MADRID 28 Dic. (EUROPA PRESS) –
A delegation from the pro-Kurdish People’s Equality and Democracy Party of Turkey is visiting this Saturday in prison the historic leader of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) – an armed organization declared by Ankara as a terrorist group – Abdullah Ocalan .
The delegation, led by deputies Sirri Süreyya Önder and Pervin Buldan, arrived this Saturday on the island of Imrali, in the Sea of Marmara, where there is a maximum security prison in which Ocalan is the only occupant.
The decision comes after the leader of the ultra-nationalist Nationalist Movement Party, Devlet Bahçeli – a key ally of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan – proposed the measure as part of an attempt to end the long conflict between the Turkish government and the PKK.
Ocalan received his first prison visit in more than four and a half years at the end of October, as confirmed by his nephew, Omer Ocalan, but this Saturday’s meeting, of a political nature, is the first of this nature since 2014, the last time that Turkey and the PKK undertook serious peace talks.
The Turkish government and the PKK, a group founded in 1978 that took up arms six years later, already began a process of peace talks in 2013, although they collapsed in 2015 and were followed by an outbreak of clashes in the areas of Kurdish majority in the southeast of the country, which caused a reactivation of the conflict.
The conflict has entered a new phase with the overthrow this month of former Syrian president Bashar al Assad and the beginning of a wave of clashes between pro-Turkish Syrian militias and Kurdish militias that Turkey accuses of complicity with the PKK.
The content of the meeting, for the moment, takes place in the strictest confidentiality. A statement from the party indicates that “there is no information about when the meeting began, how long it will last, what will be discussed or whether there will be a statement upon his return” because “this trip is entirely at the initiative of the authorities,” reports the Iraqi Kurdish agency Rudaw. .