 on Saturday visited Abdullah Öcalan, the leader of the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) who is serving life sentence on a prison island near İstanbul, party officials said, Agence France-Presse reported.){kind=link}
A delegation from Turkey’s pro-Kurdish Peoples’ Equality and Democracy Party (DEM Party) on Saturday visited Abdullah Öcalan, the leader of the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) who is serving life sentence on a prison island near İstanbul, party officials said, Agence France-Presse reported.
The visit would be the party’s first in almost 10 years.
Representatives of DEM’s predecessor, the Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP), last met with Öcalan in April 2015.
“The delegation left in the morning,” a party source told AFP, without elaborating how they would travel to the island for security reasons.
On Friday, the government approved DEM’s request to visit Öcalan, who founded the PKK nearly half a century ago to fight for Kurdish rights. He has been held in solitary confinement since 1999.
The PKK has been waging a bloody war in Turkey’s southeast since 1984, with tens of thousands of people killed in the conflict. The PKK is regarded as a terrorist organization by Turkey and most of its Western allies, including the United States and the European Union.
The DEM party delegation is made up of two lawmakers — Sırrı Süreyya Onder and Pervin Buldan. They are not expected to make a statement after the visit, the same source told AFP.
DEM Co-chair Tuncer Bakırhan said he hoped the talk with Öcalan would “open a new era” for a democratic settlement to the Kurdish problem.
“While I speak here, our delegation is currently meeting with Mr. Abdullah Öcalan at Imralı [prison]. We believe it’s important,” he told reporters in the Uludere district of Şırnak Province, near the Iraqi border.
‘Door must be unlocked’
He was attending a commemoration ceremony marking the anniversary of the 2011 killing of 34 civilians by a Turkish airstrike, an incident which was later called the Uludere or Roboski massacre.
“İmralı’s door must be unlocked,” Bakırhan said.
“I hope that the discussions there will enable the Kurdish issue to be resolved through democratic means and on a democratic basis.”
Detained 25 years ago in a dramatic operation conducted by Turkish security forces in Kenya after years on the run, Öcalan was sentenced to death.
However, Turkey abolished capital punishment in 2004 and Öcalan is held in an isolation cell in İmralı prison on an island south of İstanbul.
Saturday’s rare visit became possible after President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s far-right ally Nationalist Movement Party (MHP) leader Devlet Bahçeli recently made a call for Öcalan to come to parliament to renounce terrorism and to disband the militant group.
Bahçeli is fiercely hostile to the PKK.
‘Historic’
Erdoğan backed the unprecedented appeal as a “historic window of opportunity.”
“My dear Kurdish brothers, we expect you to firmly grasp [Bahçeli’s] sincerely outstretched hand,” he said in October, urging them to join in efforts to build what he called a new “century of Turkey.”
Soon after Bahçeli’s call, Öcalan was allowed his first family visit since March 2020, prompting the DEM Party to make its own request to the justice ministry to visit the 75-year-old PKK leader.
PKK militants subsequently claimed responsibility for an attack in October on a Turkish defense firm that killed five. That delayed government approval of DEM’s request.
Over the years, Öcalan has engaged in talks with authorities to resolve what is often called Turkey’s “Kurdish issue.” The most recent efforts at a peace process collapsed in 2015, sparking a resumption of violence, especially in the Kurdish-majority southeast.
The government’s approval of the DEM party visit comes after rebels in neighboring Syria overthrew strongman President Bashar al-Assad on December 8.
Turkey routinely targets Kurdish fighters in northern Syria and Iraq.