 met Saturday with the jailed former chairman of its predecessor, the Peoples' Democratic Party (HDP), as the party pursues an effort to end decades of conflict between Ankara and the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), Agence France-Presse reported.){kind=link}
A delegation from Turkey’s pro-Kurdish Peoples’ Equality and Democracy Party (DEM Party) met Saturday with the jailed former chairman of its predecessor, the Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP), as the party pursues an effort to end decades of conflict between Ankara and the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), Agence France-Presse reported.
Selahattin Demirtaş, 51, has been jailed since 2016 and was sentenced last May to 42 years in prison for his alleged role in deadly 2014 protests that erupted over Turkey’s perceived inaction in the face of a siege by Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) militants of the Kurdish-majority Syrian town of Kobane.
A two-time election rival to President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, he was convicted on dozens of charges including undermining state unity and the country’s integrity.
But Erdoğan has endorsed recent efforts by the DEM Party to establish a dialogue aimed at ending the conflict with the PKK, which has waged an insurgency against the Turkish state since 1984, claiming tens of thousands of lives.
The DEM Party said it met with Demirtaş, who announced his retirement from politics after Erdoğan’s 2023 re-election, at his prison in Edirne, western Turkey.
The visit, announced in a video, came after the party met in late December with Abdullah Öcalan, the jailed leader of the PKK who has been serving a life sentence on the island of İmralı since 1999.
It was the first visit by the party in almost a decade and a clear sign of easing tensions between Ankara and the PKK, which is designated a terrorist organization by Turkey and its Western allies.
Öcalan said after the visit that he was “ready to make a call” to back the new peace initiative.
Demirtaş had already said in October that “if Öcalan takes the initiative and wants to open a path to a [political] solution, we will support it with our efforts.”
Erdoğan also reiterated his support for the process Saturday during a visit to Diyarbakır, the largest Kurdish city in Turkey, as fighting raged across the border in northeast Syria between Kurdish and pro-Turkish Syrian militants after the fall of President Bashar al-Assad.
“A new window of opportunity has opened for our country to end the scourge of terrorism once and for all,” Erdoğan said.
“We are not going to miss this historic opportunity,” he said. “Terrorist organizations have no other choice but to lay down their weapons. We are giving them the chance to become a true political organization.”
DEM Party lawmakers on Sunday are due to meet with the HDP’s other former co-chair, Figen Yüksekdağ, who was sentenced last May to 30 years in prison on charges of disseminating terrorist propaganda.