Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan on Wednesday said “significant progress” had been made in efforts to revive dialogue between Ankara and the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), Agence France-Presse reported.
“Significant progress has been made towards this goal,” Erdoğan said after three members of Turkey’s pro-Kurdish Peoples’ Equality and Democracy Party (DEM Party) met with jailed PKK founder Abdullah Öcalan 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 Öcalan came after the head of Turkey’s far-right Nationalist Movement Party (MHP), Devlet Bahçeli, 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 Erdoğan’s backing.
Late last month, a DEM Party delegation visited Öcalan 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 Öcalan is in the cards, but no date for it has been set, the DEM Party has said.
After that, Öcalan should “unconditionally declare the PKK is finished … and turn this bloody page,” Bahçeli said Tuesday.
Ankara and its Western allies have designated the PKK a terrorist organization over its bloody war that began in 1984 and has since left more than 40,000 people dead.
The government has been criticized for reducing the Kurdish question to little more than a “terrorism” issue without accounting for the demands of a community that makes up 15 to 20 percent of Turkey’s 85 million citizens.
Erdoğan also warned that if the tentative efforts to broker talks with the PKK came to nothing, there would be tough consequences.
“If the organization 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 terrorism-free Turkey through other methods,” he said.