Turkey on Monday said it was not considering a general amnesty for Kurdish rebels as the government stepped up efforts to restart a stalled peace process with the outlawed Kurdish PKK group.

The issue came to the fore on Saturday when Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan hinted in the country's Kurdish-majority southeast that Turkish prisons would one day be emptied.

Erdogan had welcomed at the weekend the leader of Iraq's autonomous Kurdish region, Massud Barzani, to Turkey's own Kurdish-dominated city of Diyarbakir, in a landmark trip designed to revive the peace process between the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) and the Turkish state.

"We will witness a new Turkey where those in the mountains come down, the prisons empty and 76 million (citizens of Turkey) become united," Erdogan said in remarks which some local media saw as a veiled reference to a general amnesty, one of the key demands of the PKK.

But on Monday Deputy Prime Minister Bulent Arinc took issue with that interpretation.

"The prime minister's statement was very clear," said Arinc after a cabinet meeting on Monday.

"A general amnesty is not on today's agenda," he said.

Arinc also said that Erdogan in his speech was "drawing a perspective for the future," referring to US civil rights activist Martin Luther King's famous speech "I have a dream."

He added: "It's not us, the government, which will empty the prisons. There is the judiciary in Turkey."

The PKK, branded a terrorist organisation by Turkey and its Western allies, declared a ceasefire in March but progress in the peace process has since stalled.

Kurdish fighters suspended a promised withdrawal from Turkish soil in September, accusing Ankara of failing to fully deliver on promises to give the minority group greater rights, including education in the Kurdish language in state schools and a degree of regional autonomy.

Thousands of Kurdish rebels remain holed up in the autonomous north of Iraq, using the region -- which is under Barzani's control -- as a springboard for attacks on Turkish targets.

Barzani, who is respected by Turkey's own Kurds, voiced support for the peace process on Saturday.

During his address in Barzani's presence, Erdogan for the first time referred to Iraq's autonomous region in the north as "Kurdistan", a long taboo word in Turkey.

Arinc said it was nothing "extraordinary", adding that Kurdistan was a terminology used in the Iraqi constitution.

Turkey has long been allergic to the word "Kurdistan" and instead referred to Iraqi Kurdistan as northern Iraq, or the Kurdish regional government, fearing the use of the word could inspire Turkey's own Kurdish population to seek a homeland.

Arinc however stressed that the use of Kurdistan in Turkey was out of the question under the current unitary structure of the state, and under the constitution.