ISTANBUL: Kurdish militant leader Abdullah Ocalan, jailed 25 years ago, is again a focus of attention in Turkiye after President Tayyip Erdogan’s nationalist ally raised the possibility of his release in exchange for ending his group’s decades-long insurgency.

Devlet Bahceli, leader of the Nationalist Movement Party (MHP), made the surprise suggestion on Tuesday in a speech to MHP lawmakers following recent media speculation about fresh efforts to end a conflict that Ocalan launched 40 years ago. It was not immediately clear whether an attack at the headquarters of the Turkish Aerospace Industries in Ankara on Wednesday in which five people were killed and 22 others injured would affect or even derail the MHP overture to Ocalan.

Turkiye’s government has blamed Ocalan’s Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) for Wednesday’s attack, in which the two armed assailants were also killed.

The PKK took up arms against the Turkish state in 1984 with the aim of carving out an ethnic homeland for Kurds in Turkiye’s southeast. The four-decade insurgency has killed tens of thousands of people, re-shaped Turkish politics and scarred towns and cities across the southeast.

Ocalan was captured in Kenya by Turkish special forces in 1999 and has now spent a quarter of a century in an island prison south of Istanbul. For many of those years he has continued to wield considerable clout, but it is unclear how much influence he still retains over the PKK, whose fighters are mainly based in the mountains of northern Iraq.

Published in Dawn, October 25th, 2024