Mandela's Spirit Lives on in Turkish Jail



Linda Goyette



The Edmonton Journal

September 26, 1998



He was prisoner 446/64, enemy of the state.  He shoveled rocks all day in a 

limestone quarry and returned to his bare cell at night.  His sentence: Life in 

prison, plus five years.  Nelson Mandela could not have imagined in his 

worst years on Robben Island that he would live to receive the world's 

standing ovation at this end of century.  Darkness engulfed him in the early 

months of 1964.  He was living with a torment of doubt.



"The worst part of imprisonment is being locked up by yourself," he would 

say later.  "You come face to face with time, and there is nothing more 

terrifying than to be alone with sheer time.



"Then the ghosts come crowding in.  They can be very sinister, very 

mischievous, raising a thousand doubts in  your mind about the people 

outside, their loyalty.  Was your sacrifice worth the trouble?  What would 

your life have been like if you hadn't got involved?"



Mandela endured imprisonment for 27 years.  Perhaps his greatest act of 

courage came in 1985 when he refused the apartheid state's conditional offer 

of an early release.  "I cherish my own freedom dearly, but I care even more 

for your freedom," he wrote in open letter to South Africans that year.  "I am 

less life-loving that you are.  But I cannot sell my birthright, nor am I 

prepared to sell the birthright of the people to be free ...



"Your freedom and mine cannot be separated.  I will return."



Mandela walked out of prison in 1990, on his own terms, to lead South Africa 

into a braver, better future.  Prime Minister Jean Chretien expressed Canada's 

admiration in an eloquent tribute this week: "Few people in our time, or any 

century have so symbolized the spirit of freedom that lives within every 

human beings as you have."  Chretien praised Mandela for proving "that 

suffering does not only lead to bitterness and disillusionment, it can lead to 

wisdom and compassion, and to a better world."



Like Mandela on Robben Island long ago, thousands of prisoners of 

conscience are enduring their own torment of doubt today in jails around the 

world.  Many of these men and women are forbidden news from the outside 

world.  They don't know about distant gatherings in their honor.



On the night Mandela arrived in Canada, Leyla Zana's friends drifted into the 

International Center at the University of Alberta.  About 50 people crowded 

into the small room, poured coffee, and talked to together about what they 

could do to help a woman they'd never met.  They had no racial heritage in 

common, but they shared a human impulse Mandela would recognize in a 

split second.



So who is Leyla Zana?  She is a political prisoner in an Ankara jail.  In 1991, 

she won a seat in the Turkish parliament with 84 per cent of her riding's vote.  

She was the first Kurdish woman to win an election to the national 

parliament, and quickly gained a reputation for speaking out about Turkey's 

documented human rights abuses before the U.S. Congress and in the world's 

capitals.



Zana urged reconciliation between Turkey and its Kurdish minority, and 

deplored violence at home and abroad, but like Mandela she was accused of 

incitement in a country that has been locked in an informal civil war with its 

insurgents.  She was arrested in 1994.  The specific charges?  At her 

inauguration, Zana had worn the traditional Kurdish colors and after taking 

the parliamentary oath in Turkish, she had said in Kurdish: "I have 

completed this formality under duress.  I shall struggle so that the Kurdish 

and Turkish peoples may live peacefully together in a democratic 

framework."



Part of the ground cited in her conviction, included the accusation " ... that 

the defendant Leyla Zana on 18 October 1991 did wear clothes and accessories 

in yellow, green, red while addressing the people of Cizre ..."  Apparently 

Kurdish colors are too much for the state of Turkey to abide.



She was accused of membership in the insurgents' organization, a charge she 

denied, and jailed to 15 years in prison along with three other deputies of the 

Turkish parliament in 1994.



Parliamentarians around the world have tried to intervene on her behalf.  

The European Parliament passed two resolutions against the arrest and 

imprisonment, and awarded Zana with the Sakharov Prize.  She was 

nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize in 1995, and again this year.  It is a long 

long way from a jail cell in Ankara to a crowded corner of an Alberta 

university, but geographic distance doesn't mean much these days.



Through a rainy evening, a Kurdish Ph.D. student, Saren Azer, talked to the 

audience about Internet links and petitions to help Leyla Zana.  After 

describing his own experiences with torture and jail in Iran, he suddenly 

introduced a quiet man at the back of the room.  The poet, Jalal Berzengi, 

president of the Kurdish Writers' Union, endured torture and three years of 

jail as a dissident in Iraq.  Six months ago he arrived here with his wife Sabah 

Abbas, also a writer, and their three children.  They are no longer refugees, 

Edmonton is home.



The couple talked with me about Canada's honors for Mandela.  Did I know 

that the great South African had refused a similar honor in Turkey because of 

the country's human rights abuses?  They are survivors too, emerging into 

light.  They quoted a Kurdish poet named Ibrahim Ahmad.  "Don't be 

frightened of the chains on your arms.  They can only arrest your body not 

your soul."  The spirit of Mandela endures in many places.  No prison is 

strong enough to confine it.