months, casting long shadows through the barred window of Cell Number Two. Inside, a man sits at a small table, writing letters that will be checked by censors, copied by lawyers, and eventually read by millions.
Outside, the trucks continue to rumble down the highway toward Istanbul, their headlights cutting through the gathering dark. The drivers are listening to the radio, catching snippets of speeches from politicians promising a new era, or threatening an old one. The country is holding its breath, waiting to see if anyone will have the courage to stop the clock before it strikes midnight.
