Veteran politician Devlet Bahçeli triggered a new debate in Türkiye over how to handle the terrorism issue in the country. The leader of the Nationalist Movement Party (MHP), which is a member of the People’s Alliance led by the ruling Justice and Development Party (AK Party), made the headlines on Tuesday when he offered relative freedom to the jailed leader of the PKK terrorist group. Bahçeli suggested it as a way to end terrorism that has plagued the country for decades and reasoned that the group may lay down its arms and surrender if “separatist terrorist group leader (Abdullah Öcalan) comes to Parliament and makes a speech.”
The politician underlined that his call was straightforward. His unexpected move was a clarion call on the longstanding issue in which many politicians pursuing different ideologies have been at odds for decades.
The move by Bahçeli, perhaps the most staunch opponent of the terrorist group, irked many at first but found support from President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. As political pundits scrambled to decode the cryptic call, Bahçeli’s rivals rushed to capitalize on this seemingly U-turn. The main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP) had a mixed response to his remarks, while far-right parties, including one formed by former MHP members, took it as an opportunity to hit at Bahçeli.
The CHP, Türkiye’s oldest party and biggest after the AK Party, drummed up support from the Peoples’ Equality and Democracy Party (DEM Party) and its predecessor the HDP in the past elections. Its leader Özgür Özel at first appeared to endorse Bahçeli’s initiative. It was something conflicting with its fervent opposition to anything the MHP supports.
Özel, who embarked on a tour of six provinces in the southeast where the PKK-linked DEM Party won municipal elections in most cities, told journalists on Wednesday that the party would support anything for “peace.” Özel warned that this was a “rushed” action and contained “risks.” The CHP leader attempted to downplay Bahçeli’s call for the “right to hope” to be granted to Öcalan and said he did not believe that the matter would be resolved with the “words of one man.” As he arrived in Diyarbakır, where the PKK launched brutal urban attacks less than a decade ago, Özel appeared to adopt the rhetoric of the DEM Party. “It is up to Kurds to decide whether they have a question,” he said, referring to the so-called “Kurdish question.” The PKK, which has killed tens of thousands in attacks since the 1980s, has long sought to justify its campaign of violence by claiming it fights to restore the rights of Kurds, whose population is concentrated in eastern and southeastern Türkiye.
Müsavat Dervişoğlu, head of Good Party (IP), which represents an alternative nationalist ideology at Parliament, angrily dangled a rope in reference to calls for hanging Öcalan as he addressed fellow lawmakers in the capital Ankara on Wednesday. He vowed that Öcalan could enter Parliament only “over our dead bodies,” echoing some social media users who vowed to “kill Öcalan” if he stepped into Parliament.
Bahçeli has called on political parties to put Öcalan at the center for a call to the PKK to end terrorism, “instead of Edirne or Qandil,” referring to a prison where former HDP co-Chair Selahattin Demirtaş is jailed and a stronghold of the PKK where its senior cadres are hiding in northern Iraq. Demirtaş was influential in appeals for what his HDP (and later, the DEM Party) call “peace” or negotiations with terrorists but his hawkish stance and Türkiye’s persistence on counterterrorism operations led to his alignment with the opposition.
Ahmet Davutoğlu, a former prime minister who now heads Future Party (GP), said Bahçeli should have made a call for Demirtaş instead of Öcalan, reasoning that Demirtaş was a former lawmaker, conveniently ignoring that the latter was imprisoned for terror propaganda.
