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.
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