1961 -

Kurdish member of Turkey's parliament sentenced to jail for defending the rights of the Kurdish people.

Leyla Zana was born in 1961 in a Kurdish village near the town of Silvan in eastern Turkey. When she was fourteen her father married her to his cousin, Mehdi Zana, a political activist. In 1976 the couple moved to the Kurdish city of Diyarbakir, where Mehdi was elected mayor a year later. Arrested during the 1980 military coup d'état, he was sentenced to thirty years in prison.

Defending the rights of her husband as a political prisoner, Zana became an activist, and organized other women visiting their jailed family members. Meanwhile, she studied on her own, obtained a high school diploma, and engaged in journalistic and human rights activism, which led to her arrest in 1988.

In 1991 she became the first Kurdish woman elected to the parliament, and the first to break the ban on speaking in Kurdish in the parliament. She advocated in her native tongue for fraternal relations between Kurdish and Turkish peoples. Declared a "separatist," "traitor," and member of an illegal party, she was tried, convicted, and sentenced to fifteen years in jail in 1994. Since her imprisonment she has received several peace awards, including the European Parliament's Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought, and was nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize. In 1998 she was sentenced to two more years in jail for writing an article about the Kurdish new year (Newroz). In April 2003, a retrial convened under pressure from the European Union (which Turkey aspires to join) did not lead to her release.

Bibliography

Leyla Zana. Directed by Kudret Güneş. Artefilm, 2002.

Zana, Leyla. Writings from Prison, translated by Kendal Nezan and Harriet Lutzky. Watertown, MA: Blue Crane Books, 1999.

— SHAHRZAD MOJAB

Encyclopedia of the Modern Middle East and North Africa. Copyright © 2004 by The Gale Group, Inc. All rights reserved.