The jailed leader of the Kurdistan Workers Party, Abdullah Ocalan, has said that the Ankara-PKK peace process has entered its “second phase,” as the Turkish parliament sets the stage to vote on a draft report proposing legal reforms tied to peace efforts.
A delegation from the pro-Kurdish Peoples' Equality and Democracy Party (DEM Party), including lawmakers Pervin Buldan, Mithat Sancar, and Ocalan’s lawyer Ozgur Faik, met with the jailed PKK leader on Monday on the secluded Imrali island.
Sancar said that the second phase will be focused on democratic integration into
Türkiye’s political system.
According to the lawmaker, the PKK leader considered the first phase the “negative dimension” concerned with ending the decades-old conflict between the armed group and Ankara.
“Now we are facing the positive phase,” Ocalan said, “the integration phase is the positive phase; it is the phase of construction.”
For the second phase to be implemented, Ocalan called on Turkish authorities to provide conditions that would allow him to put his “theoretical and practical capacity” to work.
The 60-page draft report on peace with the PKK was completed by a five-member writing team, which is chaired by Parliament Speaker Numan Kurtulmuş, and is scheduled for a vote on Wednesday.
The report is organized into seven sections.
In July last year, Ocalan said the group's armed struggle against Türkiye has ended and called for a full shift to democratic politics.
