Turkey PM Meets Prominent Kurdish Lawmaker

Turkey's Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan held talks with a prominent Kurdish lawmaker in a rare meeting Saturday to try and resolve a decades-old separatist conflict.

No statement was issued to the press after the one-and-a-half hour meeting which followed Leyla Zana's comments in a recent newspaper interview praising Erdogan as the head of the strongest government in Turkey's history.

Zana told daily Hurriyet early this month that with the political will, Erdogan had the power to solve the Kurdish problem.

"The strongest one can halt all this if he wants. Who's that strongest one? It's the current government and its head Recep Tayyip Erdogan," she said.

Zana, among the most outspoken advocates of Kurdish rights who won the European Parliament's Sakharov human rights award in 1995, was imprisoned from 1994 to 2004 for alleged links with the separatist PKK, which took up arms in 1984, sparking a conflict that has claimed some 45,000 lives.

But her latest comments won plaudits from government officials and Erdogan said he was ready to meet her.

The PKK is listed as a terrorist organization by Turkey and much of the international community.