Jailed Kurdish PKK leader says he is ready for solution with Turkish state: statement
ISTANBUL,— Turkey’s jailed Kurdish leader Abdullah Ocalan said he is ready for a solution on the Kurdish issue and that he could stop the conflict between the Turkish state and Kurdish PKK militants within a week, his lawyers said in a statement on Thursday.
Ocalan is the founder of the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), which launched a separatist insurgency against the Turkish state in 1984.
Ocalan has been held in an island prison since Turkish special forces captured him in Kenya in 1999 and is revered among supporters of the pro-Kurdish Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP) who see him as key to any peace process.
A ban on visiting Ocalan, in place since 2011, was lifted in May 2019 when his lawyers met him for the first time in eight years and after thousands of Kurdish activists, politicians and prisoners went on hunger strike. The lawyers said in the statement that they met him again on Wednesday.
According to the statement, Ocalan said that Kurds do not need a separate state within the framework of finding a place for themselves that was consistent with historical Turkish-Kurdish relations.
“I am trying to open a space for Kurds, come let’s solve the Kurdish issue,” he was quoted as saying in the statement.
“I say, I can remove this conflict situation … within a week. I can solve it, I have confidence in myself, I am ready for a solution. But the state … needs to do what is necessary,” he said.
Despite the almost complete isolation, Ocalan is still a key figure of the Kurdish insurgency and the movement generally in the region.
Kurds see Ocalan, called “leader of the Kurdish people” by his followers as a living symbol of the Kurdish cause in Turkey.
The PKK took up arms in 1984 against the Turkish state, which still denies the constitutional existence of Kurds, to push for greater autonomy for the Kurdish minority who make up around 22.5 million of the country’s 79-million population.
A large Kurdish community in Turkey and worldwide openly sympathise with PKK rebels and jailed Kurdish leader Abdullah Ocalan, who founded the PKK group in 1974, and has a high symbolic value for most Kurds in Turkey and worldwide according to observers.
Turkey saw some of the worst violence in the decades-long conflict after a ceasefire broke down in 2015 after several years of peace talks between the two sides. Ocalan had played a significant role in the peace talks.
Copyright © 2019, respective author or news agency, Ekurd.net | Reuters
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