Holding its 20th session on Wednesday, the National Solidarity, Brotherhood and Democracy Committee decided to extend its work for two more months.
The committee was formed in August to tackle the terror-free Türkiye initiative for the disarmament of the PKK terrorist group. It is expected to lay out a road map to Parliament for legislative or other regulations for the next stage of the initiative. The PKK’s disarmament has been a unilateral process, but political parties participating in the committee suggested that new regulations may be enacted to facilitate the process, especially lenient sentencing for PKK members not involved in acts of terrorism.
Parliament Speaker Numan Kurtulmuş, who also chairs the committee, said at Wednesday’s session that the committee reached “the last threshold” and that was drafting a joint report. Parties have made public their reports in recent weeks, and the next sessions of the committee are expected to host discussions for the joint report.
Kurtulmuş said the commission has carried out productive work marked by democratic maturity, with all views expressed openly, discussed publicly and recorded verbatim.
“Within this framework, the committee has held 58 sessions across 19 meetings so far, totaling 86 hours of deliberations, and has heard from 135 individuals, producing 4,139 pages of transcripts,” Kurtulmuş said. “The fact that those heard included civil society organizations, academics and opinion leaders representing nearly every segment of society and that all of their views were fully recorded, has resulted in the creation of an important document for Türkiye’s political history.”
Kurtulmuş said the committee passed critical milestones with great care and dedication and has now reached its final stage: drafting a joint report and submitting it to the Parliament’s General Assembly to pave the way for legislative action and the implementation of other recommendations.
“In this context, all political parties represented on the commission have submitted their reports to the speaker’s office,” he said. “Each party clearly set out the issues it considers important, and these reports have been transmitted to the office of the speaker as separate political position documents for each party.”
Noting that the reports were made public on Parliament’s website last week, Kurtulmuş said public debate over them is ongoing and expected to continue. “Our main objective is not only that each party has presented its own political position, but also ideally to prepare a joint report that everyone can accept, even without dissenting opinions,” he said.
“If this process is successfully completed, another vital threshold will have been crossed. I believe increasing dialogue among parties in the coming period will be beneficial in bringing different views closer together and making it easier to reach common ground.”
The terror-free Türkiye initiative launched by government ally Nationalist Movement Party (MHP) leader Devlet Bahçeli involves disarmament of the PKK terrorist group. The PKK is responsible for the killing of tens of thousands of people since the 1980s in its campaign of violence, under the pretext of founding a self-styled “Kurdish state” in southeastern Türkiye. Disarming the PKK is a highly divisive issue for Türkiye, although opinion polls show the public supports the initiative. Critics of the plan claim it is a betrayal of victims of PKK terrorism and portray it as a bargaining process with the PKK. Authorities, however, deny that any negotiations for disarmament are out of the question.
