DIYARBAKIR (Turkey) Jailed Kurdish rebel chief Abdullah Ocalan on Thursday called for a ceasefire, telling his fighters to lay down their arms and withdraw from Turkey, raising hopes for an end to a three-decade conflict that has cost tens of thousands of lives.
“We are at a stage where guns should be silenced,” Ocalan said in a letter written from his isolated island prison cell and read out by a pro-Kurdish lawmaker to vast crowds in the mainly Kurdish southeastern city of Diyarbakir.
Ocalan, the founding leader of the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), said it was time for “politics to prevail, not arms,” as he called for armed militants to withdraw from Turkey.
The move caps months of clandestine peace talks between Turkey’s spy agency and the state’s former nemesis Ocalan, whose movement is blacklisted as a terror group by Ankara and its western allies.
Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Ocalan, branded a “baby killer” by many Turks, both appear to have staked their political futures on the renewed push to end the 29-year armed campaign for self-rule that has killed some 45,000 people, mostly Kurds.
“A door is opened from armed struggle to democratic struggle,” said the 64-year-old Ocalan, known as “Apo” or uncle to Kurds who has been serving a life sentence for treason on Imrali island off Istanbul since 1999.
“It is not the end of the struggle, it is the beginning of a new one,” he added. “It is time for unity.”
Turkish Interior Minister Muammer Guler gave a cautious welcome to Ocalan’s announcement. “The language is the language of peace, we must now see it put into action,” Guler was quoted by the Anatolia news agency as saying.
The peace talks were launched last year after a dramatic upsurge in PKK attacks against Turkish security forces.
Agence France-Presse
via Oman Tribune – the edge of knowledge.
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