The Kurdish group prohibits the PKK declared a ceasefire with Turkey after its imprisoned leader Abdullah Ocalan called on the movement to lay down and dissolve.
In a press release on Saturday, the PKK said that it hoped that Turkey would release Ocalan, which has been imprisoned in solitary isolation since 1999, so that it can lead a process of disarmament.
He follows his call this week to finish four decades of armed struggle in southeast Turkey, during which tens of thousands of people were killed.
His announcement occurred for months after Devlet Bahceli, the head of the ultra-nationalist MHP party in Turkey and an ally of the Turkish government, launched an initiative to end the conflict.
OCALAN – Affectionately called APO by Kurdish nationalists – met the deputies of a pro -Kurdish party this week on Imrali, an island in the sea of Marmara, southwest of Istanbul, where it is imprisoned.
“In order to open the way to the implementation of the APO leader’s appeal to peace and democratic society, we declare a cease-fire in force from today,” the PKK executive committee said on Saturday in a press release, quoted by the pro-PKK ANF news agency.
“None of our forces will take armed measures unless you attack,” he added.
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said later on Saturday that military operations will resume against the PKK if “promises [by the group] are not kept “and the disarmament process is dead.
The PKK – which represents the Kurdistan workers’ party – said that Ocalan prison conditions should be attenuated, adding that it “must be able to live and work in physical freedom and be able to establish without obstacle relationships with anyone he wants, including his friends”.
The group has carried out an insurrection since 1984, in order to discover a homeland for the Kurds, who represent around 20% of the 85 million people in Turkey. It is prohibited as a terrorist group in Türkiye, the EU, the United Kingdom and the United States.
Calling for disarmament, Ocalan had calls on the members of the PKK in a letter Read by the members of the party Dem Ahmet Turk and Pervin Buldan in Kurd and Turkish.
He said that “all groups must put their arms and that the PKK must dissolve”, adding that its movement has been formed mainly because “the canals of democratic policy have been closed”.
However, Bahceli, supported by positive signals from Erdogan and other political parties, had created the right environment for the PKK to set up arms, added Ocalan.
Kurdish leaders have largely welcomed development. According to local reports, thousands of people gathered to watch the declaration on large screens in the cities of Diyarbakir and Van in the Southeast Kurdish.
However, important questions remain among the Kurdish and Turkish public on the next steps – and not everyone was convinced that things would change.
Last week, Senior Commander of the PKK, Duran Kalkan, said that the Turkey’s power party, the AKP, was not looking for a solution but to “take over, destroy and destroy”.
The forces supported by the Turks in northeast Syria intensified their campaign against the Kurdish forces and called on the new leaders of Syria last month to eliminate the Syrian democratic forces led by the Kurds.
Pro-Kurdish politicians have been targeted by a wave of arrests and prison terms in recent years.
Some 40,000 people have died since the PKK insurrection.
There was a peak of violence in south-eastern Turkey from 2015 to 2017 when a two-and-a half-year-old cease-fire broke out.
More recently, in October, the PKK called for an attack on the headquarters of Turkish Aerospace Industries (TAI) near Ankara who left five people.
