Turkey's pro-Kurd party meets jailed PKK leader

A delegation from Turkey's main pro-Kurdish DEM party on Saturday visited jailed PKK leader Abdullah Ocalan, who is serving life on a prison island off Istanbul, party officials said.

The visit would be the party's first in almost 10 years.

DEM's predecessor, the HDP party, last met Ocalan in April 2015.

"The delegation left in the morning," a party source told AFP, without elaborating how they would travel to the island for security reasons.

On Friday, the government approved DEM's request to visit Ocalan, who founded the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) nearly half a century ago and has languished in solitary confinement since 1999.

The PKK is regarded as a "terror" organization by Turkey and most of its Western allies, including the United States and European Union.

The DEM party delegation is made up of two lawmakers -- Sirri Sureyya Onder and Pervin Buldan. They are not expected to make a statement after the visit, the same source told AFP.

DEM's co-chair Tuncer Bakirhan said he hoped the talks with Ocalan would "open a new era" for a democratic settlement to the Kurdish problem.

"While I speak here, our delegation is currently meeting with Mr. Abdullah Ocalan at Imrali (island). We believe it's important," he told reporters in the Uludere district near the Iraqi border.

'Door must be unlocked'

He was attending a commemoration ceremony marking the anniversary of 2011 killing of 34 civilians by a Turkish airstrike, an incident which was later called "Uludere or Roboski massacre".

"Imrali's door must be unlocked," Bakirhan said.

"I hope that the discussions there will enable the Kurdish issue to be resolved through democratic means and on a democratic basis."

Detained 25 years ago in a Hollywood-style operation by Turkish security forces in Kenya after years on the run, Ocalan was sentenced to death.

He escaped the gallows when Turkey abolished capital punishment in 2004 and is spending his remaining years in an isolation cell on the Imrali prison island south of Istanbul.

Saturday's rare visit became possible after President Recep Tayyip Erdogan's nationalist ally Devlet Bahceli invited Ocalan to come to parliament to renounce "terror", and to disband the militant group.

Bahceli, who heads the ultra-nationalist MHP party, is fiercely hostile to the PKK.

'Historic'

Erdogan backed the unprecedented appeal as a "historic window of opportunity".

"My dear Kurdish brothers, we expect you to firmly grasp (Bahceli's) sincerely outstretched hand," he said in October, urging them to join in efforts to build what he called the "century of Turkey".

Soon after Bahceli's call, Ocalan was allowed his first family visit since March 2020, prompting DEM to make its own request to the justice ministry to visit the 75-year-old militant.

PKK militants subsequently claimed responsibility for an attack in October on a Turkish defense firm that killed five. That delayed the government approval of DEM's request.

For several years up to 2015, Ocalan was engaged in talks with authorities, when then-prime minister Erdogan called for a solution for what is often called Turkey's "Kurdish problem".

The peace process and a truce collapsed in 2015, sparking the resumption of violence, especially in the Kurdish-majority southeast.

The government's approval of the DEM party visit comes after rebels in neighboring Syria overthrew strongman president Bashar al-Assad on December 8.

Turkey routinely targets Kurdish fighters in northern Syria and Iraq.