Amed (Northern Kurdistan) A Turkish prosecutor wants a five-year jail term
for internationally recognised Kurdish politician Leyla Zana, accused of
praising a jailed Kurdish rebel leader, a news agency reported yesterday. Zana
has already spent a decade in jail for collaborating with Abdullah Ocalan’s
rebels. The new charges against her come as she is reportedly preparing to run
in July 22 elections in a bid to return to the Turkish parliament, where she
became the first Kurdish woman deputy in 1991.
The charges stem from a speech the 46-year-old politician made on March 21 at
a Kurdish festival in Diyarbakir, the largest city of the Kurdish-majority
southeast, Anatolia agency said. She allegedly named Ocalan, head of the banned
Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), as one of the Kurds’ national leaders, along
with Iraqi President Jalal Talabani and Massud Barzani, president of the
autonomous Kurdish administration in northern Iraq.
“I am grateful to those three leaders... They all have a place in the hearts
and minds of the Kurds,” she was quoted as saying in the indictment, according
to Anatolia. The prosecutor argued that Zana’s reference to Ocalan amounted to
spreading propaganda in favour of the PKK, which is listed as a terrorist group
by Ankara and much of the international community. It was not immediately clear
when the trial would start.
Zana, the 1995 laureate of the European Parliament’s Sakharov human rights
award, and several other Kurds entered parliament in 1991, but lost their seats
three years later after their party was banned for having links to the PKK. Zana
and three fellow former deputies spent 10 years behind bars for collaborating
with the rebels. They were released in June 2004. The PKK has waged a bloody
campaign for Kurdish self-rule in the southeast since 1984. The conflict has
claimed more than 37,000 lives. Ocalan was captured in Kenya in 1999. He is
serving a life sentence for treason and separatism in the northwestern island of
Imrali.
