There are acts of political courage that require armies and weapons. And there are acts that require nothing more than a voice and the willingness to use it regardless of the consequences. On 6 November 1991, in the chamber of the Turkish Grand National Assembly in Ankara, Leyla Zana performed one of the most defiant acts in the history of Kurdish political life. Newly elected to parliament, she concluded her oath of office by addressing the chamber in Kurdish, a language that at that very moment remained illegal to speak in public spaces in Turkey. The words she chose were deliberate and precise: “I take this oath for the brotherhood between the Turkish people and the Kurdish people.” The chamber erupted. Her colleagues screamed traitor. The reaction of the Turkish political establishment revealed, more eloquently than any speech could have done, exactly why those words needed to be said.
Leyla Zana was born on 3 May 1961 in the village of Silvan in Diyarbakır province in the heart of Bakur (Northern Kurdistan). Her early life offered little indication of the political figure she would become. Her father, traditional in his outlook, permitted her only a year and a half of formal schooling. She was married to Mehdi Zana, a man twenty years her senior who would become the mayor of Diyarbakır. It was a life shaped by the conventions and constraints of the time and place. What transformed it was politics, specifically the politics of the Turkish state toward the Kurdish people.
When the military coup of 1980 swept Turkey, her husband was imprisoned. Leyla Zana, still a mother of two, began visiting him in custody. It was in the process of those prison visits, navigating a security apparatus that treated the Kurdish language as a criminal act and Kurdish identity as a threat to be managed, that her political consciousness was fully formed. She was herself imprisoned for two months after leading a protest by families denied access to their relatives in detention. She was interrogated and tortured. She emerged with a resolve that never left her.
She learned Turkish during those prison visits, teaching herself the language of the state that imprisoned her husband because speaking Kurdish was forbidden even within the prison walls. It is a detail that illuminates the particular cruelty of the Turkish state’s approach to its Kurdish population. A woman learning the language of her people’s oppressor not by choice but by compulsion, in order to advocate for her own husband and then using that language, years later, to stand in the parliament of that same state and insist on the rights of her people in their own tongue.
She was overwhelmingly elected to the Turkish parliament in 1991, receiving 84 percent of the votes in her Diyarbakır district, a result that demonstrated the depth of Kurdish political consciousness in Bakur and the degree to which the Kurdish people of southeastern Turkey were determined to make their voices heard through whatever channels were available to them. She was the first Kurdish woman ever elected to the Turkish parliament. The historic nature of that achievement was immediately overshadowed by what she did upon taking her seat and by what the Turkish state did in response.
The oath she took in Kurdish cost her everything. Her parliamentary immunity was stripped. In 1994 she was sentenced to fifteen years in prison for treason and alleged membership of the PKK, charges she consistently denied. She spent ten years in prison, from 1994 to 2004, during which she was recognised as a prisoner of conscience by Amnesty International and awarded the Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought by the European Parliament in 1995, an honour she was unable to collect until her release nine years later. The European Court of Human Rights ruled in 2001 that her imprisonment was unlawful. Turkey refused to act on that ruling for three years.
During her imprisonment she worked as an editor for a Diyarbakır newspaper and became a spokeswoman for women whose Kurdish husbands were wrongfully imprisoned. Even from a prison cell she continued to work, to advocate and to refuse the silence the Turkish state had sentenced her to. When she was finally released in 2004 and travelled to Brussels to receive the Sakharov Prize, she addressed the European Parliament in both Turkish and Kurdish and received a standing ovation. She told those assembled that violence had outlived its time and that the language of their age must be dialogue, compromise and peace. It was a message of remarkable generosity from a woman who had spent a decade in prison for speaking her own language.
She returned to parliament, was elected again and continued her advocacy for Kurdish rights and a peaceful resolution to the Kurdish question in Turkey. In 2016 she was prevented from attending parliamentary sessions, another in the long series of legal and institutional manoeuvres the Turkish state has deployed against her across five decades. Throughout her career she has been honoured with more than six international awards in recognition of her work for democracy and Kurdish rights.
What Leyla Zana gave to the Kurdish people of Bakur was something that no military victory and no territorial gain could have provided international visibility and moral authority at a moment when both were desperately needed. She demonstrated that the Kurdish cause could be fought in parliaments and courtrooms and on the floors of European institutions as well as in the mountains. She showed that a Kurdish woman from a village in Diyarbakır, denied a formal education and married at fourteen, could stand before the world and command its attention and its respect.
The Turkish state tried to silence her with imprisonment, with legal harassment and with the systematic removal of her democratic mandate. It failed. Her voice, and the cause it carried, proved considerably more durable than the laws designed to suppress it. In Bakur, where the Kurdish language was once a criminal act and Kurdish identity a threat to be managed by the security services, Leyla Zana stands as proof that neither can be permanently extinguished. She spoke Kurdish in the house that forbade it. The house has never fully recovered from the fact that she did.
