Turkey’s pro-Kurdish party urges ‘democratic solution’ to insurgency

Turkey’s pro-Kurdish opposition party said the government must not waste the opportunity to end the decades-long Kurdish insurgency and show its willingness to achieve a “democratic solution,” Agence France-Presse reported.

“The government must show political will,” Tuncer Bakırhan, co-chair of the pro-Kurdish Peoples’ Equality and Democracy Party (DEM Party), said in a TV interview that aired Friday.

“There is a Kurdish problem, and it’s not enough just to lay down arms,” he told Habertürk TV.

Kurds, he said, were waiting for “a democratic solution” and “concrete measures.”

The comments came after jailed militant leader Abdullah Öcalan issued a landmark declaration this week calling for his Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) to disband and lay down its arms after more than 40 years of fighting the Turkish state.

The PKK, designated a terrorist group by Turkey and its Western allies, has waged an insurgency since 1984 with the aim of carving out a homeland for Kurds, who account for around 20 percent of Turkey’s 85 million population.

Since Öcalan was jailed in 1999 there have been various attempts to end the bloodshed, which has cost more than 40,000 lives.

After the last round of peace talks collapsed in 2015, no further contact was made until October, when a hardline nationalist ally of President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan offered a surprise peace gesture if Öcalan rejected violence.

While Erdoğan backed the rapprochement, his government cranked up pressure on the opposition, arresting hundreds of politicians, activists and journalists.

After several meetings with Öcalan at his island prison, the DEM Party on Thursday relayed his appeal for PKK to lay down its weapons and convene a congress to announce the organization’s dissolution.

Erdoğan said it was a “historic opportunity to advance towards the objective of destroying the wall of terror.”