Turkey after direct talks with PKK: Deputy PM

The Turkish government is seeking to hold direct talks with the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), says Deputy Prime Minister Besir Atalay.

The senior government official told Turkish media on Tuesday that the country’s intelligence organization could hold direct negotiations with the PKK, whose military headquarters lie in the Qandil Mountains.

“I desire direct talks between our yet-to-be-set team with Qandil,” Atalay said, adding that the Turkish government had done its role to ease the negotiations “to a great extent.”

“We ourselves will finish the work of clarifying a roadmap. We will share it with our institutions and then we will share it with the other party… Later the negotiations will be expanded,” he said.

Earlier in the day, a Kurdish protester was killed in eastern Turkey following clashes that broke out over the destruction of a Kurdish militant statue.

Turkish security forces were trying to remove the statue of PKK’s first military commander Mahsum Korkmaz in the town of Lice, unveiled last week.

The PKK has been fighting for an autonomous Kurdish region in southeastern Turkey since the 1980s. The conflict has left tens of thousands of people dead.

In March 2013, Abdullah Öcalan, the jailed leader of the PKK, declared a historic ceasefire after months of negotiations with the Turkish government. In return, the PKK demanded amendments to the penal code and electoral laws as well as the right to education in the Kurdish language and a degree of regional autonomy.

Later, the PKK suspended its retreat from the Turkish soil after accusing the central government of not its keeping its promises, which brought the ceasefire process to a halt.