A delegation from Turkey’s main pro-Kurdish DEM party will visit PKK leader Abdullah Öcalan, who is serving a life sentence on a prison island off the coast of Istanbul, on Saturday, party officials said.
“The delegation left in the morning,” the official told AFP, without elaborating on how they would travel to the island for security reasons.
This is the party’s first visit in almost 10 years.
The last time the DEM’s predecessor HDP party met with Mr. Öcalan was in April 2015.
On Friday, the government approved the DEM’s request to visit Mr. Öcalan, who founded the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) almost half a century ago and has languished in solitary confinement since 1999.
The PKK is considered a “terrorist” organization by Turkey and most of its Western allies, including the United States and the European Union.
The DEM party’s delegation is made up of two MPs: Siri Sreya Ondar and Pervin Bardhan. The sources told AFP they were not expected to make a statement after the visit.
Twenty-five years ago, after years on the run, Öcalan was captured in a Hollywood-style operation by Turkish security forces in Kenya and sentenced to death.
He escaped the gallows when Turkey abolished the death penalty in 2004 and is spending the rest of his life in an isolated cell on Imralli Prison Island, south of Istanbul.
Saturday’s unusual visit comes after Debret Bahçeli, a nationalist ally of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, invited Öcalan to come to parliament to renounce “terrorism” and disband extremist groups. It was realized in response to what was done.
Bahçeli, the leader of the ultranationalist party MHP, is fiercely hostile to the PKK.
“Historical”
President Erdogan endorsed the unprecedented appeal as a “historic window of opportunity”.
“Dear Kurdish compatriots, we hope that you will firmly grasp the hand extended to you by (Mr. Bahçeli’s) heart,” he said in October, adding that he hoped to “turn Turkey’s century into a ” to join the effort to build something called
Shortly after Bahçeli’s call, Öcalan was allowed to visit his family for the first time since March 2020, and the DEM independently requested the Ministry of Justice to meet with the 75-year-old extremist.
PKK militants later claimed responsibility for an attack on a Turkish defense company in October that killed five people. As a result, government approval of DEM’s request was delayed.
In the years leading up to 2015, Mr. Öcalan was engaged in talks with authorities, where then-Prime Minister Erdogan sought a solution to what was often referred to as Turkey’s “Kurdish problem.”
The peace process and ceasefire agreement collapsed in 2015, and violence resumed, particularly in the Kurdish-majority southeast.
The government’s surprise olive branch to the Kurds came after rebels in neighboring Syria overthrew strongman President Bashar al-Assad on December 8.
Turkey regularly targets Kurdish fighters in northern Syria and Iraq.
