ISTANBUL // A faltering peace process between the Turkish government and Kurds aimed at ending three decades of fighting can be saved if Ankara engages in serious negotiations, the jailed Kurdish rebel leader said.
Abdullah Ocalan’s Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) seeks greater rights for Turkey’s Kurdish minority and on Monday he criticised the prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan for failing to take steps towards granting Kurds greater freedoms.
“Deep negotiations have to be started without further loss of time,” Ocalan said. “These negotiations have to be meaningful and have to produce results. A mountain of problems remains in front of us.”
Ocalan’s statement came after a visit by Kurdish politicians on the prison island of Imrali near Istanbul, where he has been held since 1999.
On the orders of Mr Erdogan, Turkey’s intelligence service started negotiations with Ocalan a year ago with the aim of halting the Kurdish insurgency, which has killed more than 40,000 people since 1984 and stunted development in mainly Kurdish south-east Turkey.
The PKK declared a ceasefire in March this year as part of settlement talks.
With his statement, Ocalan responded to a package of reforms tabled by Mr Erdogan on September 30. That package included some improvements for Kurds, such as the possibility of Kurdish language education in private schools, but left some core demands unanswered. The PKK said last week it was considering whether to end the ceasefire.
No serious fighting in Turkey’s Kurdish region of south-east Anatolia has been reported since the ceasefire was signed, a source of hope after decades of war.
The PKK started its withdrawal towards camps in northern Iraq in May, but stopped the move last month, citing a lack of government reforms to improve the lives of Turkey’s estimated 12 million Kurds, many of whom complain about being treated like second-class citizens.
Mr Erdogan’s recent reform package allowed the use of the Kurdish language in election campaigns and allowed cities and villages in the Kurdish area to return to their original Kurdish names. The package also abolished an obligatory school oath that forced all pupils in Turkey to declare, among other things, that “I am a Turk”, another source of dissatisfaction for Kurds.
But Mr Erdogan did not fulfill the PKK’s main demands for a constitutional recognition of the Kurds as a separate ethnic group within Turkey, greater autonomy and unrestricted Kurdish language education in state elementary schools in the south-east.
Without directly referring to Mr Erdogan’s reform package, Ocalan said that a year of talks had failed to produce any legal groundwork for more Kurdish rights and that there had been “neither rejection nor progress”.
Ocalan said he had conveyed his demands to the Turkish state orally and in writing, but did not say that these demands were. “While I keep my hope in place, I once again repeat my historic call [for serious talks] so that this hope does not turn into disappointment.”
Mr Erdogan told reporters yesterday he had not yet received “clear and final information” about what Ocalan had said. “If I make a comment, there could be problems.”
In a report released this month, the International Crisis Group, a Brussels-based NGO that specialises in conflict resolution, said the Erdogan government and the ruling Justice and Development Party should push on with Kurdish reforms despite fears of a nationalist backlash in local, presidential and parliamentary elections in the next two years.
“The peace process has already demonstrated how willing mainstream Turks would be to accept steps towards democratisation,” the report said.
Although the two biggest opposition parties in parliament, the secularist Republican People’s Party (CHP) and the right-wing Nationalist Action Party (MHP), had criticised Ankara’s negotiations with Mr Ocalan, the public had mostly accepted them, the report said.
tseibert@thenational.ae