Erasing terrorism from Türkiye’s agenda and achieving a terror-free Türkiye will also lead to terrorism being weakened in the Middle East, Parliament Speaker Numan Kurtulmuş said late Monday.
Speaking during an iftar dinner with parliamentary reporters in Ankara, Kurtulmuş said: “Since these lands have become our home. We live together with people from different ethnic backgrounds, Turks, Kurds, Sunnis and Alawites. Although seeds of differences have been planted from time to time, never were they able to separate us.”
He said that the PKK has attempted over the past 40 years to destroy unity in Türkiye and hinder the country’s development.
Within this scope, he added that the government is striving to pursue the PKK dissolution process transparently to prevent suspicions of any kind.
“We believe that no one should poison this process because Türkiye has found a historical chance. While ethnic, sectarian and religious differences in the region have become areas of conflict, it is our common responsibility for Türkiye to cast this existing terror scourge into the dustbin of history,” he added.
To achieve this, the process must not be personalized nor used for political bargains, Kurtulmuş warned further.
The terrorist group declared a cease-fire with Türkiye in late February, following a landmark call by its jailed leader Abdullah Öcalan asking the group to disband and end more than four decades of terror.
After several meetings with Öcalan at his island prison, the Peoples' Equality and Democracy Party (DEM Party) relayed his appeal for the PKK to lay down its weapons and convene a congress to announce the organization's dissolution. Upon the call, the PKK announced a cease-fire.
After the last round of peace talks collapsed in 2015, no further contact was made with the PKK until October, when a nationalist ally of President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan offered a surprise peace gesture if Öcalan rejected violence.
