Ocalan Negotiations Impact Future of Turkish Presidency
Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s negotiations with Abdullah Ocalan, imprisoned leader of the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), are not just over a peace agreement; they have implications for the future of the Turkish presidency, writes Kadri Gursel.
Very interesting, moreover, very ironic.
One of them is a Kurdish leader sentenced to life and who has already spent 14 years in a special island prison in the Sea of Marmara, and the other is a prime minister who has been ruling Turkey for 10 years in an increasingly authoritarian fashion. And now the most powerful man in Turkey, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, is bargaining through intermediaries with the most famous prisoner in Turkey over the new regime to be set up in Turkey.
Three members of the parliament from the pro-Kurdish Peace and Democracy Party (BDP) were permitted to visit Abdullah Ocalan in his prison on Feb. 23. The minutes of their meeting were published by the mainstream daily Milliyet last Thursday [Feb. 28]. We read through it and confirmed that the “presidency in return for peace” haggling we wrote about earlier was actually in progress.
According to the account in Milliyet, Ocalan told the visiting parliamentarians: “We can think of an executive presidential system. We will support Tayyip Bey’s presidency. We can go into a presidential alliance with the Justice and Development Party [AKP].” He then lists his conditions.
