Pro-Kurdish party 'more hopeful' after rare Erdogan talks

Officials from a pro-Kurdish party liaising with the jailed leader of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) said they felt more hopeful over the prospects of a new era of Kurdish-Turkish relations to end a 40-year conflict in Turkey after meeting President Recep Tayyip Erdogan on Thursday.

Officials from the Peoples' Equality and Democracy (DEM) Party met for nearly an hour and a half with the Turkish leader at the Presidential palace in Turkey’s capital Ankara, as part of continuing talks between Kurdish politicians and Turkish government officials. PKK leader Abdullah Ocalan in February called for the militant group he has led for four decades to lay down its arms and dissolve.

"We are more hopeful than yesterday as of today’s point,” said DEM party statement released after the talks, which were the first between the Turkish President and the country's main pro-Kurdish party in 13 years.

If the process continues to progress and the PKK disarms and dissolves itself completely, it would represent a major regional shift in regional politics, and could end one of the most grinding conflicts in the Middle East. The PKK and its offshoots have controlled territory in Iraq and Syria for decades, prompting Turkish military strikes recently, helped by drones made by its growing domestic defence industry.

The meeting with Mr Erdogan “took place in an extremely positive, constructive, productive and hopeful atmosphere for the future,” the DEM Party statement said.

The Turkish presidency did not comment on the meeting but confirmed it took place, and was attended by DEM party officials Pervin Buldan and Sirri Sureyya Onder. They are part of a delegation that has been granted several rare meetings with Ocalan in recent months. Politicians had for years not been granted permission to visit him in his island jail in the Sea of Marmara. south of Istanbul, where he has been serving a life sentence since 1999.

The PKK is designated a terrorist organisation by Ankara, the US and EU. Turkish government officials are framing the overture to Ocalan – first suggested by an ultra-nationalist ally of Mr Erdogan’s last year – as a way of achieving a “terror-free Turkey”.

The DEM Party said that the next steps in the process were “mutually evaluated” in the meeting with Mr Erdogan on Thursday. An official from the party previously told The National that the DEM was not involved in the process for the PKK’s disarmament, and is more focused on Kurdish demands for “peace and democracy” as part of the process, referring to requests for rights to use Kurdish language and an end to curbs on political participation. “Democratic conditions must be created for disarmament,” the official said.

Much is unknown about how the PKK will dissolve and disarm itself, and whether the group will be allowed to hold a congress to determine its dissolution and the future of its members. The extent to which PKK cadres in Iraq and Syria will heed Ocalan’s call is also unclear.

The Syrian Democratic Forces, a military force dominated by PKK-aligned militias, has held large areas of territory in north-eastern Syria for years, and recently said it will merge into a central army controlled from Damascus, but its exact conditions for doing so remain unclear.