Watch your tongue, Ankara tells PKK

Deputy Prime Minister Yalçın Akdoğan has warned the military leaders of the outlawed Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) after they suggested that the group's jailed head could achieve their coming party congress if the peace process comes to fruition.

"Unreal, untimely and provocative statements delivered from Kandil will bring no use to the process," Akdoğan said in a message posted on his Twitter account Dec. 24.

Kandil is a byword for the leadership of the PKK, whose headquarters are in the Kandil Mountains in northern Iraq. Akdoğan's message was an apparent response to remarks delivered by senior PKK military leader Murat Karayılan.

If the government-led peace process, which the government prefers to call the resolution process, aimed at ending the three-decade-long conflict between the PKK and Turkey's security forces eventually reaches its goal, the PKK will hold an expanded congress in April 2015, Karayılan said in remarks delivered to Rojnews, a media outlet based in Iraqi Kurdistan, on Dec. 23.

"If the peace process achieves its goal, [jailed PKK leader] Abdullah Öcalan will also attend the congress that will be held in April 2015," Karayılan was quoted as saying by Rojnews.

His remarks came only a day after both the government and the Peoples' Democratic Party (HDP) simultaneously announced the stalled peace process had entered a "new phase," with the HDP emphasizing that Öcalan will assume a more central role in the new phase.

According to Akdoğan, however, Karayılan's statement was not opportune.

"It is an anachronistic situation," Akdoğan said in his message on Twitter. "They are either lingering on the past or scattered by a small future or dream. Those who wake up to yesterday everyday cannot...