Jailed PKK leader Öcalan says ready to 'take necessary positive step'

After meeting with pro-Kurdish DEM party MPs, jailed PKK leader Abdullah Öcalan suggested that he may be prepared to call for militants to lay down arms.

Sunday December 29 2024 10:04 pm

Reuters

The jailed leader of Turkey's outlawed Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK), Abdullah Öcalan, has been quoted as indicating he may be prepared to call for militants to lay down arms, after a key ally of President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan urged him to end the group's decades-old insurgency.

Two parliamentarians from the pro-Kurdish DEM Party met Öcalan for talks on his island prison on Dec. 28, in the first such visit nearly in a decade. DEM requested the visit after a key Erdoğan ally expanded on a proposal to end the 40-year-old conflict between the state and Öcalan's PKK.

"I am ready to take (the) necessary positive step and make the call," Öcalan was quoted as saying, according to a statement by the MPs on Dec. 29.

Öcalan did not specify what the call would be but his comments came after the leader of the Nationalist Movement Party, Devlet Bahçeli, said Öcalan should make a call for the militants to lay down arms.

DEM requested the visit soon after Bahçeli expanded on a proposal to end the conflict, suggesting in October that Öcalan should announce an end to the insurgency in exchange for the possibility of his release.

Erdoğan described Bahçeli's initial proposal as a "historic window of opportunity" but has not spoken of any peace process.

Öcalan has been serving a life sentence in a prison on the island of İmrali, south of Istanbul, since his capture 25 years ago.

Recent developments in Syria and Gaza showed that the solution for the Kurdish issue has become "undelayable", Öcalan was also quoted as saying, adding that opposition and Parliament should also contribute to the new process, in a veiled reference to possible legal amendments.

One major development in the region has been the ouster of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad in Syria this month. Turkey has repeatedly said there would be no place for the Kurdish YPG militia, which Ankara sees as an extension of the PKK, in Syria's future.

"I am also qualified and determined to make the necessary positive contribution to the new paradigm that Mr. Bahçeli and Mr. Erdoğan have empowered," Öcalan said, according to the DEM statement.

Turkey and its Western allies deem the PKK a "terrorist" group. More than 40,000 people have been killed in the fighting, which in the past was focused in the mainly Kurdish southeast but is now centred on northern Iraq, where the PKK is based.