Turkey: Is there a comeback for Kurdish militant leader on the horizon ?

Abdullah Ocalan

Snatched by Turkish commandos in Nairobi, Kurdish rebel chief Abdullah Ocalan looked resigned and bewildered as he was flown back to Ankara, the gallows beckoning. A decade later, on his island prison, he appears to have the ear of a Turkish government eager to end a devastating conflict.

It seems an unlikely comeback. Reviled in most of Turkey but commanding fierce loyalty from Kurdish nationalists, Ocalan has been held in virtual isolation on the barren island of Imrali, 50 km (30 miles) south of Istanbul, since his capture in 1999.  Even his lawyers haven't seen him for 15 months.

But after the bloodiest summer for years in Turkey's conflict with Kurdish militants, and with fears over the spread of Kurdish insurrection in neighboring Syria, Ocalan is emerging from the virtual oblivion of Imrali.

When hundreds of Kurdish militants on hunger strike in jails across Turkey drew close to death this month, Turkish authorities turned to the man reviled by newspapers after his capture as "Butcher" and "Baby Killer".

A message through his brother to call off the strike was immediately obeyed, an apparent sign of the authority generally supposed to have drifted from the man, known by allies as "Apo", over his years on Imrali.

"He proved that he is still the boss, that he has the last word," said Turkish journalist Mehmet Ali Birand, who met Ocalan twice in Lebanon and Syria in the 1980s.

"He is not a fighter or a guerrilla war expert, he is more the thinking man trying to shape the Kurdish problem. He wants to be the leader of all Kurds, that is the image he gives."

Turkish MIT intelligence officials took the ferry to Imrali at least three times over the past two months and their talks with Ocalan paved the way for his appeal, according to the liberal daily Radikal, which did not identify its sources.

Few men stir such hatred in Turkey as Ocalan, who founded the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) rebel group and led the armed struggle for Kurdish home rule for 15 years before his capture, a conflict which burns at the heart of the country.  Many hold him responsible for the deaths of over 40,000 people since the PKK - designated a terrorist group by Turkey, the United States and the European Union - took up arms in 1984.

Erdogan, who publicly refused to negotiate with the hunger strikers and dismissed their protest as blackmail supported by "merchants of death", said no promises had been made to Ocalan in exchange for his intervention.

"There was no such thing," he told reporters on the way back from a trip to Egypt last week.

But the government has also suggested more talks between the intelligence agencies and the PKK were a possibility.

"This is Ocalan's second comeback," said Koray Caliskan, a political scientist at Istanbul's Bosphorus University who also writes for the Radikal.

Read more: Kurdish militant leader wields influence from island prison - Yahoo! News