Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan on Wednesday said “significant progress” had been made in efforts to revive dialogue between Ankara and the banned PKK militant group.
“Significant progress has been made towards this goal,” Erdogan said after three members of Turkey’s pro-Kurdish DEM opposition party met with jailed PKK founder Abdullah Ocalan then briefed the parties in parliament.
“We see that the contacts made by the delegation were productive,” he said, saying Turkey was “cautiously optimistic”.
The contact with Ocalan came after the head of Turkey’s nationalist MHP party, Devlet Bahceli, extended him a shock olive branch in October, inviting him to parliament to disband the PKK and even mooting an early release.
The move won Erdogan’s backing.
Late last month, a DEM delegation visited Ocalan for the first time in nearly a decade, with the 75-year-old saying he was “ready to take the necessary positive steps” to reopen dialogue.
Another meeting with Ocalan is on the cards but no date for it has been set, DEM has said.
After that, Ocalan should “unconditionally declare the PKK is finished… and turn over this bloody page”, Bahceli said Tuesday.
Ankara and its Western allies have branded the PKK a terror organisation over its bloody guerrilla war that began in 1984 and has since left more than 40,000 people dead.
The government has been criticised for reducing the Kurdish question to little more than a “terror” issue without accounting for the demands of a community that makes up 15 to 20 percent of Turkey’s 85 million citizens.
Erdogan also warned that if the tentative efforts to broker talks with the PKK came to nothing, there would be tough consequences.
“If the organisation turns a deaf ear to this call… and doesn’t live up to what is expected of them, we will achieve our goal of a terror-free Turkey through other methods,” he said.
