La prison no 5

by Mehdi Zana

After serving eleven years in the notorious military prison in Diyarbakir, Mehdi Zana was released in 1991 following a conditional amnesty, only to be sentenced again in 1994 to four more years and in 1997 to ten more months of imprisonment for his testimony to the European Parliament Human Rights Sub-committee and for publishing a poetry book, respectively. Mehdi Zana's wife, Leyla Zana - a Noble Peace Prize candidate and winner of Sakharov Prize for Freedom - is one of the six Kurdish deputies in Turkey who were charged with "separatism", stripped of their parliamentary immunity and arrested in March 1994. She is currently serving a 15-year prison sentence in Ankara Prison.