“To pave the way for the implementation of the leader Apo’s call to peace and a democratic society, we explain a ceasefire that applies from today,” PKK’s executive committee announces in a statement, reports the news agency Anf, which is close to the Kurdish movement.
The statement is the first after PKK’s 75-year-old imprisoned leader Abdullah Öcalan, sometimes called APO, earlier this week urged the organization to close down the weapons and dissolve after 40 years of armed struggle that cost tens of thousands of people their lives.
Protesters carry a picture of Abdullah Ocalan in Germany in 2001.
Protesters carry a picture of Abdullah Ocalan in Germany in 2001.
Photo: Roland Weihrauch/AP/TT
“Brand new beginning”
The group states that none of its forces will take weapons if they are not attacked.
“We agree with the content of the call as it is and we say that we will follow and implement it,” says the committee, which also writes that Öcalan’s call is not an end, but a whole new beginning.
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has welcomed the call from Öcalan.
“It is a historical opportunity to tear down the wall of terrorism that has stood between (the Turkish and Kurdish people’s) millennial brotherhood,” he said on Thursday.
– When the pressure from terrorism and weapons is eliminated, the space for politics in democracy will of course increase.
Several attempts
Öcalan, who was a member of the 1978 movement, has been held isolated on a prison island outside Istanbul since 1999. It was from which he came with the message to dissolve PKK.
Since Öcalan was imprisoned in 1999, several attempts have been made to put an end to the bloodstream that broke out in 1984. The last attempt was in the start of 2015.
PKK has a terrorist meeting of Turkey, the United States and the EU and has been rebelling since 1984 with the aim of creating a Kurdish state. The Kurds account for around 20 percent of Turkey’s 85 million inhabitants.
Facts: PKK
The Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) was founded in 1978 as a Marxist party.
The goal of the movement was a Kurdish state in southeastern Turkey and adjacent parts of neighboring countries.
In 1984, PKK took weapons against the Turkish state in the fight for independence.
PKK is a terrorist stamped by Turkey, the EU and the United States.
Turkey has, among other things, made demands for a tougher hold of PKK in Sweden in order to approve Sweden’s NATO membership.