ERBIL, Kurdistan Region - Turkey’s pro-Kurdish Peoples’ Equality and Democracy Party (DEM Party) on Sunday announced that Abdullah Ocalan, the jailed leader of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), has expressed his willingness to take the necessary steps to find a permanent solution for the Kurdish issue and “make the call.”

DEM Party MPs Pervin Buldan and Sirri Sureyya Onder were granted the rare permission of a meeting with Ocalan at Imrali prison on Saturday, amid a shift in Ankara’s stance of prohibiting contact with the PKK founder.

“He was in good health and his morale was quite high,” the lawmakers said in a statement on Sunday, adding that Ocalan’s assessments for finding a “permanent solution” to the Kurdish issue were “of vital importance.”

Ocalan stressed the importance of re-strengthening the “Turkish-Kurdish brotherhood,” according to the DEM Party delegation, urging the need for all political circles in Turkey to take the initiative and “make positive contributions” toward making the process a success, emphasizing that it “can no longer be postponed.”

“In light of this, I am ready to take the necessary positive steps and make the call,” the MPs cited Ocalan as saying, adding “this era is an era of peace, democracy and brotherhood for Turkey and the region.”

During a speech to his party’s bloc in the parliament in October, Turkey’s far-right Nationalist Movement Party (MHP) leader Devlet Bahceli proposed allowing Ocalan to appear before the legislature and declare the dissolution of the PKK.

The process was stalled after the PKK claimed responsibility for an attack on a Turkish defense company near the capital Ankara days later, in which at least five people were killed and 22 others wounded.

In 2013, the Turkish government, led by then-prime minister and current President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, entered a peace process with the PKK aimed at ending the decades of conflict and bloodshed. The truce was short-lived and collapsed in July 2015, leading to violent clashes in Turkey’s southeastern Kurdish areas.

“I have the necessary competence and determination to make a positive contribution to the new paradigm that Mr. Bahceli and Mr. Erdogan have empowered,” Ocalan was cited as saying in the DEM Party statement.

Ocalan has been serving a life sentence at Imrali prison, a small but high-security facility on Imrali Island in the Sea of Marmara, since February 1999.

The PKK is an armed group that has fought for increased Kurdish rights in Turkey for decades. The group is designated a terrorist organization by Ankara.