Turkey began peace talks because ‘PKK dropped autonomy demand’

ARBIL

One of the legs at the beginning of the process was the “promise of disarmament” and the state and Öcalan have reached a “total agreement” on the issue, Hatem Ete was quoted as saying.

The government launched the peace process to find a solution to the Kurdish issue because the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) and the Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP) guaranteed that they would not demand autonomous status, an item that broke earlier talks, according to Hatem Ete, a senior advisor to the Turkish prime minister.

“The resolution process began after Abdullah Öcalan [the jailed leader of the outlawed PKK], the PKK and the HDP guaranteed that they would not demand ‘status’ at the end of the process,” Iraqi Kurdish online news website Rudaw quoted Hatem Efe as saying at a conference in the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) capital Arbil.

One of the legs at the beginning of the process was the “promise of disarmament” and the state and Öcalan have reached a “total agreement” on the issue, Ete was quoted as saying.

Efe also reportedly said that the Oslo talks, a series of meetings held abroad between 2009 and 2011, had collapsed after PKK seniors insisted on autonomy,

Sefin Dizayi, the speaker of the KRG, meanwhile, said at the same event that Arbil played a role in the start of talks between Öcalan and Turkish officials.