“If it is going to end the bloodshed, if it is going to stop the tears, we are ready to pay the price for it,” said Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan in Ankara on Feb.15. He was personally delivering the message at Justice and Development Party (AKP) headquarters that to find a solution to Turkey’s Kurdish issue, he intends to move ahead with the latest initiative engaging Abdullah Ocalan, the leader of the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) imprisoned in Imrali since 1999. Turks are confused and distrustful of the initiative, with many doubting that it will finally lead to the PKK disarming.

Since 2002, Erdogan has won three consecutive elections and has posted increases in his party’s constituency each time. The AKP continues to get high marks in public opinion polls when people are asked if the party will win big in the general elections scheduled for 2015. Regardless, political lives will likely be dependent on the handling of the PKK peace process.

The Kurdish issue is a legendary and thorny problem for Turkey, and Erdogan apparently has his heart set on being the man that brings a peaceful conclusion to it. Yet the prime minister is angry at everybody under the Turkish parliament’s roof. For the moment, he declines to take on Selahattin Demirtas, chairman of the Kurdish Peace and Democracy Party (BDP), as a legislative partner although Erdogan wants, and sorely needs, the BDP’s support to make the Imrali talks a success. The prime minister refuses even to shake Demirtas’ hand because, he says, the BDP, an organic political branch of the PKK, supports violence. Yet, Erdogan exhorts, “BDP, you have to take this risk. If you are going to act according to a message that will come from Kandil [location of the PKK leadership in northern Iraq], you won’t have the right to claim, ‘I did all I could to end this bloodshed.’”

As for another opposition leader, at AKP headquarters Erdogan described Devlet Bahceli, chairman of the Nationalist Movement Party (MHP), as one who lacks “humanity” and said that he won’t “take [his opinion] into consideration.” He further offered that the “MHP leader has created an illusionist world, and he is the only one to sing and listen to himself there.”