Turk noted the existence of the Kurds in Turkey as an historical truism and the absence of their rights in the present Turkish constitution. Morton Abramowitz, the former United States Ambassador to Ankara, asked his guests what they meant when they said at the commission briefing: “ dedicated to advocating the rights of the Kurds by political means?” The day after, at another briefing, this time at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Mr. On May 17, 1993, she was invited to Washington together with Ahmet Turk, another Kurdish parliamentarian, to brief the members of the United States Congress at the Helsinki Commission. In Diyarbakir, Ankara, Paris, Bonn, London and Washington or for that matter wherever she went, she advocated an end to the civil war raging in southeast Turkey.
She had run a campaign of validating the civil rights of the Kurds. She was elected to serve the Kurdish city of Diyarbakir by an overwhelming margin on October 20, 1991.
Leyla Zana was the first Kurdish woman ever to serve in the Turkish parliament. She was arrested by police in the Turkish parliament on March 5, 1994, after her mostly Turkish colleagues voted to lift her parliamentary immunity and that of several other Kurdish deputies. Decemwill mark the second anniversary of Leyla Zana’s formal imprisonment in Turkey’s Ankara Closed Prison.
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