About Leyla Zana Leyla Zana (born May 3, 1961), is a Kurdish female politician from Eastern Turkey, who was imprisoned for 10 years for speaking her native language of Kurdish in the Turkish Parliament after taking her parliamentary oath and for her political actions which were claimed to be against the unity of Turkey. She was a member of pro-Kurdish Democratic Society Party for a short time. She is banned from joining any political party for five years with the Constitutional Court's decision to ban this party. She was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize in 1995 and in 1998 and was awarded the 1995 Sakharov Prize by the European Parliament, but was unable to collect it until her release in 2004.