Turkey’s pro-Kurd party to meet jailed PKK leader on Saturday

ISTANBUL — A delegation from Turkey’s main pro-Kurdish DEM party is due on Saturday to visit jailed PKK leader Abdullah Ocalan, who is serving a life sentence on a prison island off Istanbul, a party source said.

“The delegation left in the morning,” the source told AFP, without elaborating how they would travel to the island for security reasons.

The visit would be the party’s first in almost 10 years.

DEM’s predecessor, the HDP party, last met Ocalan in April 2015.

On Friday, the government approved DEM’s request to visit Ocalan, who founded the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or PKK, nearly half a century ago and has languished in solitary confinement since 1999.

The PKK is regarded as a terror organization by Turkey and most of its Western allies, including the United States and European Union.

The DEM party delegation is made up of two lawmakers — Sirri Sureyya Onder and Pervin Buldan. They are not expected to make a statement after the visit, the same source told AFP.

Detained 25 years ago in a Hollywood-style operation by Turkish security forces in Kenya after years on the run, Ocalan was sentenced to death.

He escaped the gallows when Turkey abolished capital punishment in 2004 and is spending his remaining years in an isolation cell on the Imrali prison island south of Istanbul.

Saturday’s rare visit became possible after President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s nationalist ally Devlet Bahceli invited Ocalan to come to parliament to renounce “terror” and to disband the militant group.

Bahceli, who heads the ultra-nationalist MHP party, is fiercely hostile to the PKK.

Erdogan backed the unprecedented appeal as a “historic window of opportunity.”

“My dear Kurdish brothers, we expect you to firmly grasp [Bahceli’s] sincerely outstretched hand,” he said in October, urging them to join in efforts to build what he called the “century of Turkey.”

Soon after Bahceli’s call, Ocalan was allowed his first family visit since March 2020, prompting DEM to make its own request to the Justice Ministry to visit the 75-year-old militant.

PKK militants subsequently claimed responsibility for an attack in October on a Turkish defense firm that killed five. That delayed the government approval of DEM’s request.

For several years up to 2015, Ocalan was engaged in talks with authorities, when then-Prime Minister Erdogan called for a solution for what is often called Turkey’s “Kurdish problem.”

The peace process and a truce collapsed in 2015, sparking the resumption of violence, especially in the Kurdish-majority southeast.

The government’s surprise olive branch to the Kurds comes after rebels in neighboring Syria overthrew strongman president Bashar al-Assad on Dec. 8.

Turkey routinely targets Kurdish fighters in northern Syria and Iraq.
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