Kurdish PKK Chief Abdullah Ocalan Calls for Congress to End Turkey Rebellion
In an eagerly-anticipated message for the traditional Kurdish New Year, Ocalan called for a congress to end the fighting, but stopped short of setting out a clear road map for disarmament of the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) rebels.
In the message read out by a pro-Kurdish lawmaker to hundreds of thousands of supporters in the south-eastern city of Diyarbakir, Ocalan said that the armed struggle had been “painful” and could no longer be maintained.
“A congress should be organised to bring an end to the 40-year struggle against the Turkish Republic,” Ocalan said in the message read out by Sirri Sureyya Onder of the People’s Democratic Party (HDP).
Ocalan is serving a life sentence on the prison island of Imrali in the Sea of Marmara following his sensational arrest by Turkish agents in Kenya in 1999.