Turkey : Gov’t, PKK leader hopeful about settlement process

MESOP QUOTATION BY CHAIRMAN APO : “NOW IN DEPTH”

– AND WHAT WAS BEFORE ?

“In the next couple of weeks, we will [be] discuss[ing] in depth all these [issues related to the settlement process]. I’m hopeful progress will be achieved,” Önder quoted the PKK leader as saying. Abdullah Öcalan

June 02, 2014, Monday/  TODAY’S ZAMAN / ANKARA – The leader of the terrorist Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) and a top government official have talked positively about the settlement process the government launched to resolve Turkey’s Kurdish issue, as the PKK attacks Turkish soldiers and blocks highways in the country’s Southeast.

“The most important reality [of the current situation in the settlement process] is that the process has now reached a new stage,” Sırrı Süreyya Önder, a deputy of the pro-Kurdish Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP), quoted Abdulah Öcalan, jailed leader of the PKK, as saying during Öcalan’s meeting on Sunday with a group of HDP deputies at a prison on İmralı Island.   

According to the statement HDP deputy Önder made on Sunday to the Fırat News Agency (ANF), which was communicated by the Anka News Agency, the PKK leader expects some positive steps by the government that would please Kurdish citizens and the PKK.

“In the next couple of weeks, we will [be] discuss[ing] in depth all these [issues related to the settlement process]. I’m hopeful progress will be achieved,” Önder quoted the PKK leader as saying.

Despite an ongoing settlement process launched at the end of October 2012 by the government in cooperation with Öcalan to settle the country’s terrorism problem and Kurdish issue, three Turkish soldiers were recently wounded, one of them seriously, by the PKK as they tried to clear a highway in Turkey’s Southeast of roadblocks and disperse the PKK militants. A gendarmerie unit charged with dispersing PKK militants, who had been blocking for more than a week the highway between Diyarbakır and Bingöl, was attacked on Saturday with homemade bombs. After the gendarmerie forces dispersed the militants, who were protesting against a new gendarmerie outpost to be built in the area, the gendarmes came under fire from the surrounding mountainous area. Two soldiers were wounded by the gunfire, one of them in the chest. The wounded were taken to a hospital by an ambulance helicopter. Media outlets affiliated with the PKK reported that two terrorists were also injured.

Deputy Prime Minister Beşir Atalay, who is in charge of the settlement process, said on television on Sunday that the government was preparing to take concrete steps in the settlement process. The government has been much criticized in the past months by the pro-Kurdish HDP, which has close links with the PKK, for dragging its heels over the settlement process.

Noting that the government agreed, in a meeting on May 19, on a new roadmap that included more concrete steps for the process, Atalay said on Channel 7: “On May 19, we made, under the chairmanship of our Prime Minister [Recep Tayyip Erdoğan], one of the most critical meetings of recent months. … The issue was discussed in all its dimensions, and the decision was taken that [the issue] would be given a new impetus, and new decisions [on the process] were taken.”

Although politicians and representatives of the PKK make a point of talking positively about the settlement process, members of the PKK’s youth wing, the Patriotic Revolutionary Youth Movement (YDGH), are not only continuing with blocking the highway between Diyarbakır and Bingöl, on Monday they also blocked some village roads between districts of Diyarbakır and villages that were being used as alternative routes.

Deputy Prime Minister Atalay said he saw PKK attempts to block highways as an act of sabotage targeting the settlement process. “When we have started to take some serious steps [regarding the settlement process], some [people] are getting involved in some provocative acts aimed at sabotaging this [process],” he said.   

Önder, who was one of the three HDP deputies who met with PKK leader Öcalan at İmralı Prison, underlined that as part of the settlement process, in this new “stage,” as described by the PKK leader, the imprisoned leader and the HDP as a political party will be able to have dialogue about the process with politicians. So far, it was mostly through dialogue between officials of the National Intelligence Organization (MİT) and Öcalan that the settlement process was carried out.

“What was missing up till today, but has been introduced at this point [in the process], is that politicians will now take up the issue as a political issue [among themselves],” the HDP’s Önder said during a press meeting in Diyarbakır on Monday.

Önder, who is also hopeful about the future of the process, added, “If the government takes up the issue as seriously as this, all those that look like to be ‘problems’ would no longer look so within a week or two.”

Hüseyin Çelik, deputy chairman of the ruling Justice and Development Party (AK Party), criticized the PKK on Sunday for acts of blocking highways in the country’s Southeast, saying: “The PKK has been acting in a spoiled way. Turkey knows how to counter such empty threats.”    Possibly encouraged by the ongoing settlement process, some Kurdish families whose children have been abducted in past months by the PKK as recruits launched a sit-in protest in Diyarbakır about two weeks ago, calling for the terrorist organization to send their children back to their families. http://www.todayszaman.com/news-349393-govt-pkk-leader-hopeful-about-settlement-process.html