Turkey's decade-spanning effort to end its conflict with the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) entered a decisive week after a delegation from the pro-Kurdish Peoples' Equality and Democracy Party (DEM Party) held a three-hour meeting with imprisoned PKK founder Abdullah Öcalan on İmralı Island on Sunday, August 2, just days before a long-awaited "framework law" governing the group's disarmament and reintegration is expected to be submitted to parliament.
Delegation Returns From İmralı With a Message From Öcalan
The visit was the delegation's second in as many weeks, following a five-hour session on July 20 at which Öcalan had first pressed for a legal foundation that would take "mutual sensitivities" into account. That earlier message urged political actors to move past what he called simplistic and narrow approaches and to root the new legislation in a report adopted in February by parliament's National Solidarity, Brotherhood and Democracy Commission.
That readout, released Monday, August 3, quoted Öcalan opening his message with the line "a thousand-mile road begins with a single step," and describing the pending legislation in historic terms: "With this law, we are setting out to resolve a historical problem." He went on to call the framework bill a potential "stem cell" for Turkey's broader democratization, saying legal regulation would move the country toward "a process in which the wheel of democracy turns" and that democratization was now "a vital need."
The delegation — Pervin Buldan, deputy speaker of Turkey's parliament; Mithat Sancar, a DEM Party lawmaker from Şanlıurfa; and lawyer Özgür Faik Erol — traveled to the prison island at midday and returned after roughly three hours with Öcalan, marking the group's 16th visit to him since the current dialogue began in December 2024. In a written statement, the party said an official readout of the meeting's substance would follow the next day.
What the Framework Law Would Do
Parliament Speaker Numan Kurtulmuş has said the bill will not include a general pardon or individualized amnesty and has been consulting the AK Party, the Nationalist Movement Party (MHP), the DEM Party, the CHP and the Yeni Yol group to build consensus before submission. Turkish media reported Monday that the bill could be delivered to the speaker's office as early as today, with a compressed committee timetable aimed at a final vote in the general assembly by Thursday, August 6 — before parliament enters its summer recess. Implementation would still hinge on a subsequent confirmation by the National Security Council that the PKK has, in fact, dissolved and disarmed, followed by a presidential decree activating the law.
Crucially, the draft is reported to contain no general amnesty and no special legal arrangement for Öcalan or senior PKK leadership. Under the terms described by Turkish outlets, commanders based in the group's Kandil headquarters in northern Iraq would not be permitted to enter Turkey; those who did would be prosecuted under existing Turkish Penal Code provisions rather than any bespoke mechanism. Rank-and-file members who return and were not involved in violent acts could benefit from effective-remorse provisions and would face three to five years of judicial supervision, during which they would be barred from public-sector employment and political activity. Individuals convicted of offenses would have their cases reviewed individually by the courts, and those serving aggravated life sentences would remain outside the law's scope entirely.
Turkish officials and pro-government media have described the bill, alternately called the "çerçeve yasa" (framework law) or "kök yasa" (root law), as the legal architecture for the disarmament and reintegration process launched after PKK fighters burned their weapons in a symbolic ceremony in northern Iraq in July 2025. According to reports circulating in Ankara this week, the legislation would create two oversight commissions — one under the presidency and one within parliament — tasked with managing the surrender of weapons, the return of PKK members to civilian life, and coordination of developments on the ground.
PKK Leadership Presses for Clarity on Öcalan's Role
Kandil further argued that describing the legislation as a "root law" rather than a final settlement was appropriate only if Ankara explicitly acknowledged that further democratization legislation would follow, and warned that reducing the peace and democratic-society process to disarmament alone would betray its intended scope. The statement said the movement would be "encouraging" and would "do its part" if the law proved genuine, while stressing that Öcalan should be given a formal role in fulfilling the obligations of the peace process going forward.
Domestic Political Friction Over the Bill's Origins
Government figures have pushed back on such characterizations. AK Party spokesman Ömer Çelik has said the legal groundwork for the "Terror-Free Turkey" process has now moved into a stage of fine detail work, while MHP leader Devlet Bahçeli — a key architect of the process alongside President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan — has called the moment a "critical threshold" requiring full support, framing the initiative as a step that would help Turkey break free of what he described as Western exploitation of the region.
The bill has also become a flashpoint in Turkish domestic politics. İYİ Party leader Müsavat Dervişoğlu challenged the process's constitutional legitimacy, asking pointedly whether the legislation would be "made by parliament, or whether parliament is simply being used to codify a political calendar set between İmralı and Kandil." A smaller opposition figure, Anahtar Party chair Yavuz Ağıralioğlu, went further, saying that if Öcalan saw the text before parliament and elected lawmakers did, the document should be called "a negotiation text," not "a bill."
The PKK's Kandil-based leadership issued a written statement objecting to the ambiguity surrounding Öcalan's status in the draft legislation, arguing that his position as the process's "interlocutor and chief negotiator" must be clarified or the law risks becoming impracticable from the outset. The statement also objected to continued official use of the terms "terror" and "terrorist organization" to describe a group that has already declared its own dissolution and ended armed struggle, calling the language inconsistent with a process meant to build trust between the two peoples.
Background: From Insurgency to Negotiating Table
An earlier peace initiative, launched in 2013, collapsed in 2015 and triggered a renewed and destructive round of fighting across Turkey's predominantly Kurdish southeast — a precedent that continues to color skepticism on both sides about whether the current process will hold. Since Öcalan's February 2025 appeal, analysts have noted a striking degree of strategic alignment across the Kurdish movement — Öcalan, the DEM Party and the PKK broadly agree that armed struggle has ended and that the Kurdish question must now be pursued through parliament and law — even as the Turkish government has kept its own agenda narrowly focused on disarmament, verification of the PKK's dissolution, and reintegration, resisting broader commitments on political and cultural demands.
With the framework law now expected before parliament this week, the coming days are likely to determine whether the process can convert two years of incremental, closely guarded contacts into its first binding legislation — and whether the unresolved question of Öcalan's own legal status becomes the point on which the wider settlement turns.
The current process traces back to October 2024, when signals first emerged of renewed contact between the Turkish state and Öcalan, who has been imprisoned on İmralı Island since his 1999 capture. On February 27, 2025, Öcalan called on the PKK to lay down its arms and dissolve, citing the shift of the Kurdish issue onto what he called democratic-political ground. The PKK declared a ceasefire days later and, in May 2025, announced it would dissolve its organizational structure entirely. In July 2025, PKK fighters staged a symbolic weapons-burning ceremony in Sulaimaniyah, northern Iraq, marking the first concrete disarmament step after four decades of conflict that has killed tens of thousands of people since the group's founding in 1978.
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