Mick Hartley

Kurdish blogger Fazel Hawramy writes at CiF:

In 1991, a 30-year-old woman was sworn in as a parliamentarian in Turkey's national assembly. After reciting the oath of allegiance, she added a sentence in her own language. As a result, she was removed from the building, stripped of her parliamentary immunity and sentenced to 15 years in prison. Her name was Leyla Zana, Turkey's first Kurdish female MP.

She served 10 years of her prison sentence and, last Saturday, Zana – now a diminutive 50-year-old woman – entered Turkey's grand national assembly as a Kurdish MP again. During the time she was in prison, not much had changed for those trying to represent Kurds in Turkey. Even today, teaching of the Kurdish language in primary and secondary schools is not allowed.

In its second congress in Ankara last month, Zana's party – the Kurdish Peace and Democracy Party (BDP) – produced an eight-point roadmap that centred around the democratic rights of Kurdish people, including the cultural, linguistic and civil and political rights that the Kurdish population of Turkey need to become equal citizens of the state. The denial of Kurdish identity through assimilation and continued repression of successive Turkish governments lies at the heart of the Kurdish question, which has gone unresolved for more than 90 years.

In recent months, the Turkish prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, has been given a hero's welcome in the Middle East for standing up for the rights of downtrodden Arab people and promoting Turkish democracy as a model for Arab societies.

Back home, the civil rights of 20 million Kurds in Turkey have been gradually eroded. The EU acknowledges this is "a serious cause for concern" in a country where more than 3,000 Kurdish activists are in detention. The EU has called on Turkey this week to bring its justice system into line with international standards and amend its anti-terrorism legislation.

On Tuesday, under the same anti-terrorism legislation, more than 120 members of the BDP, including the party's deputy leader, were arrested.

So sensitive is Turkey to anyone acknowledging the plight of the Kurds that the novelist and Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk was charged and tried for "public denigration of Turkish identity", after mentioning in a 2005 interview that "30,000 Kurds and a million Armenians were killed in these lands and nobody but me dares to talk about it".

Maybe it's just me, or maybe it's because there's been so much else going on, but the Kurdish cause does seem to have dropped out of sight recently. Back in the day it was one of the big issues for many on the Left, exemplified by Harold Pinter's well-publicised support, and his 1988 play Mountain Language. It's hard to avoid the feeling that the enthusiasm with which the Iraqi Kurds greeted the Bush-led invasion and the overthrow of Saddam Hussein has somewhat tainted their credentials in the eyes of their former Left friends, and attention has now switched exclusively to the more reliably anti-Western Palestinians. But perhaps I'm being unfair.