ANKARA: The jailed leader of Turkey’s outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), Abdullah Ocalan, was reportedly urged by a key ally of President Tayyip Erdogan to be ready to surrender. The group’s decades-old insurgency.
Two MPs from the pro-Kurdish DEM party met with Öcalan at his island prison on Saturday for talks, the first such visit in nearly a decade. DEM requested the visit after a key Erdogan ally extended a proposal to end the 40-year-old conflict between the state and Öcalan’s PKK.
“I’m ready to take it. [the] Take the necessary positive steps and make the call,” Ocalan said in a statement to parliamentarians on Sunday.
Öcalan did not specify what the call would be, but his comments came after Nationalist Movement Party leader Devlet Bahceli said Öcalan should call for the militants to surrender.
DEM requested the visit after Bahceli expanded on a proposal to end the conflict, suggesting in October that Öcalan should declare an end to the rebellion in exchange for the possibility of his release.
Erdogan described Behseli’s initial proposal as a “historic window of opportunity” but did not speak of a peace process.
Ocalan has been serving a life sentence in a prison on the island of Amarali, south of Istanbul, since his arrest 25 years ago.
Recent developments in the Middle East crisis have shown that a solution to the Kurdish issue has become “irreversible”, Öcalan was also quoted as saying, adding that the opposition and parliament have also been given new information on potential legal amendments. Must contribute to the process.
A major development in the region is the ouster of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad earlier this month. Turkey has repeatedly said there will be no place in Syria’s future for the Kurdish YPG militia, which Ankara sees as an extension of the PKK.
“I am also qualified and determined to make the necessary positive contribution to the new paradigm that Mr. Behseli and Mr. Erdogan have empowered,” Ocalan said, according to the DEM statement.
Turkey and its Western allies consider the PKK a terrorist group. More than 40,000 people have been killed in the fighting, which in the past was centered in the predominantly Kurdish southeast but is now centered in northern Iraq, where the PKK is based.