ERBIL, Kurdistan Region of Iraq - A delegation from People’s Equality and Democracy Party (DEM Party) on Wednesday paid a second visit in less than a month to the Imrali Prison, to meet Abdullah Ocalan, jailed leader of the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), as part of ongoing talks for the resumption of the peace process in Turkey, which the pro-Kurdish party has described as "positive".
The DEM Party delegation, made up of Sirri Sureyya Onder and Parvin Buldan, is poised to brief Ocalan on a range of meetings they have held with almost all the political parties since the late December Imrali meeting.
In a major move, Devlet Bahceli, head of the far-right Turkish Nationalist Movement Party (MHP), in October proposed allowing Ocalan to appear before the legislature and declare the dissolution of the PKK, an initiative immediately endorsed by Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and the Turkish political landscape.
This initiative led to the DEM Party MPs Buldan and Onder being granted the rare permission to meet with Ocalan at Imrali prison in December amid a shift in Ankara’s stance of prohibiting contact with the PKK founder.
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.
Last week, The DEM Party hailed their meetings with the ruling and opposition Turkish parties as “positive”.
MHP’s Bahceli, however, has previously warned that the next meeting with jailed Ocalan must end in the dissolution of the PKK.
“At the end of the second meeting to be held between the DEM delegation and İmrali, it must be declared without any conditions that the organizational existence of the PKK has ended, that no result could be achieved through terrorism,” Bahceli said at a press conference following his party’s parliamentary group meeting last week.
In 2013, the Turkish government, led by then-prime minister and current President 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.
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.
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