Jailed Leader Of Kurdish Militant Group Calls For Peace
Abdullah Ocalan, the leader of a Kurdish militant group that has fought a four-decade long insurgency against Turkey, has issued a call for the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) he founded to disarm and dissolve.
In a message read by members of the opposition Kurdish Peoples’ Equality and Democracy (DEM) Party after a meeting with Ocalan at the Imrali island prison where he has been jailed for over two decades, Ocalan said the founding of the PKK in 1978 was “primarily inspired by the fact that the channels of democratic politics were closed”. In a statement Ocalan said:
“The inevitable outcome of the extreme nationalist deviations – such as a separate nation-state, federation, administrative autonomy, or culturalist solutions – fails to answer the historical sociology of the society.
Respect for identities, free self-expression, democratic self-organization of each segment of society based on their own socio-economic and political structures, are only possible through the existence of a democratic society and political space.
The second century of the Republic can achieve and assure permanent and fraternal continuity only if it is crowned with democracy. There is no alternative to democracy in the pursuit and realization of a political system. Democratic consensus is the fundamental way.
The language of the epoch of peace and democratic society needs to be developed in accordance with this reality.”
Ocalan credited Devlet Bahceli, leader of the right-wing Nationalist Movement Party (MHP) and political ally of President Recep Erdogan, Erdogan and other political parties as having created the environment in which he could issue a call for the PKK to disarm. “As in the case with any modern community and party whose existence has not been abolished by force, would voluntarily do, convene your congress and make a decision; all groups must lay their arms and the PKK must dissolve itself.”
In October, Bahceli proposed that Ocalan could be released from lifetime imprisonment if he was willing to announce an end to the insurgency that has been ongoing for over 40 years.
The PKK had previously been engaged in talks with Ankara to end the insurgency in 2013, but talks collapsed in 2015. In recent years, Turkey has established bases in northern Iraq and conducted drone strikes and other military operations against what it claims to be PKK safe havens in northern Iraq and eastern Syria, while the PKK claimed responsibility for an October attack on the headquarters of Turkish Aerospace Industries that killed five.
The group is also officially listed as a terrorist organization by the United States, NATO and the European Union.
Ankara has also leveraged accusations of PKK support to bargain with Sweden and Finland during their accession to NATO, demanding that both cease their alleged support for the group and facilitate extradition of PKK suspects wanted by Ankara as part of a list of demands that had to be met for their membership to be approved.