The ruling Justice and Development Party (AK Party) is set to turn introspective and tackle problems in the field across Türkiye in an annual camp scheduled for later this month, party sources said Monday.
From June 23 to 25, AK Party lawmakers and provincial chairs will convene at the party headquarters in the capital Ankara, and discuss solutions to various problems encountered by AK Party officials at district levels. The camp will also draw up a roadmap and other suggestions to better convey the party’s operations and achievements directly to the public.
A second camp is slated from July 11 to 13, which will assemble lawmakers and headquarter executives of the AK Party, as well as the party chair, President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan.
The July meeting is mainly focused on the recent developments in the terror-free Türkiye initiative, sources said, as well as citizens’ expectations about the process.
The initiative, launched last year by Erdoğan's ally Devlet Bahçeli, aims to end four decades of PKK terrorism in Türkiye after the organization declared in a landmark decision last month to disarm and disband itself.
The PKK’s bloody terror campaign, which exploited the Kurdish community under the pretext of fighting for their rights, a self-styled Kurdish state in southeast Türkiye, has claimed at least 40,000 lives since the 1980s.
After years of military operations to eradicate the group, Türkiye initiated a "reconciliation process" previously in 2013 in a bid to prevent the PKK from justifying its actions.
The process saw the reinstatement of the rights of the Kurdish community, but it ultimately collapsed when the PKK resumed its terrorist attacks after a brief lull.
The PKK’s disarmament process is expected to be completed in the coming months, with the group handing over all of its weapons and some 3,500 members leaving their hideouts in Iraq’s north.
The AK Party cadres are also expected to discuss the constitutional overhaul efforts at the July camp.
Erdoğan’s government has been pushing to overhaul the Constitution for over a decade now, which was enforced in 1982 following a military coup that led to the detention of hundreds of thousands of people along with mass trials, torture and executions, which still represents a dark period in Turkish political history.
The AK Party has a comprehensive draft prepared by a scientific council during the pandemic, which it’s hoping to submit to Parliament.
The party has held several workshops with academicians and legal experts on a new constitution in the past year and is currently preparing to convene an exclusive commission tasked with outlining a method to produce a draft.
