She gained a high school diploma, and founded an influential womens group, with offices in Istanbul and Diyarbakir. She taught herself Turkish and became a prominent spokeswoman for all those whose sons or husbands were jailed. Leyla Zana found herself forced to fend for herself as a young mother of two (a son, Ronay and daughter, Ruken). He was imprisoned after the 1980 military coup. Her imprisonment has been denounced by many human rights organisations, including Amnesty International, which has adopted her as a Prisoner of Conscience.īorn in 1961 in south-eastern Turkey, where the population is predominantly Kurdish, Leyla Zana married Mehdi Zana, the elected mayor of Diyarbakir (the regions main city), while still a teenager. She is famous in Turkey as the countrys first ever Kurdish woman to be elected to Turkeys parliament.ĭuring the 1990s, she also worked as a journalist on a now defunct paper, Yeni Ülke. She is serving a 15-year sentence for her activities as a Kurdish activist, and an additional 2-year term for an article written in 1998 while in jail. Leyla Zana has been in prison since 1994.
Leyla Zana, writing in 1998 from her prison cell to the wife of the President of Turkey In other words, I am referring to the reality of my country, of its peoples and the state of affairs unfolding in it If it needs to be stated again, I belong to those who seek peace. I am talking of the struggles of those who are standing up to oppression and working for peace, freedom, brotherhood, democracy and labour rights. I want to tell you about a suffering land and the concerted efforts of the ruling circles to deny the very existence of its people. On the imprisonment of the Kurdish politician Zana, whose case the WiPC has recently adopted, having established that she has writing credentials and that her imprisonment is in part a deliberate punishment for her exercise of free expression. WiPC, International PEN: Turkey Campaign Sheet One
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