Nûredin Zaza


Nûredin Zaza was a Kurdish politician, writer and poet. Zaza was a co-founder of the Kurdistan Democratic Party of Syria and a founding member of the Kurdish Institute of Paris.

Biography

Born in 1919 to a middle-class family in the Kurdish town of Maden in the years preceding the fall of the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire, he saw his father and brother getting arrested by the Atatürk regime for having supported the Sheikh Said rebellion and the Ararat rebellion when he was six years old, forcing his family to send him to Syria.
After spending a year in jail in British Iraq, he went to Beirut and later Switzerland for his studies. In Switzerland, he also founded an association for Kurdish students in Europe before returning to Syria where he took part in establishing Kurdistan Democratic Party of Syria in 1957. Moreover, he contributed to the modernization of the Kurdish language. Zaza was also a member of Xoybûn and broadcast a radio program with Kamuran Alî Bedirxan during this period. In September 1962, he got briefly arrested by Syrian authorities, accusing him of supporting the Kurdish uprising in neighboring Iraq. After being jailed again in 1965 and the intensified Turkish threats, Zaza fled to Switzerland in July 1970 – the same country he had studied in.
Zaza wrote his dissertation on Emmanuel Mounier in 1955 in at the Lausanne University. Zaza's brother :tr:Suphi Ergene|Suphi Ergene was a parliamentarian in the Turkish Parliament representing Elazığ district for the Democrat Party from 1954 to 1957.

Selected literature