PKK declares ceasefire with Turkey after 40 years of armed struggle

ISTANBUL: Outlawed Kurdish militants on Saturday declared a ceasefire with Turkey following a landmark call by jailed PKK leader Abdullah Ocalan asking the group to disband.

It was the first reaction from the PKK after Ocalan this week called for the dissolution of his Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) and asked it to lay down arms after fighting the Turkish state for over four decades.

“In order to pave the way for the implementation of leader Apo’s call for peace and democratic society, we are declaring a ceasefire effective from today,” the PKK executive committee said in a statement quoted by the pro-PKK ANF news agency, referring to Ocalan.

“We agree with the content of the call as it is and we say that we will follow and implement it,” the committee said.

The PKK, designated a terrorist group by Turkey, the United States and the European Union, has waged an insurgency since 1984 with the aim of carving out a homeland for Kurds, who account for around 20 percent of Turkey’s 85 million people.

Since Ocalan was jailed in 1999 there have been various attempts to end the bloodshed, which has cost more than 40,000 lives.

After the last round of peace talks collapsed in 2015, no further contact was made until October when a hardline nationalist ally of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan offered a surprise peace gesture if Ocalan rejected violence.

While Erdogan backed the rapprochement, his government cranked up pressure on the opposition, arresting hundreds of politicians, activists and journalists.

After several meetings with Ocalan at his island prison, the pro-Kurdish DEM party on Thursday relayed his appeal for PKK to lay down its weapons and convene a congress to announce the organisation’s dissolution.