| Publication |
2009.
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| Summary/Abstract |
In December 1977 an independent candidate named Mehdi Zana was elected mayor of Diyarbak?r, one of the biggest cities in Turkey's southeastern region. His election was a striking event, upsetting the troika of class, party, and state that had maintained a tight hold over the local political apparatus in Diyarbak?r since the 1940s. Unlike most prior mayors of Diyarbak?r, Zana did not come from a prominent family of local notables but was a working-class tailor with a middle-school education. He was one of only two independent candidates who won electoral contests in Turkey's sixty-seven big-city races; his election therefore flew in the face of a national trend that favored candidates from the country's two main political parties. Zana was well known for his left-wing, Kurdist politics, and at the time of his election he already had spent several years in jail for his activism. In a system that suppressed collective expressions of Kurdish identity, he was thus a clear ideological interloper.
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