The PKK has responded to the call from their leader Abdullah Öcalan to put down their weapons. The Kurdish movement has announced in a statement published on Saturday to announce a cease-fire and only to perform armed actions if they are attacked themselves, writes AP news agency. The PKK wants Öcalan, which has been detained since 1999, is released. He must also be able to lead the termination of the party.
The call from Öcalan to put down the weapons and to dissolve the PKK was already seen as a breakthrough. Previous negotiations between the Turkish state and the PKK, which in the 1980s and nineties in the south and east of Turkey fought a guerrilla war against Turkey for its own Kurdish state, spoke in 2011 and 2015.
The Turkish government already seemed to be seeking rapprochement in recent months. The legal nationalist Devlet Bahceli, a political ally of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, recently hinted on a reduction in punishment for Öcalan if he would call to stop the PKK to stop violence.
‘New phase’
Yet it is unclear whether Turkey is willing to release Öcalan, who is a life sentence, free. The Turkish government has not yet made that promise. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan spoke last Friday about “a new phase in the pursuit of a terror -free Turkey”.
The violence of the PKK has never been completely stopped, but the organization had been militarily weak for years. Thus, the Turkish army managed to dispel the PKK in the last ten years from the southeast of the country. Leaders of the movement hide with a large part of their men in northern Iraq.
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