, stressed his determination to see ongoing peace efforts with Turkey through while urging Ankara to finalize the legal groundwork for the process, in remarks published Wednesday.){kind=link}
Abdullah Öcalan, the jailed founder of the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), stressed his determination to see ongoing peace efforts with Turkey through while urging Ankara to finalize the legal groundwork for the process, in remarks published Wednesday.
His comments came more than six months after the PKK formally renounced its armed campaign against Turkey, after four decades of violence that claimed some 40,000 lives on both sides.
“This process is a process of ensuring the participation of Kurds in the [Turkish] Republic through legal means and building a democratic republic with the broadest social unity,” Öcalan said in a message released through a delegation from Turkey’s pro-Kurdish Peoples’ Equality and Democracy Party (DEM Party) who had visited him a day earlier.
DEM Parti İmralı Heyetinin Sayın Abdullah Öcalan ile görüşmesi sonrası yaptığı açıklama:https://t.co/sok8DFjf3D pic.twitter.com/bXHjzGX1Ai
— DEM Parti (@DEMGenelMerkezi) December 3, 2025
“I would like to reiterate our strong will and resolute stance with respect to this process.”
Öcalan, 76, has led the peace process from his cell on İmralı Prison Island near İstanbul, where he has been held since 1999.
His remarks came just days after a senior PKK commander told Agence France-Presse the group would take no further steps in the peace process until Turkey frees Öcalan, whom his followers refer to as “Apo.”
“All the steps the leader Apo has initiated have been implemented … there will be no further actions taken,” commander Amed Malazgirt told AFP on Saturday in a bunker in the Qandil mountains in northern Iraq.
“From now on, we will be waiting for the Turkish state, and they have to be the one taking steps,” he said.
© Agence France-Presse