Kurdish separatist leader of PKK imprisoned the problems Olalan Call to leave the arms

Abdullah Ocalan, the imprisoned leader of the Kurdish separatist PKK, has asked his movement to place his arms and dissolve.

His statement, read in a letter of parliamentarians of a Pro-Kurdo party, aimed to end four decades of armed struggle in southeastern Turkey in which tens of thousands of people have killed themselves.

Ocalan, 75, had previously met parliamentarians for several hours in Imrali, an island at Marmara’s sea southwest of Istanbul, where he has been imprisoned in solitary confinement since 1999.

His announcement occurred months after the ultra -nationalist leader Devlet Bahceli, who is part of the Turkish government, launched an initiative to end the conflict.

“There is no alternative to democracy in the search and realization of a political system,” said Ocalan’s letter. “Democratic consensus is the fundamental way.”

The letter was read by the members of the Dem Ahmet Turk and Permin Buldan party both in Kurdish and in English at a hotel in Istanbul, after his third visit to Imrali Island in recent months.

Appealing to the members of the PKK, the Kurdistan workers movement, Ocalan said that “all groups must put their arms and the PKK must dissolve.”

He said that the movement, forbidden as a terrorist group in Türkiye, the EU, the United Kingdom and the United States, formed mainly because “the channels of democratic policy were closed.”

However, Devlet Bahceli, backed by positive signals from President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and other political parties, had created the right environment for the PKK to leave his weapons, he added.

Bahceli has pressed for years for a hard military action against the PKK, but last October the colleagues surprised the hand of the parliamentarians of the DEM party in Parliament. He then suggested that Ocalan could receive probation if he renounced violence and dissolve his armed group.

There was a cautious optimism of some sectors that the 40 -year -old conflict would come to an end.

“We look at the result,” said an outstanding member of the Erdogan ruling AKP, Effkan Ala.

The largest opposition party, the secular CHP, said it would call a meeting on Thursday night.

Percin Buldan and the colleague of the DeM party, Sirri Sureyya Onder, had already met Ocalan twice in recent weeks, and have informed other parts on their visits.

Onder told a hearing largely composed of politicians and Kurdish journalists who were at a positive turning point in history.

Kurds leaders largely welcomed the statement and local reports said thousands of people gathered to see the statement on large screens in the cities of Diyarbakir and go in the southeast predominantly Kurdish.

However, not everyone was convinced that things would change.

Last week, a PKK main commander, Duran Kalkan, warned that the ruler AKP was not looking for a solution but to “take charge, destroy and annihilate.”

Kurdish politicians and journalists had faced a repression and the Turkish army was involved in military operations in the Iraqi Kurdistan and in Syria to the Northeast, he added.

“(Erdogan} is causing and instigating war as a ‘baron of war’,” he told a Pro-Pkk television channel.

The forces backed by Turkish in the Northeast of Syria have intensified their campaign against the Kurdish forces and last month they asked the new Syrian leaders to eliminate the Syrian democratic forces led by Kurdas.

Pro-Kurdos politicians have been attacked by a wave of arrests and jail sentences in recent years.

Last year, the two leaders of the HDP Pro-Kurdo, Selahattin Demirtas and Figen Yuksekdag, were imprisoned for 42 years and 30 years respectively on mortal disturbances in 2014.

Kurds politicians said it was a “black spot” in the Turkey justice system and that HDP was subsequently reformed as the DeM party.

About 40,000 people have died since the insurgency of the PKK began.

There was an increase in violence in southeastern Turkey since 2015-17 when a high fire of two and a half years broke.

More recently, in October the PKK claimed an attack on the headquarters of the Turkish Aerospace Industries (TAI) near Ankara that left five people dead.

While reading the Ocalan letter, the good opposition party hung a great black banner at its headquarters reminding the victims of the PKK: “We will not forget, we will not let them forget.”