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Turkey: Jailed Kurdish MP Leyla Zana not
to stand for parliament again
4.6.2007
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June
4, 2007
ANKARA, -- The first female Kurdish member of
Turkey's parliament, who spent 10 years in jail for
links to separatist rebels and was honoured by human
rights campaigners, will not run in next month's
elections.
The country's main pro-Kurdish political party, the
Democratic Society Party (DTP), which is boycotting
the July 22 poll but backing independents, said
Saturday that Leyla Zana would not be standing.
Her three former cellmates, Hatip Dicle, Sirri Sakik
and Orhan Dogan, would be trying to win back their
seats in parliament which they lost when their party
was banned, it said.
They are among some 60 independent candidates which
the DTP said Saturday it would support. Others
include left-wing academic Baskin Oran, a defender
of minority rights who has upset Turkish
nationalists.
Many Kurds have become legislators in Turkey as
members of mainstream parties. |
Turkey's outspoken Kurdish rights advocate Leyla
Zana, Former Kurdish MP in Turkey.
Zana spent a decade behind bars in Turkey for
speaking Kurdish in the Turkish Parliament after
taking her parliamentary oath. She was the first
Kurdish woman to be elected to Turkey's parliament |
But pro-Kurdish movements have failed to overcome a
bar on parties that fail to win 10 percent of the
vote nationally, even though they usually dominate
the poll in the mainly Kurdish southeast and
routinely win local elections.
The DTP said in May that it would not contest the
early legislative elections as a party in protest at
the 10 percent national threshold.
Once in parliament, DTP-backed candidates can form a
group under the party banner.
However a new law passed in May was widely seen as
aiming to foil this tactic by obliging the names of
independent candidates to appear on the same ballot
as those of the political parties, instead of on
separate slips.
Since many voters are illiterate or do not speak
Turkish in the Kurdish southeast, they are likely to
have trouble picking their candidate's name from the
long list of parties and other independents.
Kurdish politicians are routinely accused of being
instruments of the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK),
which has led a bloody separatist insurgency in the
southeast since 1984.
The PKK is listed as a terrorist group by Ankara and
much of the international community.
The DTP was set up in November 2005 as a successor
of other Kurdish political parties outlawed by the
courts on grounds of separatism.
It has pledged to try to resolve the Kurdish
conflict through peaceful means, but has so far made
no progress.
Zana caused a storm following her election as an
independent in 1991 by speaking Kurdish in
parliament. She was jailed in 1994 after she lost
her parliamentary immunity with the banning of the
Democracy Party which she had joined.
She was awarded the European Parliament's Sakharov
human rights prize in 1995 but could not collect it
until after her release in 2004 after a long
campaign.
Only last month a Turkish prosecutor called for a
new five-year jail term for Zana, 46, after
she was accused of praising
jailed PKK leader Abdullah Ocalan.
AFP
** More
about Kurdish Activist Leyla Zana
** The use of the term "Kurdistan" is vigorously
rejected due to its alleged political implications
by the Republic of Turkey, which does not recognize
the existence of a "Turkish Kurdistan" Southeast
Turkey.
Others estimate over 40 million Kurds live in
Big Kurdistan (Iraq, Turkey, Syria, Iran, Armenia),
which covers an area as big as France, about half of
all Kurds which estimate to 20 million live in
Turkey.
Turkey is home to over 25 million ethnic Kurds, some
of whom openly sympathise with the Kurdish PKK for a
Kurdish homeland in the country's mainly Kurdish
southeast of Turkey.
Before August 2002, the Turkish government placed
severe restrictions on the use of Kurdish language,
prohibiting the language in education and broadcast
media.
The Kurdish alphabet is still not recognized
in Turkey, and use of the Kurdish letters X, W, Q
which do not exist in the Turkish
alphabet has led to judicial persecution in 2000 and
2003
The Kurdish flag flown officially in Iraqi Kurdistan
but unofficially flown by Kurds in Armenia. The flag
is banned in Iran, Syria, and Turkey where flying it
is a criminal offence"
Southeastern Turkey:
North Kurdistan ( Kurdistan-Turkey)
wikipedia
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