Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan on Monday ruled out the revival of peace negotiations with the terrorist Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), the state-run Anadolu news agency reported.
“We opened a way with peace talks, but they didn’t give an inch. Don’t expect another peace negotiation now. It is finished,” Erdoğan stated during an opening ceremony in Konya province.
The previous negotiations, which were started in 2009, were terminated by the government after the pro-Kurdish Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP) garnered more than 10 percent of the vote in a general election on June 7, 2015, causing the AKP to lose its majority in parliament.
AKP leader Erdoğan then formed an alliance with the Nationalist Movement Party (MHP) instead of the HDP, a move that led to a more aggressive and militaristic approach to the Kurdish question revolving around the PKK insurgency, which has caused tens of thousands of deaths in the last three decades.