Since Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan said in Diyarbakir on Nov. 16, "We will see the people in the mountains coming down, the prisons emptied," there has been an intense debate as to whether the government is preparing the legal ground for declaring a general amnesty. The speculation was also hyped when Erdogan’s guest in Diyarbakir, Massoud Barzani, the Iraqi Kurdistan Regional Government president, said that the imprisoned Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) leader Abdullah Ocalan would also benefit from this amnesty and be freed. 

Yesterday, Nov. 19, however, Erdogan denied any truth to such speculation. "It looks like I was not clear in my expression. I have said in the past numerous times that there is no such thing like general amnesty in our agenda," the prime minister said. "I was talking about my dreams, [and] you are speaking of general amnesty. There is no such thing."

Yet Kurds in Diyarbakir would have preferred that Erdogan indeed were preparing to call a general amnesty.  

"As much as we appreciate all that happened here in Diyarbakir [where the government expressed its commitment to negotiation with the PKK], and the promises given by the prime minister to empty all the prisons, we learned over the years to match the words with deeds. [The government] doesn’t seem to have a good record of keeping their promises," Abdullah Demirbas, mayor of the municipality of Sur in Diyarbakir, told Al-Monitor in a telephone interview. "Without the needed preparations done in parliament to implement certain changes into law, all that Erdogan said is nothing but an effort to increase his votes in this region. He is basically telling people that if they vote for him, he is going to take all these steps to free the [Koma Civaken Kurdistan] KCK, [known as the urban establishment of the PKK] prisoners after the election results. If this is his plan, I still don’t believe that he is going to be able to increase his votes in this region.