Leyla Zana: Married at 14 to Mehdi Zana, a political Kurd some 20 years her senior who became mayor of Diyarbakir and spent 16 years in jail after the 1980 military coup, she found herself the single mother of two children. Learning Turkish with them as they were schooled, she also found her political voice — and went on to become, in 1991, the first Kurdish woman elected to the Turkish Parliament.
There, she famously infuriated nationalists by wearing a headband of yellow, red and green — the Kurdish colors — and, amid loud whistles, recited the formal oath in Turkish, adding at the end a sentence in Kurdish calling for brotherhood between Turks and Kurds. It was the first time that Kurdish had been spoken inside Parliament.
(Read more at: The New York Times)
Leyla Zana: Married at 14 to Mehdi Zana, a political Kurd some 20 years her senior who became mayor of Diyarbakir and spent 16 years in jail after the 1980 military coup, she found herself the single mother of two children. Learning Turkish with them as they were schooled, she also found her political voice — and went on to become, in 1991, the first Kurdish woman elected to the Turkish Parliament.
There, she famously infuriated nationalists by wearing a headband of yellow, red and green — the Kurdish colors — and, amid loud whistles, recited the formal oath in Turkish, adding at the end a sentence in Kurdish calling for brotherhood between Turks and Kurds. It was the first time that Kurdish had been spoken inside Parliament.
(Read more at: The New York Times)