ANKARA, Turkey,— Abdullah Ocalan, the imprisoned leader of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), should be moved out of jail, placed under house arrest and granted media access to address his supporters, a former Turkish minister said.
“The Turkish government should make arrangements for Ocalan to address his supporters twice a month on TV,” said Mehmet Salim Ensarioglu, who was minister of state in the 1990s, when there was an all-out war between the PKK and the Turkish state.
Talks between the PKK and Turkish officials to find a peaceful solution to the Kurdish issue had regained momentum over the past several months, but recent deadly clashes in the southeastern city of Cizre between PKK supporters and the Kurdish Islamist Huda Par threaten to derail the process.
Before the Cizre riots the leader of the PKK’s military wing, Murat Karayılan, had expressed hope that Ocalan would be able to attend the 12th congress of the PKK, planned for April 2015.
Ankara has tried to include Huda Par in the peace process but PKK has categorically dismissed the plan and sees the Kurdish Islamist party, which has a violent past, as created by the Turkish state for rivalry with the PKK in the southeast.
Six people have been killed in the last three weeks in street clashes in Cizre between supporters of the two groups.
“The peace process is progressing straightforwardly, but some regional incidents can derail it,” Ensarioglu said about the Cizre killings in comments published Thursday in the Vatan daily.
“Erdogan should intervene and Ocalan should address (his supporters) more to the point. If he would do that via television, I think it will have a bigger impact,” he added.
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan on Monday called the riots “a plot” against the government. Erdogan has in the past accused the powerful Islamist Gulen movement of “plots and sabotage.”
By Farhad Chomani
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