Turkiye’s pro-Kurd party meets jailed Ocalan

ISTANBUL: A delegation from Turkiye’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” organisation by Turkiye 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.

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.