Twenty-One Years, Four Months

The journal of Kurdish revolutionary, Ali Poyraz, who spent twenty-one years and four months in Turkish prisons. Born in 1962, in an Alevi village in the Gürün district of Sivas, he was politically active from a young age and was captured by Turkish authorities in 1981. Tried by a military court and sentenced to death, his sentence was commuted to twenty-one years and four months of imprisonment following the abolition of the death penalty in Turkey. An obvious political organiser, Ali records his thoughts and observations while in prison, providing invaluable insight into life inside Turkish prisons, including the organisation, morale, and activities of political prisoners. His journal is a mine of information that lends itself to much probing and understanding of the conflict between the Turkish state and Kurds over the past 45 years. This book is published for scholarly purposes, following the recent disbandment of the PKK as an armed political organisation, and the emergence of new horizons in Turkey today.