Still, they have been accompanied by grand unveilings by top AKP officials calling Turkey ‘the most reformist country in Europe’. Superficial reforms, such as lifting the ban on the letters Q, W and X (used in Kurdish but not Turkish) and allowing the reversal of village names in the Kurdish region back to their original Kurdish names, are insufficient.

Today, many argue that the status of the Kurds has improved significantly in the last 13 years, under the government of the Islamic-based Justice and Development Party (AKP), led by Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Turkey’s current president.īut while forced disappearances and assassinations are painful memories of the past, other violations of Kurdish rights continue under the guise of a progressive government, which has actually done little to relieve the pressure on Turkey to address the legitimate demands of the Kurdish people. Once again, Turkey stifled the Kurdish voice.

It came as no surprise when, 3 years later, Leyla Zana was sentenced to 15 years in prison on charges of membership of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), an outlawed, armed Kurdish resistance movement. The mere sight of the red, yellow and green band in her hair, the colours of the Kurdish freedom fight, provoked the Turkish members of parliament, who expressed their anger by knocking incessantly on their desks. It was an act of civil disobedience that made Leyla Zana the epitome of the resistance against Turkey’s oppression of the Kurdish people. She said this in Kurdish, a language then still forbidden.

‘I take this oath for the brotherhood between the Turkish people and the Kurdish people,’ said Leyla Zana as she stood at the rostrum in the Turkish parliament in 1991, the first Kurdish female MP in the history of Turkey. Julia Buzaud under a Creative Commons Licence A girl in the crowds at an HDP meeting calling for peace, justice and reconciliation, Istanbul, May 2015.

Writings from Prison by Leyla Zana