The Kurdish nationalist DEM party has expressed its ‘hope’ for the resolution of the so-called ‘Kurdish question’ after the first meeting in almost a decade with Abdullah Öcalan, leader of the PKK terrorist group serving a life sentence since 1999 on the prison island of İmralı, with whom Turkish President Erdoğan recently expressed willingness to negotiate.
‘We are much more hopeful than in previous processes,’ assured DEM deputy Sırrı Süreyya Önder, quoted by Turkish media, who together with deputy Pervin Buldan travelled to İmralı last 27 December to meet with Öcalan, in the first such visit since the meeting that representatives of the HDP (DEM’s predecessor) party held in April 2015.
Önder declined to elaborate on the negotiations, explaining that it’s necessary to wait until they reach ‘a certain maturity’, but stressed that ‘this decision does not mean hiding anything. On the contrary, it is something that is required out of respect for the talks we are going to have’, promising to give more details at the beginning of the new year.
Turkish government also expressed hope that the process will move forward so that ‘the need to fight the PKK will be put to an end’, while insisting that in the meantime the fight against terrorism will not cease, Turkish Vice President Cevdet Yılmaz said. The leader of the main opposition party, Özgür Özel, demanded ‘transparency’ in the process and that it be carried out under parliamentary control: ‘One of the most important aspects for us is that the feelings of the families of the martyrs and our veterans (in the fight against terrorism) are taken into account,’ he said.
For now, according to a statement released yesterday by the DEM party, Öcalan reportedly said he is ‘ready to make an appeal’ to the PKK and support negotiations with the government to end more than four decades of armed struggle by the so-called Kurdistan Workers’ Party, founded by Öcalan in 1973 with a Marxist ideology and which in 1984 adopted violence to achieve its political goals, sparking a conflict that has left more than 40,000 people dead. The latest attempt by the government to start a peace process ended in failure when in July 2015 the PKK unilaterally resumed its attacks in an attempt to put pressure on the executive during the negotiations.
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Edited and reviewed by:
Pablo Gómez is a specialist in Turkey and has been editor-in-chief of Hispanatolia since 2011. He has been analysing current affairs and geopolitics in Turkey and the surrounding region since 2006.
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