Turkey: Party leaders meet, call for dialogue

ANKARA

The leaders of two opposition parties in Turkey have used a Friday meeting to call for dialogue, less than a week after the country’s worst bomb attack in modern history.

Main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP) chief Kemal Kilicdaroglu and Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP) co-chairs Figen Yuksekdag and Selahattin Demirtas met in Ankara.

Kilicdaroglu said: "We voiced our mutual concerns regarding terror and the recent incidents. Nobody in this beautiful country wants a child to even have a nose bleed. We want to live in peace in this country."

The CHP leader called for a united society and said the joint meeting was from his party’s political tradition where "differences are accepted as richness".

"I wish all political parties could do the same with each other," Kilicdaroglu added.

HDP co-chair Selahattin Demirtas said it was important to "lower the tension and keep channels of dialogue open".

Describing recent terror events as "traumatic" Demirtas said:

"It is not easy to get over it. We all go through a trauma. The fire burns where it falls. All of our families that lose their children… PKK members, soldiers, police: all of their families have pain. The rest do not deserve this."

The twin suicide bombings in the Turkish capital on Saturday claimed 99 lives and injured hundreds at a peace rally.

Turkey faces a general election re-run on Nov. 1, while counter-terrorism operations continue in the southeast and an ongoing civil war rages on along its southern border in Syria.

The terrorist PKK group ramped up its attacks against security forces after a July 20 suicide bombing that killed 33 young activists in the southeastern town of Suruc. The suicide attack was blamed on Daesh.