Turkish President Abdullah Gül has said dialogue is vital to avoid a deadlock in the country’s Kurdish issue, implicitly confirming that he had talks with deputies from the pro-Kurdish Peace and Democracy Party (BDP).
Gül’s remarks came on Thursday in response to a news report the same day which claimed that the president received a delegation from the BDP at the Çankaya presidential palace on Oct. 9. Gül received the BDP’s Pervin Buldan, Sırrı Süreyya Önder and the BDP-backed Mardin independent Ahmet Türk, according to a news report that appeared in the Yeni Şafak daily on Thursday.“It is not correct to make out an extraordinarily new situation from this claim, but I would like to remind people that these are Turkey’s most significant issues. If we failed to see that these issues are the most vital issues of Turkey, we would make a great mistake,” Gül told reporters in Ankara.
Otherwise, Gül continued, “if these issues are left unaddressed, they can go in unexpected ways and hit dead ends.”
During the meeting, Gül reportedly appealed to the BDP members to act with a sense of responsibility in the period ahead, which sources say he described as of crucial importance in formulating a solution to the Kurdish question. The president reportedly told the BDP delegation to avoid scenes such as an incident that took place in August of this year, when some BDP deputies met with a group of Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) terrorists and embraced them after chatting with them for a while. The meeting was recorded on film and distributed widely, sparking public outrage at the BDP deputies. The BDP members’ vehicle was pulled over at a PKK roadblock in the Şemdinli district of Hakkari, but critics say the meeting appeared to be the result of a prior arrangement.
Gül told the BDP deputies that acts of this nature were highly provocative and infuriating for large segments of society. “You understand the effect of such acts on society,” he is reported to have said.
(Today’s Zaman)
